As I write this, I am watching a documentary on the crisis of 1929. The middle class was the most beaten social class. Today we also see that this is the class that is hit the most as well. Yesterday I saw that Belgium was officially declared out of recession (some graphics were provided). In another article, I read that most Belgians do not have more than 6 months of cash as a buffer to face unexpected conditions. What all this gives is that there is tremendous stress associated with these situations. Stress is not very healthy of helping people improve.

In my line of work, I do help organizations to dramatically improve their way of working.

In a lot of projects, an individual is clearly not performing the way it should be. The easy way would be throw the person out of the project and get a replacement. But this usually doesn't work. Why? The person is often just a symptom of a larger organizational problem. Poisoned dynamics, lack of accountability, and insufficient knowledge of the essentials of the job have contributed to the situation.

How do these two things (crisis and symptoms of organizational problems) correlate? Well, the crisis is the large scale version of the organizational one. Also, the large scale is the combination of the smaller scale elements, leading to unstable and unpredictable dynamics.

The whole thing means that to dramatically improve situations, one has to identify how the constitutive elements do interact together, and how to break the sick dynamics to replace them with productive ones.

The key ingredients to get that done is to have people trust you, follow through on initiatives instead of getting started and not supporting afterwards, and generally showing discipline in getting things done. This in turn requires courage and vision. That's also why changes have to start at the top of the organization. That's why leaders have to behave in a way that clearly set them as exemplars of the wanted behavior. This is the first step for success. The other one is to have the members of the organization trust the leaders so that the leaders can leverage their motivation and energy in realizing the organization objectives.

Let's be clear on the objectives. If this is only shareholder's interests, forget it, it will not hold water. This must provide an answer to other expectations, like contribution to society, advancement of the technology, and generally an impact on the world. You do not want your people to view themselves as stone cutters, but rather as cathedral builders