Enigma Solution

  When visiting factories in Japan in the 1980s, I noticed that in every meeting there was always an individual who never participated in the meetings. He just sat there listening attentively, taking notes. Later I learnt that the person's role was to simply observe and provide critical feedback to the team on the dynamics of the meeting based on verbal and non verbal interactions of participants. The person usually did not even have expertise nor great knowledge of the subject being discussed. His role was to provide objective analysis looking in from the outside. Experience is not what happens to us, but what we lean from what happens to us. We borrowed a leaf from this approach and deployed a variation of this theme, in our organisation where we had a fair share of meetings. I always chose to bring in someone not from any of the involved departments or functions to join the meeting. With no participative role, the person was an obvious misfit, somewhat like a fly in the soup. A...

An organisations structure needs be designed to cater to current needs of tactical planning and future needs for implementing the organisations strategic plans. Succession planning is vital for the continuing success of every organisation and family business. The organisation's leadership needs to have ready at all times a succession plan for each critical position in the team. Even then the best of plans can fail so we need to keep ready plan 'B' in the eventuality that the successor groomed is unable or unavailable to step up to the crease.  Succession plans will highlight strengths that need to be leveraged and deficiencies in individuals that need to be addressed. This will give illuminate training and development requirements.  Match the personality, attitudes, skills, knowledge and capabilities that the individual possesses or will acquire from training and development with those that the position or situation demands. Failure to do so will hurt both the people and th...

We often take competent, capable, sincere individuals and assign them to do things or take up responsibilities without preparing them for the task? As a consequence we land up harming both the organisation and the confidence of the individual concerned. This is the story of how we accidentally hurt Derek, our number 2 team member without even meaning to when we promoted him to top slot. When Derek's boss the Works Manager resigned, we had to fill up the position fast. So we promoted Derek our no 2 man to replace him. Our World Class mission goals placed high demands on productivity, quality, cost effectiveness and continuous improvement from our team and leadership. We had no doubts about Derek's ability to meet our mutually agreed expectations and targets. Alas it was not to be. Six months after his promotion, a frazzled looking Derek came to see me. He handed me his resignation letter was resigning and requested to be relieved from his job at the earliest. I felt confused, an...