Organic Integration and its required elements for growth
VISION + Disruption <—> STRATEGY + Collaboration
Communities and organizations are living, breathing, and constantly evolving. People and technology are the most unpredictable forces, both driving the sense of urgency to evolve, think, and work differently at a faster rate.
With these changing and evolving dynamics, leaders need a framework to rely upon by which they can quickly adapt, execute, realign, and consistently provide sound strategy, stability, and sustainability within their organizations and communities.
For over 25 years, Insight has worked in-depth with and executed plans for more than 300 organizations. We have identified four consistent elements that, when aligned and organically integrated into the organization or community's DNA, will cultivate and accelerate teams toward growth.
These four elements form the framework for The Insight Growth System, which strives to achieve Organic Integration (OI) through its proprietary business model and services.
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PASSION
Leadership
Passion is the lifeblood of the organization. Places with people who have passion take in more air and have more energy. You can feel it. When everyone working in an organization or community has a passion for what they do, synergy emerges, and amazing inventions and solutions start to emerge.
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STRATEGY
Growth Plan
Strategy captures the external plan for growth with customers via the products and services offered. Strategy must be aligned with the higher purpose of vision, mission, specific goals, and measurable objectives. Strategy must also be lived out through the expectations of shared values, exemplifying the behaviors that make the culture a great place where people want to be.
Achieving strategic alignment and orchestrated execution realized in the marketplace is hard enough. Internally and externally, communicating the framework's pieces and ensuring everyone understands their part in the action is even more challenging. Yet, it is necessary and quite possible to achieve both.
Strategic understanding and alignment compound efficiency by clearing confusion and creating a super highway for communication. The efficiency of this deeply integrated alignment, coupled with the energy of leadership's passion, is a powerful force that creates a competitive advantage.
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COLLABORATION
Team
Collaboration is not a compromise. Collaboration is a win-win because everyone gets what they need. Compromise is a lose-lose because everyone must give something up to meet in the middle.
Greater productivity is achieved when organizations and communities don't compromise. Instead, they collaborate to clearly define a team design that 1) is on purpose with the strategy and 2) is on purpose with people's talents and strengths.
When people understand the expectations of their roles and if those expectations are aligned with their talents, they flourish.
Furthermore, when team members have a clear line of sight to the vision and external strategy, while seeing how their role is required for collective success, watch out! This collaborative alignment from visionary purpose to individual passion is a powerful force.
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PROCESS
Accountability
Process and accountability activities add energy to the speed of growth. Process is the discipline required to refine the tasks and steps necessary to remove annoyance and make work and life easier.
Streamlining process steps, tracking accountability metrics, and effectively utilizing technology to share meaningful analysis are activities that accelerate work and create safer environments. Most process improvements and accountability tools quickly eliminate at least 20% of waste, redundancy, and cost. Without such disciplines and efficiencies, growth cannot exist.
OI is a creative endeavor
Over the years, we have continued to develop specific practices designed to align and integrate passion, strategy, collaboration, and process. We have found that focusing on this integration always leads to accelerated growth and greater fulfillment. It's physics!
We believe the quest to achieve continuous Organic Integration fundamentally redefines the active role of leadership -- from being less like a jet fighter pilot to being more like Neo and Trinity in the Matrix.
How? Running our lives, organizations, and communities is about being as human as possible while productively integrating technological advancements into our lives. Those leaders who are best at making choices to achieve Organic Integration perform most effectively in advancing and winning in today's dynamic and global environment.
Thus, leaders accomplishing Organic Integration must be creative and highly skilled at the discipline of aligning these elements together at the same time:
understanding people and their passions and talents,
morphing flexible strategies, repositioning resources, and interpreting objective information,
designing teams to have synergy,
building elegant processes and supporting technologies for getting work done, and
doing it all while intuitively following instincts to shift as needed.
These skills develop with time, and the more you practice, the better and faster you become.
Consequently, there is no right way or solution to integrate an organization or community organically. It is a series of creative acts that must support the unique DNA of an organization while being performed by the distinct natural talents of its leaders.
People lead OI
People ultimately choose whether to be motivated or not. They also control the energy required to achieve growth.
The faster pace of change today inevitably enforces some technology requirements into this creative process, such as:
Using analytics, performance dashboards, scorecards
Routinely engaging new technologies -- all of which are at our fingertips -- ready to share all aspects of our people, organizations, industries, and communities (and yes, provide it all as we sleep).
Yet, there's much more to it than just the logical stuff. Leaders must know how to quickly access the correct information and adapt relevant strategies while being connected to the emotional performance of themselves and their people.
Those leaders who excel at Organic Integration develop and fully engage their emotional, instinctual, and critical thinking talents and skills. They process complex information, along with being able to consciously relate to and connect with the individual and collective needs of people.
OI is a quest for relevancy and growth
It is Organic Integration that clarifies the connections people need to see for an organization to be relevant to their energy use. When these connections are made and acted upon, a stickiness is achieved that connects people to their work. As this connection builds on the energy of others, velocity increases, and the momentum for growth is achieved.
So, what does Organic Integration look like in your organization or community? It is a creative system led by leadership that aligns and unites people to make a unique difference in their community. "Unfortunately, no one can be told what their Matrix is. You (leaders) have to (do the work and) see it for yourself."