Corporate ADHD
Awareness of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD, previously just ADD) and its impact on individuals within our population has grown dramatically, but comparatively little has been said on organizational manifestations of ADHD.
First, what is Corporate (or Organizational) ADHD? This is not a manager or employee having ADHD (though that can be a contributing factor), but the entire department, company, nonprofit, or group acting as though the organization itself has ADHD. Leap-frogging from one initiative to another in every direction, rarely finishing anything, hyper fixation to the point of near obsession with the latest “shiny,” and continuous cycling through this behavior all indicate Corporate ADHD.
The costs of Corporate ADHD can skyrocket quickly:
Wasted time on abandoned projects and products
Massive confusion & chaos in the workplace
Poor scoping & cost overflows
Staff burnout & rapid turnover
Inability to adapt to new challenges
Legal challenges arising from poorly implemented or abandoned contracts
And that’s just a few of the obvious ones.
It may seem silly to consider “diagnosing” a business with a mental health disorder, but we’re not in uncharted waters. A business - regardless of for profit or not - is a human system. There’s an entire branch of psychology dedicated to Systems Theory we won’t go into here, but the important part for today is that any group of people forms a system. How those people interact and what the goal(s) for interacting is(are) shape the system.
Corporate ADHD often happens when the system can’t handle change or stress. Leaders can’t or won’t manage priorities, hurdles become insurmountable walls, and the organization devolves into constantly chasing the next new thing.
Note that “constantly” above. We’re looking at persistent patterns, not one-off instances. All organizations go through periods of flux, that’s part of life. Corporate ADHD is an ongoing, persistent pattern of behavior.
So what do we do about it once we identify it is Corporate ADHD? We can’t (legally) dose everyone in the office with ADHD medication, but that probably wouldn’t be effective anyway. It’s not necessarily the people who are ill, but the system, so we need to change the system.
I’ll caveat that you may need external experts to help identify problematic patterns and build plans for changing to new patterns, but there are some steps your organization can take internally before getting to that point. Maybe you can create enough change to be comfortable (not necessarily thrilled) with the organization’s operations.
Engage leadership actively. Think of leaders as the “parent” of the organizational family. If we are going to change the way the family functions, we need the parents to play an active role.
Assess and analyze past cycles. What spurred the cycle to start, what carried it through, and what eventually ended it? This can be painful as past cycles may be considered “failures” everyone wants to forget, or staff may have already left, but understanding the cycle is critical to understanding how to break it.
Identify and document common themes observed in cycles. Are the wrong people involved in initial planning? Is there planning at all? What obstacles are normally encountered? How engaged is leadership as a whole, not just one person?
Plan for solutions to obstacles in advance. If big ideas with poor planning are a big risk factor for your organization, develop a project value and costs assessment process internally. If confusion during production grinds the gears to a halt, bring in additional production specialists - internal or external - who can guide the project through the blocks. Target your solutions to the actual, observed problems.
Implement the plan as a “pilot” project. Your aim is not to immediately fix the problem - you almost certainly won’t - but to learn how and if the system can be changed from within. Know that you will likely run into challenges, things will not go as you had originally hoped, and this is kind of a good thing. You have the opportunity to model sticking through a project despite difficulties, which can then be held up to your organization as proof that change is possible with enough motivation.
Finally, learn from your attempt and iterate on it. You only fail when you give up and refuse to learn anything of value from your efforts.
As frustrating as it may seem at first, systems are easier to change than we think. This is because each member of a system has an impact on it, no matter how small it might feel. You are a part of the system, a part of the culture, and what you do will change at least your part of it.
