The Laundry Test

Is there a simple test you can give to find out how siloed or collaborative your organisation is? For that we need to create the equivalent of the "marshmallow test".Fifty years ago, Walter Mischel, a professor of psychology had given a bunch of preschoolers the famous "marshmallow test," to gauge the level of self-control of children. Five-year olds sat at a table with their favourite treat, in this case, a marshmallow. Then the adult left the room and the kid was all alone. If they resisted eating anything for 15 minutes, they got two marshmallows; otherwise they just got one. The experiment was designed to test the child's ability to delay gratification. Children who resisted eating the marshmallow (showed more selfcontrol) went on to have higher SAT scores than those who couldn't resist temptation. In later years they were also thinner and earned more advanced degrees.I have a similar test that can give you a quick measure of collaboration. The next time you check into a hotel, try to hand over your laundry to someone from another department. Then watch for the person's reaction. Do they ask you to hand it over to the "right department" or do they do it themselves?I know of an IT organisation that was bidding for a very large order for hardware and software as well as a large annual maintenance contract for the government. The deal threw the organisation into a tizzy. They could not decide who would be a single point of contact for the deal. The head of the hardware sales, the software division and the services department kept fighting among themselves. Each one tried to use this opportunity to prevent the other departments from winning the deal and getting bragging rights. They could not agree on the revenue sharing model between themselves. They lost the deal, but you know what, no one cared. They were just happy that their colleagues did not win it. The truth is that the organisation's structure, reporting relationships and so on never make sense to customers. They view the organisation as one seamless entity. It is the employee who notices the wall between departments. Organisations need to leverage different business units and service lines to be able to sell complete solutions to the customer. That often means subordinating the interests of the business unit or service line to present one face to the customer.Matrix organisations are complex to navigate. Business opportunities get created at the intersection point of business units and service lines and geographies. The employee has a complex challenge. When they go to meet the customer they need to take a seamless view of the organisation. When they go back to fulfil the demand, they have to work in their silos. This is the challenge of the modern enterprise.Source: Economic Times 14 Oct 2014Follow me on twitter @AbhijitBhaduri