Think outside the fishbowl

I'd like to start with sharing this wonderful comic that I found on a government department website here in Australia:



How often do you see this in the workplace, at home, among your friends, in government? Probably more often than we care to admit. Is it that the world is so small, or is it that we swim in small circles? My guess that it is the latter, and this is the reason why we find it so hard to think outside the fishbowl.

I have worked with many clients on projects that required their organisations to think and act outside of their comfort zones in order to improve their service or competitive position. On most projects we managed to score some reasonable sustainable gains however in all cases, we had underestimated the pervasive hand of legacy systems and culture that countered any movements towards change at every step of the way.

I almost began to feel that it was me (i.e. perhaps I was an ineffective consultant) until I went to Boston in March of this year and found out that Peter Senge, Edgar Shein and Jay Forrester all experienced not only the same problems, but also the same feelings of self doubt. How do we change a system and a culture that doesn't allow you to change it? The answer is that you don't, because you can't. The best you can do is to make sense of the situation, encourage conversations, make connections and select leverage points for interventions.

The now dated 'change management' and 'business re-engineering' tools are no longer suited to the economic, business and social ecosystem that is now evolving. The brilliant work of Valdis Krebs shows us that the old industrial economy was driven by economies of scale (and old school management and consulting tools seemed to work well). However the new information economy is driven by the economics of networks, and this requires distinctly different management tools. Krebs, and others, maintain that our knowledge economy operates on the complexities of our connections and our networks. And at this point in time, many organisations still have the neat, mechanical hierarchies sitting on top of the complex networks of information flows and knowledge sharing.

To be successful individuals and organisations in a networked, knowledge economy requires a different mindset and different ways of thinking and working to what we have done in the past. The fishbowl we choose to swim in is merely a construct of our depth of vision, fear and limitations. The choice is ours to make - the bowl or the ocean?