To break out of the old or current status quo does not necessarily require creative or different thoughts but rather discovering the existing obstacles preventing the new status quo using the already existing critical higher order thinking skills.

In speaking with Jim Godshall, president of the Total Quality Institute Inc., he offered this idea along with several others during a recent telephone interview.

As a former Johnson and Johnson executive, Jim experienced silo solutions or systems thinking at J%26J along with his own entrepreneurial experiences since starting and leading the Total Quality Institute in 1992. This type of thinking is prevalent in organizations that have multiple departments (silos) as well as within even smaller organizations where the attitude is "this is how we (I) have always done it."

Systems thinking can be quickly entrenched and is disruptive in the sense that organizations need to be able to integrate systems thinking into an accumulative thinking style which operates both interdependently and independently within the organization. When systems (vertical) and accumulative (horizontal) thinking work together, the organization can take the best of what is does and move forward.

Jim made a great observation about how some organizations will look at other similar or even dissimilar firms and take one best feature from several of these firms to improve their competitive advantage or internal performance key indicators. Then what happens is the leadership attempts to assemble these features (best practices or skill sets) together with the end result of even worse performance.

He compared these organizational and leadership behaviors to taking the best components from different manufactured vehicles such as BMW or Ford and then putting them together with the goal to have the best of the best car. Yet logic along with common sense tells us this will not work because of the interdependency of the vehicle parts to each other. However, many organizations along with management consulting or executive coaching firms still embrace this "pick, choose and assemble" approach for organizational success.

This is possibly why Jim, along with several others, decided to build an organizational assessment model (D.I.AL.O.G.*) based upon the Baldrige criteria and then to use that data to help not only identify the obstacles, but to close the gaps between the different functionalities of the organization specific to:

* Strategy

* Structure

* Processes

* Rewards

* People

These five areas all need to work in alignment for organizational success as detailed in Jay Galbraith's "5 Star Model."

And, as Jim noted ,these five key functionalities are inter-related and tend to display Newton's Law of Motion: "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."

This is why most silo solutions do not work because fixing one silo potentially creates a problem in another one.

One final observation Jim made was the majority of organizations he has worked with already have the solutions for most of their challenges. This is consistent with executive coaching philosophy that the client has the answers, but may need some guidance through simple questioning to discover the answer that was always there, just hidden by the obstacles.

In today's turbulent world, organizational success (which for me is creating a culture of high performance so that all functionalities are working together) is possible. To achieve this goal does require an investment of internal resources and possibly some external ones. When leadership understands and makes the necessary investments to as Captain Picard said "Make it so," then all stakeholders and shareholders will benefit from these efforts.