Are organisations congruent

Firstly can I say a huge thank you to George for allowing me to post here as a guest blogger – a real honour and a I hope a great co-creation.  Thank you.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about quality organisations and the service product divide.  There is so much written that we are now in a post marketing age and that the 4Ps that are taught on marketing 101s are now out of date and old fashioned (mark my words they’ll be there again like some old fashioned 80’s revival someday).  There are certainly new Ps which a great post from Anne McCrossan showed the other day linking the old world with the new world but I still see something missing in my mind.

I’m now in favour of the congruent organisation, the aligned organisation, the smooth organisation – you can see my thinking isn’t there yet and i haven’t got the word or even the hashtag for.  These type of organisations have a core sense of authentic self throughout their organisation and exude it throughout their communication both within and outside their organisation.In my mind well designed organisations may want to choose whether they tell the story of desperation – cost cutting, cheap workforce, low training.  They may indeed find and tell the story that this maybe a strategy of future success.  I’ve met many people in business who believe passionately that shoving a product down spamming, in-yer face marketing is the way to go and many of these people actually enjoy buying from organisations like this!  In contrast there are the organisations where there seems to be much extra capacity, nothing too much for you, high prices, niche service, high quality.  Again these are choices (and believe me these choices can be made) for organisations to make.  The problem comes when they get mixed within different parts of the organisation.

One of the joys of having pre-school children was the need to ask shop assistants where the nearest toilet is located.  There is something about this that even the unforgiving shop assistant can’t help you with.  Admittedly this is usually the retail sector but it is interesting how visiting the “back stage” of a shop can show you how aligned the organisation is.  Again if the organisation is very performance driven I can almost be certain that back stage there are charts and graphs wooping about how they are 110% over budget.  If the organisation is very people focussed there seem to be always pictures on the wall of the last party – I saw a lovely team incentive scheme where the top team were treated to a nice evening out and displayed the page on their notice board.  But does this back stage shine through to the front of house?  My concern for some organisations is that part of the organisations functions can be operating on a very high quality context – think of hospitals with highly skilled surgery only to be let down by a small part of the system that has had underinvestment.  The experience is then often focussed on this small part.

So with the rise of social media there has never been a time when organisations are more open to showing their context through the people that work with them.  Whilst an organisation may be highly social through their comms team and giving a great service there there could be exposed other areas of the organisation that could be showing that there is a different internal context than that being portrayed.

For me I still maintain that a clear agreed context for a organisation – that can change is a valuable part of the service I receive and have affinity for.  Is it just me?

Mike Baldwin

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