From the capability of individuals to the capability of the organisation

The new is often handled by improvisation. With capable people this works surprisingly well, and that is exactly the trap.

The trouser-pocket model

If there is no shared way of dealing with the new, everyone has only one option: to handle it from their own capability. From experience, from gut feeling, with skill. One could call it the trouser-pocket model. At the decisive moment, everyone pulls their solution out of their own trouser pocket, off the cuff.

This is expressly nothing bad. With capable, experienced people it often works excellently, and such people are a treasure for any organisation. But this is exactly where the trap lies. Because it works, nobody notices that every time things are improvised from scratch. Nothing of what succeeds in one person's head becomes a path that someone else can take too.

Three costs that remain invisible for a long time

Not repeatable: what comes from gut feeling cannot be passed on.
Not comparable: everyone works their magic differently.
Not able to learn: what was never recorded cannot improve.

As long as a few experienced people carry everything, it goes well. As the organisation grows, the strength of the individual unnoticeably becomes a vulnerability of the whole.

What a method is really for

The answer is not to make people uniform. The diversity of people is a strength. The answer is to bring the approach into an orderly flow, so that the new reliably becomes the proven. That is exactly what a method is for. Not as a rigid corset and not as a thick rulebook to be learned by heart, but as a manageable number of clear principles of action that everyone orients themselves by. These principles of action can also be called cornerstones; the meaning is the same: a few load-bearing guard rails instead of a hundred detailed rules.

It is not about the one and only correct method. An organisation can quite well develop its own. What matters is not which method it is, but that there is an orderly, shared path at all. For that is where the real value of a good method lies:

A good method also helps a less experienced person achieve strong impact, if they orient themselves by the shared principles of action.

That is the core. It is about effectiveness, and it is about everyone being able to be effective, including those who do not yet see the whole picture. A good structure does not put the strong on a pedestal; it lifts the whole team to a reliable level. The capability of individual people becomes the capability of the organisation.

Where this approach also reaches its limits

In all honesty, the limits of this approach must be named too. A good method and capable people are worth a lot, but they do not solve everything. Three weaknesses should be seen openly.

Succession and skills development: if experience is not deliberately passed on, the organisation's capability ages, and the best principles of action are of little use if nobody moves up who fills them with life.
Knowledge that is not shared: there are people who accumulate knowledge and do not share it, whether out of insecurity or to remain indispensable. That is not a method problem but a culture problem, and where this attitude prevails, even the best development of young talent does not take hold.
Dependence on individuals: without insinuating anything about anyone, a sober view includes the fact that an organisation is vulnerable as long as decisive capability depends on a few heads.

These weaknesses point to something that goes beyond structure and principles. Structure provides security and orientation, but it must not stifle movement; that is why principles of action are needed as well, enabling independent, good decisions. And for people to decide voluntarily and in the interest of the whole, more than rules is needed: it takes a sound culture. In the end, culture is stronger than structure and strategy combined; it is the soul behind everything.

A clear boundary matters here, which Chapter 5 sets out: the Office strengthens how the new is handled, but it does not create an organisation's culture. It presupposes a fundamentally healthy culture.