Rightshifting simply means ‘improving the effectiveness of knowledge-work organisations’. The Rightshifting Chart quickly makes clear the origin of the term.

Some market-leading organisations are more effective than their peers by a factor of four or five. The majority of people spend the majority of their working lives in these ‘average’ organisations . So many folk never get to experience how life and work is fundamentally different in highly-effective organisations. They are unable to recognise ‘high performance’. Furthermore, many do not believe it is ever even possible for organisations to achieve performance levels higher than those they are used to.

This first session of two illustrates the fundamental differences in the nature of life and work between ‘average’ and ‘high performance’ organisations. Unsurprisingly, most organisations face huge challenges in making and sustaining non-trivial improvements to their effectiveness.

The Marshall Model of Organisational Evolution identifies the fundamental root condition underlying these challenges. This root condition explains:
· Why most Agile (and Lean) adoptions fail.
· The special behaviours of highly-effective technology organisations.
· Why all incremental improvement hits a brick wall, sooner or later.
· Why some incremental improvements work for some companies, at some times, and not others.

The companion session (see below) takes these ideas and explains practical measures for Rightshifting aspiring knowledge-work organisations.