Intent Integrity

Organizational state

At any point, an organization exists in a particular organizational state: how some relevant part of it is structured or operates at that time.

In plain terms

Organizational state is how a relevant part of an organization is actually arranged and how it actually works at a given moment: its processes, capabilities, systems, structures, roles, information and behaviors. It describes the arrangement, not the results. What that arrangement produces once it is running in real conditions is something separate, and keeping the two apart is one of the more useful habits this framework asks for.

How it works

Change alters organizational state. A redesigned process, a new system, a restructured team: each of these is a change of state. Whether any of them produces better results is a different question, and the answer is not guaranteed by the change having happened.

That separation is easy to state and easy to lose. Most change reporting describes state, because state is visible and countable. The system is live. The process is redesigned. The team is reorganized. It is entirely possible for all of that to be true while the outcomes that justified the work are unchanged, or worse than before.

A state does not produce results on its own. It operates within a context: the conditions around it that it does not control but that shape what it produces. The same process, run under different market conditions or different regulation or different behavior elsewhere in the organization, produces different outcomes. A change that works in one context can fail in another without anything about the change being wrong.

The framework names three states, and the difference between them carries most of the argument. The current state is where things stand when a change is taken up. The target state is what a direction aims to create. The realized state is what execution actually produces. These come apart routinely, and noticing when they do is much of the work.

Current state

The current state is the relevant organizational state at the point a change is taken up for deliberate consideration.

The organizational state as it stands when a change is first taken up for deliberate consideration. The outcomes it already produces are the reference for understanding why change may be needed and which outcomes should be pursued. That is not always improvement: sometimes the aim is to keep acceptable outcomes acceptable as conditions change.

Context

An organizational state operates within a context: the relevant conditions outside the organizational state under consideration that influence how that state operates and what outcomes it produces.

The conditions outside the part of the organization under consideration that influence how it operates and what it produces. Market conditions, regulation, economics, technology, stakeholder behavior, and whatever else is happening elsewhere in the organization. Context is not controlled by the change, but it determines much of what the change achieves.

See also Intent, Direction, and Execution for how organizational states feature in deliberate change.

  • An organizational state operates within its Context and produces outcomes.
  • The Current state is where a change starts. Direction establishes a target state. Execution produces the realized state.
  • A Change need arises when the current state's outcomes are inadequate, threatened, or improvable.

Referenced by

Cite this page

Rozema, Lars. “Organizational state.” Intent Integrity. https://www.intent-integrity.com/organizational-state. n.d.

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