In the face of an obvious threat or opportunity, you can react with lightning speed. Whether it’s an immediate threat to your safety or a gold nugget you spot while hiking in a dry riverbed, you can instantaneously sense what’s going on, absorb the implications, think about your options, decide on one, and act. These functions (sensing-absorbing-thinking-deciding-and-acting, or SATDA) are seamlessly integrated within your nervous system, so much so that they work together unconsciously, especially when the stakes are high. The same is not true, however, of the organizational nervous system.
Your organization doesn’t work nearly as fast. Responding to its major threats or seizing its big opportunities requires the activation of a diverse range of talent from in and around your organization – and those people are distributed, physically siloed, specialized, and speak different languages. This is a universal truth. Your organization’s nervous system is fragmented. SATDA in your organization cannot progress quickly from stimulus to response, and it often fails to notice the stimulus in the first place.
To activate your organization’s nervous system so that it can sense, absorb, think, decide and get to action exponentially faster, you need to bring those fragmented functions together and connect them seamlessly, all in a single effort.
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This is a major leadership blind spot. We just don’t think about SATDA: We don’t design our organizational processes and structures to smoothly execute SATDA as a single effort; we don’t teach our leaders to pay attention to SATDA; and we don’t naturally value all of the SATDA functions equally or holistically.
An Example
When does the SATDA lens apply? Every time you’re faced with a big challenge and thinking about putting together a group of people to deal with it – a task force, a steering committee, an advisory board, a cross-functional team, a committee or a sub-committee.
For example, take a task force assembled to create and execute a plan for becoming more customer-centric in automotive sales and service. Consider including:
- Sensors: People from sales, a service technician, someone who answers the phone and books appointments, someone who sends out bills and takes payment, someone who deals with customer inquiries on the web.
- Absorbers: Someone who analyzes web traffic or dealership traffic, the person who reviews sales and service reports, and someone from marketing who pays attention to the success and failure of campaigns.
- Thinkers: Marketing, analysts, business and/or competitive intelligence, R&D, product management, other strategists and maybe a consultant or two hired to help with any of that.
- Deciders: The owner of the dealership and front-line management, senior management at head office, and their most trusted advisors.
- Actors: Project management, communications, and ultimately – when the plan has been created – the doers and steering committee members who will participate in its execution.
You certainly won’t end up including all these people in the task force. The important takeaway, however, is that you thought about it and carefully selected a team with better coverage than you would have without the SATDA lens, and recognized that the task force will need to engage a cross-section of the other functions in a meaningful way at some point in their efforts.
What Does SATDA as a Single Effort Look Like in Practice?Assume you’ve brought together a nice cross-section of SATDA in one place to deliberate together on a far better customer experience in automotive sales and service. What does that look like?
- It’s bold and incorrect statements from Marketing about what they’ve learned customers want triggering a response from a service technician: “The hell they want a comfortable sitting space and a coffee machine, they just want to be in and out on time, if not sooner, and they’d happily do without a fancy coffee if they weren’t waiting for hours.”
- It’s the person who manages the website discovering from a sales person that most customers print out what they find on the web because it’s too hard to use the app and it’s the only proof of web pricing that sales will accept.
- It’s an executive about to decide on a new service pricing policy being informed by the person who takes service calls just how angry his customers are already with current pricing.
- And it’s an analyst, present in the room where the results of her research are being misquoted and misapplied, correcting these errors.
Imagine the time saved, the confusion circumnavigated, the missed understandings converted to shared understandings in this or any other example where SATDA is the lens on who to involve, and team membership is chosen accordingly.
With SATDA applied as one effort, your journey from identifying a problem to enacting a solution will become radically faster and more effective. That’s how your nervous system works. Why not your organization’s?
