Two new laws for large organisations
Large, long lived organisations are unusual things. Weird things happen within them. Weird things are accepted by their participants. The cost or overhead of a large organisation has many symptoms. Over time i've observed that there are some patterns to these weird things. I thought i'd try and nail them down into some distinct form, here are Two.
1) Sage's law of enterprise duplication
In any sufficiently large organisation, at any one time there will be more than one initiative aiming to deliver the same outcome or capability. - me
I've seen this multiple times within different organisations. Sometimes it's been where two different parts of the same organisation are trying to implement or improve a capability, for example, Customer Relationship Management. Sometimes it's involved trying to outsource the same capability to different suppliers, but regardless of the type of duplication, it's ultimately completely avoidable waste.
Why does this happen? there can be many causes, some i've seen include:
- Poor communication
- Unclear view of the enterprise portfolio
- Non-existent, Unclear or poorly communicated strategy
- Empires within the organisation
- ill-defined view of the organisation's architecture
- poorly designed operating model
2) Sage's law of enterprise conflict
In any sufficiently large organisation, at any one time there will be two or more initiatives whose intended outcomes will conflict with the intended outcomes of another initiative. - me
Again, i've seen this multiple times, for me this is a symptom of a more dysfunctional organisation than the first law, because, although sometimes it can just be unintended, sometimes i've seen it happen very intentionally.
Why does this happen? similar reasons to the first one:
- Leadership conflict/competition
- Dysfunctional leadership structure
- Conflicting incentives
- Enterprise Arseholes
- Poor communicaiton
- unclear view of the enterprise portfolio
- non-existent, unclear or poorly communicated strategy
- ill-defined view of the organisation's architecture
- poorly designed operating model