Organic integration
“Organic Integration is the creative process by which a leader aligns — passion with strategy, collaboration and and process — to best achieve sustainable, accelerated growth with greater fulfillment for everyone involved. ”
— Shelley Moore - President, Founder of Insight SC
Communities and their organizations are living, breathing and changing at all times. People and technology are the most unpredictable forces; both driving the sense of urgency to evolve and to think and do work differently and at faster rates of speed.
With these changing and evolving dynamics, leaders need a framework to rely upon by which they can quickly adapt, realign and consistently provide stability and sustainability within their organizations and communities.
For nearly 20 years, Insight's founder, Shelley Moore, has worked with over 200 organizations and has defined four consistent elements, that when aligned and organically integrated into the organization or community's DNA, will cultivate and accelerate growth.
These four elements are the framework for Insight's proprietary business model and its services.
1. Passion
Passion is the life blood of the organization. Places with people who have passion simply take in more air and have more energy. You can feel it. When everyone working in an organization or a community has a passion for what he or she does, synergy emerges and amazing inventions and solutions start to fly.
2. Strategy
Strategy captures the external plan for growth with customers via the products and services offered. Strategy must be aligned to the higher purpose of vision, mission, specific goals and measurable objectives. Strategy must also be lived out through the expectations of shared values exemplifying the behaviors that make the culture a great place where people want to be.
Achieving strategic alignment and orchestrated execution that is realized in the market place is hard enough. Internally and externally communicating the framework's pieces and having everyone understand his or her part for action is even more difficult. Yet, it is necessary and quite possible to achieve both.
Strategic understanding and alignment compounds efficiency by clearing confusion and creating a super highway for communication. The efficiency of this deeply integrated alignment -- coupled with the energy of leadership's personal passion -- is a very powerful force that constitutes the creation of competitive advantage.
3. Collaboration
Collaboration is not compromise. Collaboration is a win-win because everyone gets what they need. Compromise is a lose-lose because everyone must give something up to meet in the middle.
Greater productivity is achieved when organizations and communities don't compromise. Instead, they collaborate to clearly define a team design that 1) is on purpose with the strategy, and 2) is on purpose with peoples' individual talents and strengths.
When people understand the expectations of their roles and if those expectations are aligned with their talents -- they flourish.
Furthermore, when team members have a clear line of sight to the vision and external strategy -- while seeing how their role is required for collective success -- watch out! This collaborative alignment from visionary purpose to individual passion is a powerful force.
4. Process
Process and accountability activities simply add energy to the speed of growth. Process is the discipline required to refine the tasks and steps necessary to remove annoyance and to simply make work and life easier.
Streamlining process steps, tracking accountability metrics, and properly utilizing technology to share meaningful analysis -- are activities that speed up work and make more safe environments. Easily, most process improvements and the use of accountability tools eliminate at least 20% of waste, redundancy and cost. Without such disciplines and efficiencies, growth cannot exist.
OI is a creative process
Over the years, we have continued to develop specific practices that are designed to best align and integrate passion, strategy, collaboration, and process. We have found that focusing on this integration always leads to accelerated growth and greater fulfillment. It's physics!
We believe the quest to achieve continuous Organic Integration fundamentally redefines the active role of leadership -- from being less like a jet fighter pilot -- to being more like Neo and Trinity in the Matrix.
How? Running our lives, organizations and communities is about being as human as possible while productively integrating technological advancements into our lives. Those leaders who are best at making their choices to achieve Organic Integration best perform to advance and win in today's dynamic and global environment.
Thus, leaders accomplishing Organic Integration must be creative and highly skilled at the discipline of aligning these elements, together at the same time:
understanding people and their passion and talents,
morphing flexible strategies, repositioning resources, and interpreting objective information,
designing teams to have synergy,
building elegant processes and supporting technologies for getting work done, and
doing it all, while intuitively follo wing instincts to shift as needed.
These skills develop with time, and the more you practice, the better and faster you become.
Consequently, there is no one right way or solution to organically integrate an organization or community. It is a creative process that must be defined to support the unique DNA of an organization while being performed by the distinct natural talents of their leaders.
OI is led by people
People ultimately behold the choice to be motivated or not. They also control the energy required to achieve growth.
The faster pace of change today inevitably enforces some technology requirements into this creative process, such as:
using analytics and performance dashboards and scorecards, and
routinely engaging new technologies -- all of which are at our fingertips -- ready to share all aspects of our people, organizations, industries, and communities (and yes, provide it all as we sleep).
Yet, there's much more to it than just the logical stuff. Leaders must know how to quickly access the right information, and adapt relevant strategies, while being connected to the emotional performance of themselves and their people.
Those leaders who are best at Organic Integration develop and fully engage emotional, instinctual and critical thinking talents and skills. They process complex information, along with being able to consciously relate to and connect with the individual and collective needs of people.
OI summary
It is Organic Integration that clarifies the connections that people need to see for an organization to be relevant to their use of energy. When these connections are made and acted upon, a stickiness is achieved that connects people to their work. As this connection builds on to the energy of others, velocity increases and the momentum for growth is achieved.
So, what does Organic Integration look like in your organization or community? It is a creative process led by leadership that aligns and unites people to make a unique difference in their community. "Unfortunately, no one can be told what their Matrix is. You (leaders) have to (do the work and) see it for yourself."