Pro-Active Organisation

Pro-active organizations have an analytic quality about them which permits looking beyond a particular time and place to see what is coming next. Typically, they are scanning their environment to see what the market change will be, how the customers will be feeling, and what may be coming down the road. At the same time, they also look within to consider their way of doing business, the adequacy of their organization, facilities and personnel as measured against what they are doing presently, and perhaps more important, what they might be called upon to do in the future. All of this critical, reflective activity is based upon their Understanding of the logic and rationale of the business.

Pro-active organization do not stop being Responsive or Reactive, indeed, they do both, but appropriately so. Thus, they respond to customer’s needs fully, not just with the right words, but with some real sense of the logic behind those words. By the same token, they continue to be able to re-act quickly to particular situations when the Data and Information indicate that such re-action is critical. But most important, a pro-active organization may decide neither to respond nor react when it becomes apparent, on the basis of their Understanding, that the problem at hand is neither a matter of the words people are using, nor the data and information they have collected, but of rather something deeper.

Pro-active organizations do very well. Their capacity for self-criticism and environmental assessment enables them to keep on top of things, and even to get a little ahead. What they really do superbly is identify problems, and come up with solutions on the basis of their Understanding of how things are supposed to work. There is, however, a downside to the pro-active organization, which comes from the limitations of their Understanding, and the concentration on problems.

Understanding is a specific logical structure which was built at a special time and place in order to delineate the rationale of the Organization’s Vision. So long as the environment (time and place) remain relatively constant, the logic and rational will continue to work. However, should that environment change in some profound way, the logic will be less and less effective.

What does the Pro-active organization do in this situation? Ordinarily, they would look for problems and solutions. That means finding out what was happening on the “outside,” and readjusting the structure of things “inside” according to their understanding of how things ought to work. But in this case, the “problem” is not the “outside” or the “inside,” but rather that neither exist! In fact, the problem lies in the Understanding, the very mechanism that used to define problems as problems. Very confusing, but what can the organization do?

Playing by the old rules, the Pro-active organization, will engage in a continuing series of reorganizations, changing the language (words) and increased efforts to collect more accurate Data and Information. Relying on their normal “problem-solving mode,” they will look far and wide for a part of the organization that isn’t working and seek to fix it. But the truth of the matter is that the difficulty lies not in some part, but rather in the whole. None of these efforts will have any effect at all except to make the total situation worse, at which point the most likely result will be devolution, down to the most basic levels of behavior – pure re-activity. Action for the sake of action’s sake.

There is, of course another alternative, which is to reconnect with the Organization’s potential and to actualize what may be lying dormant in the Vision. At that point, it becomes possible to rise above all the specificities of Understanding, Language, and Information-Data, to achieve some new sense of the whole – the Inter-Active organization.

Harrison Owen, 1987