ROOMS
In a traditional house, the rooms represent the physical spaces where family members reside, interact and engage in various activities such as cooking, eating, playing, studying, celebrating, sleeping, planning, working and, of course, making important decisions. In our House Model analogy, the Rooms area highlights the organizational components related to the essential operations and strategic interactions through which leaders and team members engage; these are key activities that must be performed in order to achieve the degree of organizational performance required to remain competitive in the market.
It is crucial to stress that regardless of whether the company is a brick and mortar or 100% virtual, the Rooms area of an organization refers to the key areas inhabited by leaders and team members.
The House Model depicts three main sections of organizational Rooms – The Eye, the Study and the Family Room.
EYE
In the House Model analogy, The Eye of an organization is akin to the window of a house – the organizational window through which it becomes possible to peer at what is happening outside the company. In the same way that people use a house window to check how sunny, windy or stormy the weather is, The Eye represents the key activities that allow an organization to gather information and assess what is happening in the company’s surrounding environment. It refers to those activities that allow the organization to take stock of the business weather.
We refer to business weather as the totality of factors and forces present in the external context – those that interact with and influence a company’s performance in one way or another.
Just like the community of a residential house, the external environment of an organization includes competitors, clients, prospective clients, communities, institutions, other industries, providers, government entities and key partners. On top of that, forces such as technology, economics, politics, trends, nature and market conditions create a complex system capable of influencing the company in different ways.
Understanding what is happening outside the organization is of paramount importance in informing the strategy of a business.
STUDY
Another section of the Rooms area of the House Model, dubbed the Study, is the perfect space for strategic planning. In most residential houses, the study is an area mainly reserved for reading and studying. In the House Model, this section fulfills the crucial role of opening a space for critical thinking and strategic planning. Once provided with key information, leaders are encouraged to invest time in performing a thorough analysis in order to make strategic decisions.
The Study section of the House Model encourages users to focus their attention on four organizational components related to strategic planning – strategic foresight, competitive strategy, questioning and decision making. In fact, these four strategic components all stem from an additional key, common component – strategic thinking.
The competitive strategy and decision-making processes are fueled by strategic foresight on the one side, and tested by the process of questioning on the other side.
FAMILY ROOM
The Family Room is another section of the Rooms area of the House Model. The Family Room houses the activities that help the organization put its strategy into practice. It mainly refers to the activities and processes that are directly linked to the products and services the company produces, as well as all customer-oriented actions.
In real life, the family room is a friendly family space for everyday activities. It is a multifunctional room, comfortable and accessible, where people from different parts of the house come together. Both family members and guests gather there for family and social activities.
In a similar manner, the Family Room of your organizational house is the place where different areas of your company come together through synergy and collaboration in the pursuit of a common goal. It represents the efforts of team members to create and deliver a unique value proposition to clients – the very same value proposition that you have already planned for.
We highlight five main, general operations in the Family Room section – suppliers, production, distribution, external communication and sales.