Many years ago I worked as a facilitator on a project team tasked with the redesign of a manufacturing process. I tell this story often because it illustrates what happens when we get distracted from seeing the big picture.

Our job was the integration of a 60-year-old manufacturing process whose 18 steps were essentially separate enterprises in the process. Each step operated in isolation from the others.

Our project created a plan to eliminate unusable inventory, cross train the workers, and reduce manufacturing time from six weeks to six days. It was a major change process. Yet, when done, it was not the whole story. The owners and executives could not see the other changes that needed to take place in coordination with the changed manufacturing process.

Their perspective was fragmented. They could see all the parts, but not how they fit together into a whole. 

In other words, each part of their company influenced every other part.

Once the manufacturing process was fixed, they should have addressed the larger need of increasing orders. But they didn’t. It was just another facet of the business that they kept doing as they had always done.

As a result, 18 months after a successful launch of the new, integrated manufacturing process, the company closed. They didn’t have enough sales to fulfill the potential of the new manufacturing process.

It is my experience personally and through my consulting work that this missing link is being able to state, “This is the impact that we seek to create.”

Every organizational system is dominated by two things: numbers and process. Especially in complex organizations, it is easy to get lost in the trees, and not see the whole forest.

Why is it that it is so difficult to see how all the parts of an organization function as a whole? This is the way we have been taught to see things. We learn to break whole things into parts and processes. Then we focus on one or more to the exclusion of others.

For most of us, we spend our days with the parts of our organizations. If we have tried to join them together into a created whole, we may find that there are parts of our businesses that don’t fit well together.

We have a sense that maybe we don’t need it any longer. But we can’t see the whole, so we hold on to it.

In the story above, the marketing and sales part of the business was just as it had always been. Oriented around the sale of products. We all know that it cost less to keep a client than to find new ones. But what happens when your entire industry changes, and you don’t see it?

For this company, their competitors were not other manufacturers, but companies that managed inventories for their clients. Technology had changed their business, but they had not changed their perspective on who they were.

They still focused on the one facet of their business, the manufacturing process, that was the easiest to see. They could not see that the industry was being transformed by information technology. They could not see the whole picture.

For this company, they never asked the question, “What is the impact that we want to have on our clients?”

Instead, they were asking, how do we keep the clients we have. They could not see that changing the manufacturing process served an internal operational need, but it did not go far enough in serving the needs of clients.

An impact mindset is an outward-focused perspective related to the people and organizations that are your target audience. What is it that you want to change in the experience with your company?

Maybe you already have an idea about this. Many of us do. We have an intuitive sensitivity to the situation. We see new products and services that can help. Yet, we may lack the same intuitive sense about what happens within our organizations

An impact mindset is not just for marketing and sales. It is a perspective that we need to have throughout every part of our organizations. We need to invest the time to develop this perspective by being committed to seeing the whole of our businesses.

An investment in creating an impact mindset is a process, a sequence of steps that lead from awareness to change.

Begin with the simple question: What is the desired impact of our business on our clients?

This is more than a statement of the distinguishing features and benefits of your product. This is a change that makes a difference that matters to your client.

If this isn’t clear, then sit down with your best client, the one who is a big fan of your products and company. Ask him, “What is the impact we are having with you?”

In that conversation, you will learn a few things important for the future of your company. You will see either how you are different from your competitors and why, or, how you are not.

Whatever the insight is, you are learning how to change your business to create an impact for your client that matters.

Once you understand the impact that your client wants you to have, then turn around and look at how your company is structured. Is it organized to create the impact that your client desires?

The challenge at this point is how to communicate your new impact mindset to the people who work for the company.

Ask this question. “How do we impact our people so that the result is the impact that our client desires?”

There is a circle of impact here. To impact your clients, you have to impact your employees. To impact your employees, they need to see and appreciate the impact that they can have on your clients.

To see these connections is to begin to understand how all the parts of your company fit together. It is not just about processes and numbers. It is what those mean in terms of creating change that makes a difference that matters.

Investing in an impact mindset begins with your own change in perspective. When every part of the system can have a shared focus for impact, then a whole perspective begins to show itself. With that insight, you can anticipate how to change to better serve your clients and people.