Blue ocean strategies couldn’t beat COVID-19.
For many years, Cirque du Soleil has been a model of how to rethink a business and an inspiration for the authors of the best seller “Blue Ocean Strategy.” Founded…
WHAT IS THE HOUSE MODEL?
The House Model is a management and planning tool that provides users with a visual way of thinking about an organization by highlighting the organizational relevance of specific areas, their interconnectedness, and the crucial points where attention should be directed.
The House Model describes the key components and activities of an organization in a very straightforward and easy-to-understand manner through the visual depiction and narrative description of a house.
The House Model is a framework that can be used to trigger and facilitate conversations amongst leaders and teammates because it helps users visualize, analyze and discuss topics related to an organization.
The main purpose of the House Model is to provide users with a simple, friendly, easy-to-use tool for organizational analyses.
In more detail, the House Model aims to help users:
- Recognize crucial components of a high-performing organization and how those components relate to and interact with each other;
- Integrate key components of, and coordinate the flow of decisions within, the organization in order to optimize effort and maximize performance;
- Comprehend the relevance and importance of each component in the organization’s lifecycle in order to enhance the decision-making process;
- Appreciate the intangible components of an organization that are typically difficult to understand.
Analogy
The House Model analogy allows readers to picture their organization as a house, not in a literal manner in terms of its facilities or offices, but figuratively in terms of the key processes, activities, decisions, attitudes, communications and definitions that position the organization for success and allow it to thrive. If applied to an online enterprise, for example, the analogy helps users visualize the different parts of an otherwise intangible organization.
The framework breaks an organization down into five strategic areas – Foundation, Rooms, Garage, Roof and Chimney.
Foundation
In a residential house, the foundation provides the structural basis on which to build, develop, sustain and expand the house. In an organization, the House Model defines the Foundation as the key people, activities, procedures, values and definitions essential to bolstering organizational growth. Resultantly, if an organization has problems in its Foundation, it is difficult for it to perform well.
Rooms
The rooms of a residential house consist of the spaces where family members interact, perform activities and complete household chores. In the organizational context, the Rooms represent the key areas of the establishment that both leaders and team members should inhabit. The analogy highlights all kinds of essential operations, relationships and strategic interactions through which leaders and team members engage.
Garage
The garage in a residence, besides functioning as the place where we keep cars and store old things of no use to anyone anymore, also functions as the workshop. The most significant aspect of the Garage in the organizational context is as the place where many companies start from scratch. For a company that has been in the market for some years, meanwhile, it can stand for two things – a reminder to keep the founder’s original spirit and flame of passion alive, and the drive to experiment, collaborate, reflect and act in order to constantly improve and innovate processes and products.
Roof
The roof protects a residential house from inclement conditions, thereby preventing it from damage, helping it last longer and allowing people to inhabit it. Similarly, the organizational Roof allows the company to endure and to remain competitive in the market. On the one hand, the Roof area promotes critical aspects of sustainability that buoy the company’s organizational health so that it can remain operational in the market. On the other hand, the Roof also contains the Attic, where the strategic goals that the company is committed to achieving become visible.
Chimney
The organizational Chimney is based on the chimney of a residential house, from which the aroma of what is being cooked in the kitchen emanates to the outside world. This part of the analogy brings the attraction and subsequent engagement between the company’s brand and its customers into focus. In the same way that passersby may be enticed by the aroma of baking coming out of a chimney, leaders must strive to entice potential customers in a highly competitive market using the value being cooked up by their organization. Thus, the organizational Chimney focuses on customer engagement
WHAT IS THE POWER OF THIS FRAMEWORK?
The power of The House Model rests on three different pillars.
First, the framework is designed in the form of an analogy. The power of an analogy lies in the fact that it allows an audience to easily understand complex or abstract situations. The framework disaggregates an organization in basic areas of activities and key components by building an analogical bridge between an organization and a house.
Second, the framework relates the main aspects of an organization regardless of the size, type of industry, or purpose of the organization. It helps users to understand how different areas and activities of a company and intangible business concepts coalesce and fit into the organizational puzzle.
Third, the model is underpinned on visual thinking. Among many advantages, this method allows thinkers to deal with complexity, focus their attention, reduce overwhelm, convey ideas, take different perspectives, and most importantly, make meaning. Visual thinking is a tool that uses drawings, icons, lines, colors, and shapes to relate, connect, and translate abstract ideas into concrete and visible images and diagrams.
Fourth, the House Model design uses chunking. Chunking can be understood as a technique that connects separate pieces of information together to work as a whole. This process helps the brain make connections and relationships. If information is organized in chunks, the working memory significantly increases its capacity to hold more information. For example, consider the word tree. We all know that a tree has roots, a trunk, bark, branches, twigs, leaves and flowers, and that it also provides shelter for birds and other animals. All of this information is therefore chunked together with the word tree. By chunking, our memory can store smaller pieces of information into bigger and more familiar units. Chunking is a method used by the human brain to reduce load, facilitate storage and retrieval, and make connections between new experiences and what is already known.
TO WHOM THE HOUSE MODEL SPEAKS:
The House Model is a simple and straightforward framework that helps users of any walk of life learn about or bolster their understanding of a slate of factors key to organizational performance or development. The model also helps consultants, advisors or practitioners facilitate their analysis and/or assessment of the elements contributing to short- and long-term organizational effectiveness and success.
Therefore, the House Model Speaks to:
- people who are in charge of leading an organization.
- students who want to learn how organizations work.
- professors who want to find easier methods to teach organizational concepts.
- everyone who considers developing their own organization.
- every person who is interested in how an effective organization works.
WHAT IS THE CONTRIBUTION THE HOUSE MODEL BRINGS?
The House Model provides you a visual way of thinking about an organization. It helps you make sense of the key components you should think about. It highlights the organizational relevance of specific areas, the interconnectedness among them, and the crucial points you should pay attention to in every section of the house.
The House Model is a management and planning tool, which can be used to trigger and facilitate conversations among people when it comes to organization-related issues. It can help users analyze, assess, understand, discuss, design, think, and plan on topics and areas related to an organization. The House Model can be applied in either business, governmental, or educational contexts.
