This works for business organizations, too; how you think about your business and how you define it has a lot to do with how it behaves.

Creating mental models is one of the methods people use to think productively about complex ideas (see section 9, using mental models).

In order to think productively about how businesses behave, we borrow a concept from biology---the living organism---and apply it to business organizations.

Think of your business as a living entity; how it thinks of itself and defines itself will affect how it behaves.

Just as living organisms exist within ecosystems, so does your business.

As you think about what your business must do to understand its ecosystem, to meet its needs, to sustain itself, and to thrive and fend off threats and predators, you’ll discover that you are creating a story about your business idea.

Putting the story of your company together can help you articulate your purpose to key stakeholders.

It will help you to better think about your strategies for the future. It will help both you and your people to clarify assumptions and priorities.

Such a perspective allows you to measure your capabilities against your goals and aspirations. It enables you to connect with allies and partners. It will sensitize you and your people to the threats and opportunities in your environment.

Take a quick look at a your organization as a living entity within its market niche. You can view your company as a thinking entity that must survive, grow, and prosper in a complex and hostile environment.

If this image makes sense to you, then you can begin to assess how good your company’s performance is, in a strategic sense.

You can’t enhance those skills or improve those capabilities unless you can first look at them from a dynamic perspective. Using an organic perspective provides three broad categories that we can use to understand organizational dynamics:

• Sensing

• Thinking

• Acting

Author’s Note: In the sections below – sensing – thinking – acting – when I talk about “you” I’m talking about your company. Understand the points being made from your company’s point of view.

Seeing Through The Fog:

How good is your company’s ability to take in information? What are the significant signs and signals that can alert you to critical developments and opportunities?

Do you notice emerging trends early enough to gain competitive advantage?

Are all of your sense organs working? Think about it. You have a company full of people. You have vendors, suppliers and customers.

Are they gathering relevant information for you? Are they sharing insights?

Is your technology programmed to capture and present critical information to you?

You can’t know everything, but can you see an advantage to knowing more than you do?

On the other hand, some companies are paralyzed by unfiltered information. They have a difficult time sorting out the important nuggets from the irrelevant background noise. By the time they identify what’s important the window of opportunity has closed.

Conducting Smart Business:

Can you turn information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom?

Think of your company as operating within an ecosystem, a niche, filled with opportunities, threats, allies, resources and predators.

How well do you cope? Do you understand how your company’s thinking skills predispose you to conduct yourself in this ecosystem?

Are you savvy or naive? Can you identify patterns in ambiguity?

Do you recognize other companies who share common interests, values and possible synergy? How do you prowl your territory? What are the critical factors in your niche that presage threats, opportunities or simply new conditions?

Can you capitalize on opportunities? Can you gain an edge on rivals? Can you make good decisions on insufficient information? Can you imagine possibilities and then make them real?

Your company must take in a broad array of information about the environment and accurately understand it in relation to your purpose – your strategic intentions. This is critical for filtering out irrelevant background noise!

How do you plan to learn about things that take place beyond your immediate awareness?

Is there a decision-making bottleneck where everything needs to be carried through layers of organizational authority, or can your organization make decisions and take action from a number of decentralized nodes?

Acting For Results:

Your company has an identity, a personality with enduring traits, characteristics and values that deeply affect its ability to succeed in its environment over time.

Your company has the need to act with a focused urgency, an agile style and a unity of purpose, especially in times of great uncertainty where flexibility is required.

Successful companies develop a powerful sense of self-understanding, the ability to reflect on past experiences, the capacity to apply lessons learned on the path to wisdom, the ability to ponder multiple possible futures, and the determination to choose and enable appropriate courses of action to succeed.

Are you satisfied with your ability to execute within your plan?

From this perspective, you can position yourself and your company to deliberately develop your skills and hone your capabilities in ways that increase the likelihood of your success.

In the sections below, we will consider the advantages you can gain from moving into the future with the mindset of being a driving force within your ecosystem.

Where appropriate we will point out examples of family businesses that are doing these things in a practical, common sense way, by transforming themselves into organizations that can do business within the new realities of today’s market requirements.

Author’s Note: The rest of this section is full of tools to identify fitness deficits and recommend action steps for addressing and developing your potential.

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