Elevarse Performance Consulting

Organizations succeed when they design their processes, routines, and procedures to encourage employees to problem-solve and contribute to a common purpose.

“When people have difficulty doing their work easily and well, despite investing their best time and energy to support the larger effort, we shouldn’t expect the enterprise as a whole to perform well either,” writes MIT Sloan senior lecturer Steven Spear. “This is an organization that has not been wired to win.”

In their new book, “Wiring the Winning Organization,” Spear and co-author Gene Kim offer leaders three mechanisms to hone employees’ problem-solving skills:

• Slowification pulls problem-solving out of the fast-paced realm of performance.
• Simplification breaks down large problems into smaller, simpler ones.
• Amplification makes it obvious there are problems and clarifies whether those problems have been seen and solved.

“Even if we cannot do all three,” Spear and Kim write, “doing two or even one still brings us closer to the winning zone, making it easier for us to take situations about which we know too little and can do too little and convert them into situations in which we know enough and can do enough.”