The Universe of Business Alignment
Business Alignment is a function of Organization Alignment and Business Strategy
Firstly, Business Strategy is explored, dialogued upon, evolved, and deployed by FLAME TAO Knoware as a “process”. The Process school underlines the significance of evolution of the strategy through explicating the extant mental models and the functional and dysfunctional consequences thereof, facilitating a discourse co-held with an awareness of the processes of power, and aligning a series or a pattern of conversations across the various stakeholders within the organization.
Secondly the FLAME TAO team bridges strategy formulation with organizational effectiveness by fleshing out the design and role taking within the organization. It facilitates forums to diagnose organizational health, relevance of values, mission, and vision, relevance of organization culture and existing leadership, and the nature of organizational alignment.
The interventions on Business Alignment involve long-term partnerships with the client organization, where FLAME TAO Knoware commences with a diagnosis on the nature of Alignment at all levels. This leads to examining the reason-for-being of the organization, its vision, its mission, its values-in-action, and its responsiveness.
Business Alignment is critical and effective to the extent of alignment at the other three levels is engaged and realized within the organization. The key offerings in the universe of Businss Alignment are:
- Diagnostics on Alignment between the Organization and its Ecology
- Facilitating the Visioning Process: Designing Institution Building interventions
- Scenario Building: Aligning and translating Business Strategy with an Organization Development Mandat
 Diagnostics on Alignment between the Organization & its Ecology
As early as the mid 1960’s, Emery and Trist (1965) and Katz & Kahn (1978) have speculated that the external environment of the organization has an impact on the internal organization. According to open systems theory, the organization responds to the demands of the external environment in which it operates.
FLAME TAO Knoware over the last two decades has designed and created diagnostic frameworks that explicate the extant of alignment between the organization and the ecology it is set in. The Diagnostic frameworks help examine the visible throughput realities and its inter-dependencies within the ecology.
In addition to exploring and understanding the task realities within the ecology, the frameworks enable a dialogue on the stress / potential breakthrough zones, help create spaces for experimentation, and creating a language to articulate the culture, and invisible yet critical forces that operate within the ecology.
Illustrative Clients: Sterling Commerce, SRF, OnMobile, TCS Limited, Future Soft, EPCOS
Facilitating the Visioning Process: Designing Institution Building Processes
Too often the Visioning processes at the stakeholder level are not aligned to the institution building processes across the organization, and consequently the one or the other get experienced as not relevant, non-evocative, and devoid of meaning or value. The emergent values in action do not converge with espoused values impacting human energy within the organization.
FLAME TAO Knoware facilitates the congruence between the processes of Visioning, Institution Building, and Strategizing. The Congruence is facilitated through a series of dialogue forums across the organization, some through formal processes such as goal setting, and some through informal processes of socialization.
Identification with the Vision and Values become the key imperative, and interventions are designed to sustain processes within the organization. Issues pertinent to leadership, role taking, replenishment and renewal of the organization and its members are critical to Institution Building.
FLAME TAO deploys metaphors to examine organizational identity, as a key process to facilitate the congruence.
Illustrative Clients: Infosys, EID Parry
Scenario Building: Aligning and translating Business Strategy into an Organization Development Roadmap
FLAME TAO Knoware facilitates Scenario Building processes across key stakeholders to emerge with an OD (Organization Development) mandate. Scenario Building is a critical step in the strategizing process as well as the diagnostic interventions and is offered as a key offering to diagnose and scope the consequent OD intervention.
FLAME TAO Knoware uses many Tao Frameworks and Tao Power Tools (Software Solutions) to facilitate Scenario Building across large and complex organizations. Scenario building is structured around narratives co-created on various fronts, and how these narratives form emergent patterns that need a collective exploration.
Scenario Building offers insights into the existing mental models, the impact of the past legacies within individuals and collectives, and lead to an agenda for Change and Transformation. It evokes a collective inquiry into the history, and evolving present, often leading to breakthroughs and insights.
Illustrative Clients: Claris Life Sciences, Parry Agro, EID Parry, and TCS Limited … |
