Building a business for resilience 33 – open systems, closed systems and selectively porous ones 25

This is my 33rd installment to a series on building flexibility and resiliency into a business in its routine day-to-day decisions and follow-through, so it can more adaptively anticipate and respond to an ongoing low-level but with time, significant flow of change and its cumulative consequences, that every business faces in its normal course of operation (see Business Strategy and Operations – 3 and its Page 4 and Page 5 continuations, postings 542 and loosely following for Parts 1-32.)

I began working my way through a brief to-address topics list in Part 32, that I repeat here for smoother continuity of narrative as I continue discussing its points:

1. Even the most agile and responsive and effectively inclusive communications capabilities can only go so far. Effective communications, and with the right people involved in them, have to lead to active effectively prioritized action if they are to matter, and with feedback monitoring and resulting reviews included.
2. Both reactive and proactive approaches to change and to effectively addressing it, enter in there and need to be explicitly addressed in rounding out any meaningful response to the above Point 1.
3. And I will at least begin to discuss corporate learning, and the development and maintenance of effectively ongoing experience bases at a business, and particularly in a large and diverse business context where this can become a real challenge.
4. In anticipation of that, I note here that this is not so much about what at least someone at the business knows, as it is about pooling and combining empirically based factual details of that sort, to assemble a more comprehensively valuable and applicable knowledge base.
5. And more than just that, this has to be about bringing the fruits of that effort to work for the business as a whole and for its employees, by making its essential details accessible and actively so for those who need them, and when they do.

I began addressing the above Point 1 and its issues in Part 32, and I begin this posting by continuing and completing that discussion thread, at least for purposes of this series. And as a core part of that discussion continuation, I will focus on the role of feedback and of two-way communications in these systems, and on the crucial importance of developing and maintaining performance monitoring-capable interactivity in all of this.

• Who needs what business-developed and owned, or at least business held information: sensitive and confidential information in particular, in order for them to effectively do their jobs and complete their assigned tasks in that?
• Who holds this information, and closely related to that, who controls access to it?
• Who is communicating with whom there and on what? Are there in fact gaps where the people who hold crucially needed information do not know, or know of the people who most need it and legitimately so?
• And it is important to remember that the above questions apply to legacy and historical background information too, including experience learned from how others have dealt with similar issues to those faced now,
• And that this type of at least potentially sharable accumulated knowledge and even business wisdom, can be as important or even more so, than the more immediately here-and-now business transaction data that might be called for. If you have that data and allowed access to it, but do not have the necessary and perhaps less than obvious background information that might be crucial in carrying out a task at hand that would call for it, you might use the right customer or other specific transaction oriented data, but in ways that leave process disconnects or other challenges.
• Consider this type of possibility whenever facing what for you might be a new and novel situation, but where it might have a longer history at that business for others.
• And consider this when facing what might involve significant change. Have others faced similar change there? And if so, what transaction-level complications if any did they encounter in that and what where the ultimate resolutions that they achieved? What complications or collateral issues did they have to identify, clarify and resolve in that too?

And with these types of detail noted, communications feedback on the timeliness and effectiveness of these information exchanges as carried out in practice, are essential for developing and maintaining business systems that work. And necessary follow-up steps that would accompany and complement that type of review would include monitoring, and performance reviews and outcomes research on work carried out as a result of these communications. And together, these overall communications plus work flow performance reviews would be used to both identify gaps where raw data and more processed knowledge are needed but effectively unavailable, where they are actually made available and effectively so, and how to more effectively balance information security with its necessary access restrictions, with necessary information and knowledge sharing.

• And adding in this type of business process management, means shifting this discussion from a here-and-now tactical and transactional level, operationally, to a longer-term strategically conceived one.

This is important, and it raises issues that are not always appreciated in practice, even when they are acknowledged in the abstract. Decisions and actions taken without the benefit of review and the insight that it can develop and offer, are usually carried out as if in a vacuum and often as either ad hoc or blindly adhered to cookie-cutter responses. Feedback monitoring and review processes add historical perspective – and are essential in making strategic planning and follow-through possible.

And with that noted I at least begin to address Point 2 of the above list, and the closely related issues of reactive and proactive decision making and action. And I begin addressing that set of issues by clarifying where I am citing “closely related” alignment in this.

• Reactive decision making and its follow-through are almost always resorted to on the fly, absent any clear-cut foundation of precedent or best practices understandings. That in fact is what makes them reactive per se.
• A perceived need for a reactive response arises when the unexpected and unplanned for arise, and generally when those who have to decide and act have to do so as if there were no precedent for the situation faced at that business, and with no best practices solutions or even just workable but known ones available to fall back upon.
• I amend that by offering an exception to the above bullet point that I have seen play out too many times, when a hands-on employee or lower level manager, or someone simply out of the loop for this event knows of an established approach for dealing with and resolving an apparent problem, but they are unable to actually share any of that in a meaningful way with whoever has to actually make a decision there and take action on that.
• This is in fact a description-formatted definition of business systems friction with the breakdowns in communications and information sharing that lead to it, as I have discussed in this blog on numerous occasions now.

I am going to continue my discussion of reactive approaches and their consequences in the next installment to this series. And I will continue on from there to consider proactive approaches and what goes into enabling them and carrying them out. Then I will proceed from there to address the remaining points of the above topics list. Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings and series at Business Strategy and Operations – 5, and also at Page 1, Page 2, Page 3 and Page 4 of that directory.