Organization 21C: Someday All Organizations Will Lead This Way

The Silent Killers: Undiscussible Barriers to Organizational Fitness

Recent research by Russell Eisenstat and myself sheds light on the specific organizational dynamics that block organizations from learning about their internal functioning.^[12] Using an intervention I will describe later, we found that top teams and key lower-level managers in a dozen underperforming organizations had very similar and consistent perceptions of barriers to organizational effectiveness. These barriers had not been communicated to top management by lower levels nor had top management taken action to confront them until the intervention we designed to help them do so made it possible. The barriers identified were as follows:

• Unclear strategy and/or conflicting priorities ...