Organizational focal length

Where are you focusing, and how to get a sharper impression?

Thinking too big; thinking too small. How can you adjust your personal focal length to focus on the correct scale for your project, business or organization?

Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash

As a geographer, I love to talk about scale. As a strategist in the geospatial community of practice, scale becomes even more interesting because the word is used for many intersecting themes: business practices, cloud computing, and geography. In our last discussion, I briefly talked about being zoomy. Being zoomy is being able to look at details of an issue and understand how those details might create broader market ripples. I used this term within the context of idea creation and identifying if a new practice could provide the basis for a new strategy. Today, I want to expand that idea further.

Consolidation is on the lips of numerous organizations in the geospatial sector this year. We have seen multiple tech companies taking the opportunity to lay off staff. There is an accompanying air of concern over the tech sector at large and a sense that the beginning of 2023 might be complicated, reinforcing the idea that close management is necessary.

Being zoomy is helpful in this regard. In reality, the strategist or professional leader needs the ability to change the scale at which they are working very quickly. So, how does one determine their working scale, and then how can we train ourselves to think at different scales?

Empathy gets you closer.

My background has given me a unique opportunity to understand how most rungs of the geospatial ladder look from data editing and cleansing to executive leadership. So, the best tool I use for understanding business processes is empathy. Empathy is crucial because it forces an individual to consider how the environment of another might be. In business, empathy is often skipped as being extraneous to shareholder value. But, to understand how a process works, it is essential to understand how those undertaking it operate. I know from bitter experience that:

1. How someone describes their job

2. How their boss describes their job

3. The actual job that individual does

These are three entirely separate activities. You don’t learn that from looking at an organizational chart; you know it from being empathic and talking to people.

So, when looking deep into a process, one needs to have empathy. For instance, if a modernization project is being undertaken, what is the likelihood of its success? It would be best to look at who and why that job is happening. You should look at their situation and assess if your modernization work will support their day-to-day activities. When you want to understand if a project is working or not, talk to the people doing the work. Empathy lets you zoom in on a process.

Mentors zoom you out.

I often find myself in a mental box of my own creation.

I think many of us do. But zooming out is absolutely critical to my role. While I have built a great team to manage the internals of Sparkgeo, my job is to look further out and identify the weak signals against which to set our course. I very much enjoy the market analysis and innovation strategy work, but often I find myself needing to be realigned on market size and opportunities. I often think too small because my focus has been set on Sparkgeo. When I focus on Sparkgeo-sized things for a while, it is hard to zoom out to large enterprise-scaled organizations. I need to remind myself to be zoomier.

My zoominess is reasonable because I have lots of experience with innovative and venture-funded companies. I know what those environments look like personally, so I need to push myself to understand how other systems work. This is a similar pattern to price anchoring, one has one’s scale anchored, and it can take a force of will to de-anchor.

To help push me, I lean on a series of mentors and friends to remind me that other models exist. Finding mentors with different experiences in similar industries is hugely important and will challenge your strategic thinking.

Enterprises are not people.

My final thought today is to identify that large organizations are not people. They are made up of people, and it is easy to anthropomorphize organizational behaviour. But, in terms of decision-making and rational action, large organizations are not a sum of their parts. Quite the opposite, even the best companies and teams are far less able to operate as effectively as a single person can.

Yes, bigger teams can conceivably DO more, but they are far less able to make rational decisions. An organization has a more challenging time empathizing. Groupthink overtly discourages any empathic problem-solving because, invariably, politics get in the way. Politics and organizational structures can also prevent thinking big or contrarian thinking.

As a result, organizations have a hard time being naturally zoomy. They rely on individuals to do the zooming. But internal politics and organizational structures often leave any zooming somewhat out of focus, to reach a consensus.

If you are in a large organization, don’t lose heart: I have talked about sensory organizations, and there are ways to build this organizational capacity.

Being zoomy is good practice for navigating the complex waters ahead of us this year. Look closely at your day-to-day practices for incremental execution refinements, but don’t ignore the macro-trends around us. It is fearsome how quickly things can change in a time of flux, and I suspect that this year, we will see a great deal of instability.