Some truths are so obvious as to be lost. In our desire for technical mastery and our love of the shiny things, we can lose sight of a fundamental and universal truth.
Every organisation is comprised of people, exists for people and is run by people.
There is no power in an organisation outside of those three groups of people: workers, customers and governance. There is no they. Everyone falls in these groups and some fall more than one, even in all three. All the policies, process, technology and structure is subservient to these three group’s needs. All the purpose, community, and culture comes from the interplay of people in and between each of these groups.
There is nothing that these three groups of people working in alignment can’t change. The power of an individual or a small group to influence change in these humans begins with the power of conversation.
Our organisations are fundamentally human and first and foremost exist for human purposes. Our organisations should be to enable the realisation of human potential for customers and for workers. We need to remember that all the complication and shiny things we build around our organisations must not distract us from why we collectively are there, our potential and our power to have impact in the world.
We cannot escape the human in our organisations – customers and governance will always remain. Without a focus on real people, our organisations have no meaning. If we embrace the human connections and human potential, what might we achieve?
