I help clients navigate company structures with this exercise:
Find the path of least resistance.
You see, every company is a system of interrelated connections, and each has its own rules that dictate what can happen and how.
And out of all these pathways, one will be the quickest and easiest for getting a desired outcome.
Most Professionals don’t fully embrace this approach for three reasons:
- We default to traditional reporting structures without recognising that everything is governed by a mix of positional power, personal power, incentives and preferences.
- We assume assessing all possible pathways takes too long when actually the discovery cost to do this is quite low.
- We stick to methods that have “worked” without realising how much resistance we’re pushing through (or we do realise but choose not to explore alternatives).
If you want something to happen within a company, I strongly encourage you to consider which paths are available to you and how you can best leverage these paths to achieve a result with the least resistance.
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