The words come straight out of the most important document that has come out of Silicon Valley in recent years; The story of Netflix and its path, to set in a culture which holds an intent of establishing an environment of entrepreneurship.

The organizational hypotenuse in the context of any organization, is the connector between the Foundation and the aspiration to consistently grow, which needs to be “context” and not “control”.

The times in which organizations will conduct their businesses going ahead, have suddenly become one that has moved from volatility to extremely unknown. It is expected that this nature of the environment is going to remain, for some time to come. Accuracy of projections are being questioned everyday as leadership struggles gallop in intensity by the day.

What is an organization challenged with today? And the answer is clear: “To find The Hypotenuse”.

High performing sales organizations in the 1980’s reached there by making their sales force aware, that the critical element of success is the ability to read the context and the finer underplays that take place in the customers’ environment. This critical thought was debunked and disregarded later by many sales organizations under the garb of “Product leadership” and “Competitive pricing strategies”.  The entire concept of what the “Context of the Customer” was, got submerged in the battle for market share and growth.

The same can be applied to organizational culture. People were not onboarded because they display a potential to thrive in the existent culture, but in most cases, force fitted into an environment, in which they found it difficult to thrive.

Processes were invented and deployed not because they fitted the context, but with a view to “keep oneself relevant in the role”.

The magic of context, if understood and institutionalized, is that it ensures that people see the world where they exist and more importantly, are able to make decisions based upon what the context demands. This gradually takes away the need to be in “control” and assists in inventing and institutionalizing processes that takes away the sense of “claustrophobia” in the organization culture.

The CEOs in the years ahead, will have to face a hard choice as to whether they want to operate through a lens of myopic orientation which might be susceptible to being disrupted, or understand the criticality of ensuring that everybody operates from the same canvas.