In this video, I will talk about the manageable organization and why you need to get out of the chaos that you might have in your organization today. Hi there. Matts Rehnstrom here, Shaper of Business Excellence. In this video, I will continue to talk about the clarity matrix that I introduced in the last video.
And it’s all connected to these business excellence components and the relationship they have because it explains why you need to improve. And that was a question I got earlier, and I wanted to reply to that question to all of you with this three, or actually four videos that I’m recording right now.
The Unarticulated But Clear Organization
Anyway, so we’re into video number two in this little mini-series within the series. We talked about this then the clarity matrix. Four fields. We have the clear unclear. We have unspoken or unarticulated and articulated.
The last video I talked about what’s down here, and the manipulative situation, relationship, organization. Here people play each other because nothing is articulated. Nothing is clear, and it could be a part of the organization. It could be the whole organization. I’ve seen organizations that are fully down here. People are struggling to get out of it, but forces are pulling them back. So the whole organization is actually very unclear and unarticulated.
In today’s video, we’re down in this area, in this field, where things are unarticulated and they’re still clear. So we have clear things that we don’t speak about or write about and what can that be. And I’ll take an example as I did before about what’s going on in this field.
Employees Learn When They Are Told They Did Something Wrong
Here we have rules and regulations that are not written down, but people learn them anyway because as soon as you’re about to cross the line, the border of what you should and shouldn’t do, someone will reprimand you and say, “Wait a minute. Matts, you can’t do it like this.”
Why? I haven’t read anything about it. And then this is how we do things here. So down here we have then the situation that we are reprimanded for things that we are doing wrong.
People are telling us. Over here, they didn’t really tell us anything because nothing was spoken. Nothing was really clear at all. Here, it’s clear because we are told that this is the way we do things, but we need to learn it the hard way. So we end up with a manageable situation, relationship, or organization.
The Manageable Situation
In a manageable relationship:
- We learn the hard way what is acceptable and what is not. We may not like it, but we can manage our work day around it
- We sit tight and do not take any initiative, we just manage our way through the workday
We can manage actually in that world. It’s like moving from one part of the world to another part of the world where you enter a new society where they had a new, or for you, a new culture of how you do things. You speak about this, but not that. You do this, but don’t do that. Don’t do this and so on. So all these things that you learned the hard way, you can manage with them. You don’t really like them maybe, but they’re clear so you can manage.
So down here then, we have people that are more of like, “Okay.” “Yeah, yeah. I understand.” It’s not fun to cross the line and be told that you’ve done something wrong, but then you back off and say, “Okay. I understand.”
But we’re not open maybe to discuss things, either in this world when this relationship, this situation that we’ll have within an organization because it’s like when Joni is in the meeting, we never mentioned that what happened to Mary and Joan when they were out selling (blah blah) because then Joni will, whatever.
These Situations Aren’t Beneficial in the Workplace
I mean, situations like that we can’t have in our workplace. That we can’t really talk about things that affect our way of doing the work, out of delivering the value to our customers. We need to be able to articulate and have clarity about these different situations, these front happenings that have come up, but down here we’re not.
But we can manage, as it says, Manageable Situation. We can manage due to that we just fall back and say, “Okay. Whatever. I’ll just do this then, and you take care of whatever. I don’t really care.” So we don’t get the engaged people down here. We just get those that manage throughout the day. They come in the morning. They leave in the evening. They do as little as possible because they just want to manage to survive in this structure that we’ve created for them.
Do You Recognize This Situation?
So I will in the next two upcoming videos talking about the two remaining fields in this four-fielder within the clarity matrix. But I also have a question for you. Do you recognize this? Do you have this within your organization? Have you had it in the previous place you’d be working for where you only then just manage? You don’t really try to do anything else because then you step on someone’s toes, you cross a line or whatever. An unwritten line because we don’t want to break rules that are stated, but you break these unarticulated rules.
Anyway, if you have that, please leave a comment down below, or if you haven’t as well leave a comment. I have never seen this before. And then I say, congratulations to you. With that said, if you’d like to have this poster so you can follow along better in the upcoming videos, please click here and the hyperlink will take you to a page where you can download it for free. See you in the next video then, and until then let’s go and shape our business for excellence.
