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Reading an Unknown Organization

Leaders in New Roles Thriving in Challenging Environments with the 3-P-Model Mindset

Peter Wollmann | Lukas Stricker | Doris Pemler (Editors)

Excerpt from the introduction

Reading an unknown organization is a capability that has always been useful. The reading process starts intuitively the moment we first interact with a new organization. With experience as whisperer in the background, the process often remains a largely unconscious one.  We believe that in a time of structural change on many dimensions—technological, geopolitical, ecological—reading unknown organizations has become a quintessential capability that deserves a more conscious approach. Of course, there are tested methods to analyze organizations or diagnose people for different purposes, developed by the consulting or medical professions. Those remain valid and useful within the framework they were developed for. They are not the focus of this book, however. Rather, we are taking a broader view that can be labeled as “Organizational Intelligence”. Organizational Intelligence builds on a mindset of curiosity and self-consciousness to be able to discover the potential of a new organization and avoid the traps of perception and assessment biases. It seeks for the right balance between intuition and analysis, between fairness and speed.
 
 
Reading a new organization is required in many situations. It can be an executive joining a new enterprise or public institution, or an investor considering taking a share in a venture, a professor being asked to join a scientific advisory body of a new life science start-up, a diplomat taking over a role as a special envoy in an international conflict or an urban planner bringing together various interest groups to develop a neighborhood. This book specifically presents cases as such gathered in structured interviews with people which had to have a strong ability to read an unfamiliar organization.

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