Organizational Identity Dissonance
Dissonance pertaining to organizational identity could get pretty hard to tackle if it is left unattended initially, here are a few of its implications and ways to nip it in the bud...
Conventional teams & problems
Q: When you talk of a product where do you think it all starts from?
A: An idea perhaps, or as it is commonly referred to in the parlance of product management - an opportunity!?
Ideas are tested before proceeding any further and spending time or splurging a few 1,000-odd dollars. But it is quite possible they are advanced to the next stage where some basic research gets conducted “just so much as to feel it is enough to prove one’s hypothesis” and not delve any further into either the target market or the users / user groups or the problem / pain points and this method is not considered conventional anymore and thankfully so, given today’s way of the world it certainly seems like such teams are going to be missing out big time.
Also, these mistakes could be discerned by careful (at times tedious) spells of retrospection (/ introspection) so as to zero-in on the exact place, the epicenter of misalignment or where it began to go off-track, on a tangent. Most times it could be one or more of these reasons acting as the root cause:
lack of immersive & descriptive research (post exploratory research)
lack of product chops
lack of a market need
lack of relevance / urgency
lack of strategies oriented towards growth
Some more problems (/dilemmas) that product teams face internally are:
But, an organization could be faced up with much bigger problems giving the impression that they are fighting a lost cause in spite of making all the right moves internally with their teams. Such problems could be much graver as they could be deep-rooted germinating largely at the pre-strategy / vision stage that may snowball into disagreements, ambiguity, confusion leading to some sort of dissonance & may indeed be very difficult to bolt down as time progresses posing a serious threat to the identity of the organization.
What is Organizational Identity?
“Organizational identity” is a concept that was coined in 1985 by Stuart Albert and David Whetten perceiving it as a tripartite synaptic connection between:
central character which is given by the values the organization identifies with & believes in
unique qualities that the organization tend to believe that they are in possession of
perception of all the external actors towards the organization & those initiatives
So, to put it bluntly, organizational identity is a high-level perception of the larger market to unambiguously associate the org’s existence with a very well-defined purpose alongside the culture and the values that form the pillars thereof.
NOTE 1: There is a subtle difference between the vision and the org. identity which ought to be understood preliminarily. When the vision is the definition of the where the org. sees itself in medium term (over a few years) the org. identity is the market’s perception of it.
NOTE 2: Setting a vision is imperative and could be thought of as a precursor / an enabler that leads to establishing what’s org. identity.
NOTE 3: Sometimes organizations (mostly MNCs) may have to manage / juggle multiple identities given the diversification and how they may have an entire product-suite which is why they simply choose to go by the term “M-N-C”.
Let’s try and understand the concept of organizational identity exploring a few real-world examples from the who’s who of the world today.
Now, think about this for a scenario.
Given how amazon today has diversified successfully ballooning into one of the biggest Tech companies out there by envisioning themselves as the leading provider of and pivoting on cloud infrastructure just as much as they still manage to have a stronghold on the D2C eCommerce part of the business, it is natural for one to assume that it may have led to some kind of “dissonance” earlier on, just when they made that foray.
“But we know for a fact that no such thing was ever reported”.
Organizational Identity Dissonance
The one thing that ought to be pretty evident by now is the dissonance w.r.t the organization’s identity may not be something that transpires over a really long period of time post that major announcement / taking a step towards another direction / just before that major product launch. If anything, it could largely be down to a perception that the market in general or the users in particular carry about the head-honchos of the org. / the org. as a whole all by itself.
Organizational identity dissonance could be attributed to the psychological stress or discomfort experienced by an organization's social actors (the markets / users & user groups) from holding different (more than two) attitudes / beliefs generating something of a conflict in their behaviors as opposed to the actual identity the organization looks to project / wants to convey.
Just how it is easy to bend / mold a plant directing its growth when it is a freshly grown sapling as opposed to a fully-grown mature tree, dissonance if any, ought to be identified and nipped in the bud much early on. Also, undertaking it as an exercise when the organization and that freshly proposed / change in initiative is pretty nascent ought to be the default route to take does indeed go without saying.
Debating about whether dissonance is good or bad is again down to perspective. If a Cofounder or a product person in an organization looks at it as off-putting given how most of the market and the customer segments don’t seem to get a hang of that vision that could be bad, yes, and there’s no doubt about it. But, given how one is able to get to that level of understanding as quick as possible is what ought to matter helping internal teams shift the focus as swiftly as they can to doing all that is needed to help the markets align and be in harmony with that change in the overall vision whilst directing those market-fronted teams to prepare all the assets afresh to help disseminate information as required to help understand why that’s important given the current market conditions and the value the users would be able to derive with this new focus-shift.
Here is a 5-step process one could follow to identify & nip all that dissonance in the bud.
1) Immersive Research
Regularly talking to the users of a target market seems more common given the way product teams and orgs. operate today. But, deep descriptive research spanning nuances of the market could be a great way to identify any dissonance if any. Early identification would obviously mean lesser dissonance to deal with (represented by the size of the double-headed-vertical-arrow in the scatter plot above) and could also ease out the job of having to deploy just the right quantum of resources / chops to work.
2) Behavioral understanding
Motivations could be plenty, some plain and simple when some may be really complex and deep under the skin types. Popping the right amount of questions over (for ex: surveys) so as to build a holistic understanding of the user’s behaviors and why they seem to want (x), what they care about and don’t in terms of adopting to a certain feature / a product does form a strong connection and could bring down the probability of any dissonance reducing it to a bare minimum if not eliminating it totally altogether.
3) Discovery
There are tons of orgs. out there who are just doing market research and they do charge for the data (in US$ per record) as well. When it is still quintessential, plain research sans a purpose or a goal could be rendered useless on a varying degree. Teams conducting all that in-house research ought to balance their pace and be able to tie / drive it towards those outcomes / goals obliterating even a feeble chance of dissonance barring which even stumbling upon a diamond mine could end up proving a futile waste.
4) Realignment
Given the nature of businesses and how orgs. at times may be forced to shift their focus from (A) to (B) and the probability of (B) being much wider in scope or possibly a totally different pivot, makes total sense to redefine or realign the vision so as to eliminate any sort of dissonance by the inclusion of new initiatives that have been earmarked as a part of the strategic drift. For realignment to be successful one ought to implement a whole lot of changes that are internal to an organization, no doubt. But at times it could mean a minor extension of that vision itself.
5) Awareness
Any new strategic initiatives or an entire change in the strategy itself happens to be a very probable cause for dissonance leading to the users / markets largely disconnecting with the organizational purpose, which no doubt ought to be tackled & tackled sooner by employing proper marketing and fronting the user groups with all the relevant information pertaining to the strategic changes, reasoning the “why” behind those moves & also not to mention extending the proposed value additions to the target market via fresh pitches. It’s a cost no doubt, but that could be a very minor expense in comparison to the aftermath of the dissonance growing over a geometric progression spreading devastation much quicker than if it were to be exponential.
Let’s jump back to the example of Amazon.
Did you know?
“In 1997, Amazon was looking to sell books as it was pretty evident how the internet was beginning to take off back then and a massive insatiable need to make all those 3 million+ titles available online was felt”
An excerpt from an interview of Jeff Bezos during that very period:
But, like Jeff puts it around the pre-2000s addressing a crowd (6 years post inception) “we have always wanted to be the best customer-centric company” which essentially is an example the realignment exercise (as compared to just “selling books online”) and now a more generic representation of the vision as they may have surely outgrown that original one fanning their strategy out to pivot on selling an eclectic mix of things online which also encompassed the core of their vision. A “real extension of sorts”, wouldn’t you agree?
So, to think on the lines of “their strategic drift aimed towards core expansion didn’t face any dissonance whatsoever and was accepted with open arms” may be dicey a statement to make, although it now seems quite safe to quote that it didn’t majorly derail any of their existing customer base.
Conclusion
It’d be daft to assume a “state of zero dissonance” given any business vertical that an org. seems to be dealing with, as there is a high probability that it could still be prevalent in some tranches. But if an organization has done enough research and has factored in the VOM (voice of the market) so as to envision the contingencies (if any & however grave or mild) and be prepared with a pretty detailed action plan branching out well to cover those use cases & the edge cases, they may have put themselves on the righteous path to win.