Adapted from the work of Ken Wilber
Quadrent 1: Individual Subtle
Addressing the beliefs, ethics and complex thinking processes of individuals is required for effective implementation.
Ignoring or not attending to the interior world of yourself and your major stakeholders is a recipe for failure.
Your chances of success greatly increase when you are curious about and seek to understand your own and your stakeholders' hopes and fears.
If what you want is opposed to what someone else wants, and this remains unexpressed or undiscovered, critical incidents will continue to occur that disrupt your best-laid project plans.
Quadrant 2: Individual Obvious
Developing skills and knowledge is vitally important to support effectiveness and performance.
A great deal of organisational money and time is focused on developing professional competencies.
However, without the proper mindsets, beliefs and complexity of thinking, people will not apply the skills they may have acquired and organisational resources will have been wasted.
360 feedback, measuring thinking and behaving, is an important start to learning and practicing new behaviours.
Quadrant 3: Subtle Organisation
How people interact with each other and the subtle patterns of those interactions greatly impact effectiveness. There is a growing awareness of the importance of culture and shared values to getting things accomplished.
Group dynamicsMost organisations and leaders do not invest greatly in thinking about or creating a healthy functioning culture. Mostly it is an artefact of their personality or a legacy of 'how we have always done things around here'.
Effective cultures are ones that support organisational purpose and vision. That are constructive and support members to contribute to their maximum.
Quadrant 4: Obvious Organisation
Business process efficiency is one necessary element in creating organisational effectiveness.
About 85% of organisational investment in strategy and changing how and what an organisation does falls into this last quadrant.
This over-emphasis is a legacy of Taylorism and a mechanistic world-view.
Like skills and competencies, systems and structures are necessary but not sufficient for organisational effectiveness.
Why do approximately 85% of business and organisational change efforts fail to deliver the value that was promised?
Usually, both industries (socio-political systems) and organisations invest most time and money in content-driven, obvious change (quadrants 4 and 2); this is necessary but not sufficient to deliver sustainable effectiveness.
For increased collective capability, complexity of functioning and on-going strategic agility, industries and businesses must invest in subtle factors as well (quadrants 1 and 3).
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