It continues to fascinate me how little some businesses still seem to understand their human factors as opposed to their people model. They know how their workforce is organised. They understand where they’re allocated. They know what they cost. They have processes for everything they do. But they still seem to lack the anthropological understanding of how they actually can and need to get on and interact.
They see the shape, but they don’t appreciate the fabric.
It comes back to a point I make often in my purpose workshops – that we tend to treat organisations as “natural gatherings” because it is convenient to do so, and therefore we expect businesses to behave in that way because they are meant to be bound together by culture.
In point of fact, unprompted cohesiveness is probably a strange assumption.
So perhaps we should really be addressing organisations as quite the opposite – unnatural structures, that need to be encouraged and stimulated to stay together and function effectively.
Instead of trying to think about why some people don’t fit in, and therefore what is odd about them, we should start from the premise that everyone is naturally inclined not to fit in, and focus on what we can agree on, and instigate, to cement enough commonality to counter that.
