We encourage you to move beyond putting the fires out to genuinely improving the functioning of your  organisation and helping it grow. Growth does not necessarily mean getting bigger, it can mean getting better.
In many work situations, people are forced into a position where they have to “produce results” quickly. This usually comes at the cost of looking at the deeper causes of problems and the foundation work that needs to be done to ensure future growth and the success of new initiatives. The result is a small short term gain, but overall, a long term loss.
The insidious nature of this is that organisations and programs can limp along in an ineffective way for a long time. Either the organisation never fulfills its full potential or a crisis “suddenly erupts’. When a crisis erupts we are forced into a situation of having to undergo radical change. This is painful and expensive. Moreover, when change is so radical it is human nature to resist strongly.
It would have been easier, cheaper and less disruptive to have made incremental improvements in the first place.
We experience the symptoms of this lack of investment as ‘reinventing the wheel’ or ‘the wheel turning full circle yet again’. We seem to be climbing ‘up the hill’ and then ‘slide back’ again without ever ‘getting over the hump.’
 The bottom left hand corner of the diagram (1) shows situations where investment is short-term, sporadic and not linked to strategic goals. It’s about getting the car back on the road rather than looking where the road is going.
This seems the cheapest option, but it is not!
 Good examples of this in our field are one-off workshops or short programs which address complex areas such as communication, governance and business planning. Areas like these need genuine skills transfer and ownership. For an organisation to build a new level of mastery and apply these sorts of new skills, takes time, practice and confidence.
The hill (2) represents taking the organisation from an old way of doing business to a new way. It can also be used to illustrate the difference between training and genuine capacity building.
www.rirdc.gov.au/capacitybuilding/about.html
Climbing the hill involves an investment of resources and time, beyond production and outputs, into the structure of the organisation. It is equivalent to the organisation as a whole ‘sharpening the saw’. www.stephencovey.com
 Once there is a critical mass of people inside the organisation who have reached an adequate level of confidence and mastery the outside help can leave (3). Through this mechanism, new skills will become part of the culture of the organisation and, if supported effectively, will become self perpetuating.
Our satisfaction is seeing you move up to a new level of operation without needing
our help anymore. This is why Little Fish starts with the end point in mind. |
