Organizations have a "smart" and a "healthy" dimension. The smart aspect has to do with strategy, marketing, finance and technology. This is what we are trained to handle in our leadership programs and are expected to report back to the organization. The healthy aspect has to do with more “fuzzier” things like politics, clarity, morale, productivity and job satisfaction - those that really determine if your organization is successful or not.

Patrick Lencioni, a bestselling author, pioneer of the organizational health movement and named by Fortune magazine as "one of the new gurus you should know", has long experience from working with CEOs and their senior executive teams. He is convinced that If we are to find truly healthy organizations, we should look for organizations with minimal politics (where people for example are not driven by their own agenda), minimal confusion, high morale (people are engaged and loyal), high productivity and low turnover.

Lencioni points out, when he lists the different categories and their impact for leaders, that they agree it’s true, but still go back to their spreadsheets to try to make the organization graspable. Why is this so? The answer is that we human beings prefer to look for answers in areas we believe are more understandable. "We look for answers where the light is better". Spreadsheets and Gantt charts are easier to control than relations, different opinions and subjective conversations.

Lencioni continues with saying that if he was forced to prioritize between a smart or a healthy approach, he would, without hesitation, choose health:

“An organization that is healthy will inevitably get smarter over time. That’s because people in a healthy organization, beginning with the leaders, learn from one another, identify critical issues, and recover quickly from mistakes. Without politics and confusion getting in their way, they cycle through problems and rally around solutions much faster than their dysfunctional and political rivals do. Moreover, they create environments in which employees do the same".

To be a well-functioning and profitable organization for reel, we must learn - and dare - to also look for answers in the more "fuzzy" areas. GreenGardens® use for example Whole in order to deal with both the smart and healthy dimension.

The "Smart" and the "Healthy" dimensions are discussed in his book "The Advantage".