Dysfunctional Organization chronically fail to meet their own objectives. The underlying forces which lead to repeated failure are complex. The patterns of organizational behavior before, during and after the failure are an intriguing study. This study is not merely academic in nature. The cost of failure is too high. The impact on corporate profits is only part of the cost. Chronic failure has a significant impact on the quality of life of the managers and the employees.
There are proven and practical solutions for improving the performance of dysfunctional organizations, but they are not obvious or easy to implement. For example, most people believe that more knowledge is the solution. Give the IT people more training, or hire a consultant to assess the organization, are often proposed. These proposals can be of some benefit to the organization but they rarely solve the problem.
Organizations are composed of people. They are a live in a sense. They have complex behavior patterns… And they resist change. When I engage with large dysfunctional organizations I always find that the organization already knows “what’s wrong,” and in most cases “how to fix it”. Why don’t they change? They choose not to change, even though they have the knowledge to do so. A lack of knowledge is not the problem, and more knowledge is not the solution.