Having had this blog for nearly four years, I took a look at the nature of the articles written to date, and subjects included therein, wondering if there were any patterns that emerged. I found the resulting chart (above) interesting as a reflection of the relative importance I associate with certain topics overall. To that end, I thought I’d provide some perspective on what’s been written to date before moving to the next article, whatever that may be.
Leadership and Culture
The two largest focus areas were leadership and culture, which isn’t surprising given I’ve worked for many years across corporate and consulting environments and have seen the relative impact that both can have on organizational performance on the whole. Nearly two-thirds of my articles to date touch on leadership and one-half on culture, because they are fundamental to setting the stage for everything else you want to accomplish.
In the case of organizational excellence, courageous leadership has to be at the top of the list, given that difficult decisions and a level of fearlessness are required to achieve great things. By contrast, hesitancy and complacency will almost always lead to suboptimized results, because there will be apprehension about innovating, challenging the status quo, and effectively managing relationships where the ability to be a partner and advisor may require difficult conversations at times.
With leadership firmly rooted, it becomes possible to establish a culture that promotes integrity, respect, collaboration, innovation, productivity, and results. Where one or more of these dimensions is missing, it is nearly impossible to be effective without compromising performance somewhere. That isn’t to say that you can’t deliver in an unhealthy environment, you certainly can and many organizations do. It is very likely, however, that those gains will be short-lived and difficult to repeat or sustain because of the consequential impact of those issues on the people working in those conditions over time. In this case, the metrics will likely tell the tale, between delivery performance, customer feedback, solution quality, and voluntary attrition (to name a few).
Delivery and Innovation
With the above foundation in place, the next two areas of focus were delivery and innovation, which is reassuring given that I believe strongly in the concept of actionable strategy versus one that is largely theoretical in nature. Having worked in environments that leaned heavily on innovation without enough substantive delivery as well as ones that delivered consistently but didn’t innovate enough, the answer is to ensure both are occurring on a continual basis and managed in a very deliberate way.
Said differently, if you innovate without delivering, you won’t create tangible business value. If you deliver without ever innovating, at some point, you will lose competitive advantage or risk obsolescence in some form or other.
The Role of Discipline
While not called out as a topic in itself, in most cases where I discuss delivery or IT operations, I mention discipline as well, because I believe it is a critical component of pursuing excellence in anything. The odd contradiction that exists, is the notion that having discipline somehow implies bureaucracy or moving slowly, when the reality is the exact opposite.
Without defined, measurable, and repeatable processes, it is nearly impossible to drive continuous improvement and establish a more predictable operating environment over time. From a delivery standpoint, having methodology isn’t about being prescriptive to the point that you lose agility, as an example, it’s about having an understood approach that you can estimate and plan effectively. It also defines rules of engagement within and across teams so that you can partner and execute efficiently in a repeatable fashion. Having consistent processes also allows for monitoring, governing, and improving the efficiency and efficacy of how things are done over time.
The same could be said for leveraging architectural frameworks, common services, and design patterns as well. There is a cost for establishing these things, but if you amortize these investments over time, they ultimately improve speed, reduce risk, improve quality, and thereby reduce TCO and complexity of an environment once they are in place. This is because every team doesn’t invent their own way of doing things, ultimately creating complexity that needs to be maintained and supported down the road. Said differently, it would be very difficult to have reliable estimation metrics when you never do something in a consistent way and analyze variance.
Mental Models and Visualization
The articles also reflect that I prefer having a logical construct and visualizations to organize, illustrate, analyze, and evaluate complex situations, such as AI and data strategy, workforce and sourcing strategy, digital manufacturing facilities, and various other situations. Any of these topics involve many dimensions and layers of associated complexity. Having a mental model, whether it is a functional decomposition, component model, or some other framework, is helpful for both identifying the dimensions of a problem, and also surfacing dependencies and relationships in the interest of driving transformation.
Visualizations also can help facilitate alignment across broader groups of stakeholders where a level of parallel execution is required, making dependencies and relationships more evident and easier to coordinate.
Wrapping Up
Overall, the purpose of writing this article was simply to pause and reflect on what has become a fairly substantive body of work over the last several years, along with recognizing the themes that reoccur time and again because they matter when excellence is your goal. Achieving great things consistently is a byproduct of having vision, effective leadership, discipline, commitment, and a lot of tenacity.
I hope the ideas were worth considering. Thanks for spending the time to read them. Feedback is welcome as always.
-CJG 07/14/2025
Organized Chaos 