“Fair judgment takes into account the context in which an event occurs, its antecedents and its consequences”
Tzvetan Todorov
One of the things that surprised me the most in my first participation as assessor of the European Quality Award, many years ago, was that, months before carrying out the on-site visit to the candidate organization, the team of eight international assessors locked ourselves in the EFQM headquarters in Brussels to analyze in depth the context of the organization. There I understood that no diagnosis or evaluation of the management structure of an organization could be precise without trying to understand what surrounds the area under analysis.
This applies not only to organizational analysis but to practically any action on anything: A doctor will hardly find a sustainable and/or definitive solution to something if he is not able to see the person systemically -pain in one place can have their origin in another- or without contemplating the general state of the same -you just have to see how many medical diagnoses determine that the cause of a certain physical problem is “stress”-. School failure may not be due to the student’s ability per se and may be related to their specific, personal, family, social or cultural context. Or, in general: How many times, in our day-to-day, do we issue value judgments without sufficient information about the context, which, once it is known with more insight, makes our position or opinion more flexible or, directly, change?
Finding effective solutions to organizational problems implies a previous deep understanding of the conditions in which it operates, its background and the previous journey that has led us to that place. Ultimately, everything is context and history :
- Context: Everything (present moment) that surrounds the organization and conditions or determines its actions (tacitly or explicitly) and that of the people and teams that make it up. Some examples (from the macro -organization- to the micro -teams and people-):
- Do we understand the competitive dynamics of the sector? Do we understand the current position of the organization from a sectoral point of view? Leaders or followers? Drivers or Driven?
- Do we understand what are the a priori restrictions (sectoral, legal/legislative/regulatory, etc.) that the organization faces?
- Do we understand what is the predominant management culture in the organization? And in the country where you live (a much more relevant aspect than it seems)?
- History: Everything (historical trajectory) that has shaped the organization and has contributed to making it what it is at the present moment. Some examples:
- What were the foundational elements on which the organization was created? What was the original end? Has it been maintained/respected over time? How have organizational values evolved over time?
- Do we understand why people behave in a certain way? Why are they more or less proactive/reactive, innovative/conservative, or autonomous/dependent?
- How have leadership styles evolved (if at all)? What has conditioned people to behave as they do? Many years of rigid hierarchy where control was the essential element of management?
One of the seven habits of highly effective people is “seek first to understand, then to be understood”. Stephen Covey has already extensively detailed the paramount importance of understanding before jumping to conclusions. However, it is an area in which we seem to be eternal apprentices, in a challenge (that of understanding without bias and prejudice) that must be practiced every day.
A third element could be added to all this: context (present moment), history (past moment) and projection (future moment), since organizations are not only past and present. The ambitions and challenges that you want to address in the medium and long term, reflected in the organization’s strategy, and defined after considering future trends and changes in the environment, also make up something vital if you want to have a global and holistic perspective of it. and reliably identify strengths and, above all, pain points whose approach cements the path of excellence.
PS: The photograph that accompanies this article shows an image that cannot be understood without understanding the context, or better, the history. Sometimes trees are pushed to grow in a unique way…
