Characteristics of The Logical Organization ™

The Logical Organization ™ is comprised of eight key interrelated elements:

1. Purpose – the reason for the existence of the organization, and the focus of all corporate strategy and objectives
2. People – an invaluable resource required to make decisions and take towards achieving the purpose
3. Decisions – are required to formulate a strategic framework as to how the organisation will achieve its purpose and objectives, and the tactical inputs into day to day operations.
4. Systems – the processes and methodologies that convert resources into outcomes, based on decisions made.
5. Technology – non-human resources that support processes and decisions, and where appropriate make automatic decisions that trigger further action.
6. Knowledge – the raw data that results from transactions and operational actions, converted as required into reports of performance results and inputs into decisions and automatic actions.
7. Logic – the basis upon which knowledge is regarded as valid or invalid, as well as the context within which knowledge data is transformed into insight.
8. Actions – the output of decisions [human or automated] that create a downstream output.

Purpose

No organization exists without a purpose. Unfortunately, many organizations exist without clarity of purpose and a structured mechanism for aligning all activities with that purpose.

Corporate performance is constrained by the practice of measuring it in largely financial terms. Strategy is too often planned well, and executed poorly.

Strategy ensures that the right actions are being taken; corporate performance management ensures that these actions are being performed well.

Before we can even consider how an organization should be managed in terms of decisions and logic, we need to ensure that both corporate performance and strategy are both efficient and effective.

People

As a manager, you have heard the expression that “people are our greatest asset”.

The people in your business are not just those on the payroll – they include your customers, suppliers, partners and public. The people component of business performance has been the subject of thousands of books and many management theories. As such I will not attempt to repeat the process here.

The important factor in terms of The Logical Organization ™, is that it is the ‘people’ that mostly form strategies, direct action and evaluate performance, all based on decisions.

People are emotion driven organisms, and much of what we think, decide and act is influenced by basic emotions and instinct. We also absorb concepts subconsciously, easily leading us to ‘adopt’ positions and theories that have not been formulated using knowledge and logic based on our own learnings and experiences, rather they have resulted from subconsciously absorbing group think or social expectation.

Thus, a large component of what drives our decisions is intuition, rather than logic.

Next: Decision Making

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