Is Your Organisation Making The Impossible Possible?

2016 was the year the social media bubble burst. The year we woke up to the fact that — despite what Twitter and Facebook tell us — a lot of people think exactly the opposite to what we do. It was us, not them, who were in a bubble.

I spent New Year travelling — so only read a few of the “2016 sucked” type posts that swamped my feeds. My view is that 2016 wasn’t the end of days — but rather the necessary conclusion of a cycle that’s been playing out for years. The new cycle is beginning and is open for us to shape.

I began writing this post on the early morning ferry from Tagbilaran to Lamu Lamu City in the Philippines — after a conversation with some Filipino commuters.

The Filipinos are blessed with breathtaking landscapes , astonishing waterworlds and true Asian megacities. It’s also situated smack in the middle of the typhoon belt and the Pacific Ring of Fire. Storms and earthquakes are part of everyday life.

It’s one of the most beautiful countries I’ve been too — and it’s in an almost constant cycle of peril.

People have to continually rebuild, reuse and readapt.

There’s no time for navel gazing about change management programmes and cultural readiness for transformation. It’s transform or die.

The Fili culture has a word for this mindset — “Bayanihan”.

The word came from the tradition where neighbours would help a relocating family by literally carrying their house and contents to a safer location.

More generally the word has come to mean a communal spirit that makes seemingly impossible feats possible through the power of unity and cooperation.

The term bayanihan has evolved over time — being incorporated in many projects that depict the spirit of cooperative effort involving a community of members.

In 2017 many of us have to rebuild our organisations to face challenges that may seem impossible. And we can’t do it alone.

Saving the NHS from implosion seems impossible, but 1.5 million people work for the health service. If that were a country it would the 150th most populous in the world — ahead of Estonia, Cyprus and Iceland. That’s a huge amount of skills and knowledge that if harnessed correctly could surely transform any system.

If you stop thinking of the NHS as an end in itself and start adding in the wider social sector you’ll have more than 5 million people — and that’s before you start untapping the skills and resources in communities.

The reality is that the health and social sector isn’t an untouchable thing of beauty. It’s a clunky system built for another age. It’s been patched so many times that it’s astonishing it still works at all.

Whilst short term emergency funding may be necessary — it is in no way the answer.

We need to to invest in scaling up promising community based initiatives at the same time as scaling down paternalistic systems and bureaucracies that stifle innovation.

This , as Alex Fox has written, is the scaling challenge of the digital age. Scaling down bureaucracies to be human and family sized again.

I’m lucky to be working with organisations who are actively exploring these concepts, some of which looked fanciful in 2012.

• In 2014 they started to take shape and gather momentum. More people took interest and got involved.
• In 2016 post-Brexit, post-Trump, post-truth it looked increasingly persuasive.
• In 2017 amid a global implosion of trust — moving our organisations from the reactive to the preemptive and challenging the whole system as we have known it — is now the day job.

In the Philippines it’s interesting that the spirit of bayanihan — of communities themselves doing impossible tasks — has not spread upstream into Government.

The cooperation that works so well at community or baranggay level has been stunted when it meets the inflexible institutions that supposedly serve it.

This is the big challenge for us.

Can we reshape our organisations to be more like people — or are our institutions the very things that are standing in the way of unity and cooperation?

Are we letting communities make the impossible possible — or are we the ones stopping it dead in its tracks?

Here’s to a challenging and productive year!

Originally published at paulitaylor.com on January 20, 2017.