Creating Integrated Practice means aligning decisions, roles, and efforts across an organization to work together effectively on the shared mission of creating value.
In this approach, every role contributes to value creation, with each function bringing specialized knowledge to help advance initiatives from concept to reality. Like building a skyscraper, different experts work together, each adding their specialist expertise to produce a better outcome than any individual could on their own. Rather than being seen as overhead, each discipline is an essential part of a system that works cohesively together to increase the certainty of success. Each discipline adds measurable value to the collective outcome.
In an integrated organization, each role and function helps to increase the reliability of the organization’s efforts and future outcomes.
Every discipline—whether it’s engineering, finance, or management—has a clear purposeful contribution in moving the project forward. If a discipline is overlooked or ignored, the risk of failure increases. By recognizing the value each role brings, the organization can ensure better, more consistent results and a more effective process.
Unfortunately, today many organizations treat these professional roles as mere compliance tasks or obstacles. They often work in isolation, and their contributions aren’t properly recognized or funded. This lack of clarity leads to inefficiency and missed opportunities for value creation. Instead of viewing these roles as necessary parts of a well-oiled machine, we often ignore their potential to improve the overall process.
When each discipline is treated as a vital component whose contribution can be measured, it becomes easier to see how it contributes to the success of the organization’s goals. Understanding the role of each function brings to the collective effort helps to ensure that all parts of the system work together seamlessly, improving the organization’s overall value.
In short, Integrated Practice is about recognizing and valuing the contributions of each role and discipline within an organization. By doing so, organizations can build a more cohesive, effective process that drives long-term success and creates real value.
In the soccer ball method, every patch on the soccer ball represents the perspective through the lens of a different professional discipline – each looking at the same solid object. Each perspective is different. Each is valid.
Each professional discipline acts on, and contributes to universal shared knowledge through their particular lens. They each interact through that lens with the same tangible universe.
Any change, decision, action or analysis contributed by one discipline immediately updates the views available to all others. Alignment of independent actions is influenced where their thinking and their decisions are made on the basis of shared information.
Effectively integrating the practices and processes of these disciplines in the real world demonstrates the advanced sense-making governance framework we see in the most effective, most highly productive organizations.
Themes Explored In This Keynote Address
Danny’s futurist foresight is a powerful meeting of the latest global research, the leading edge of enhanced professional disciplines, thousands of real-world observations of corporate behaviours, and his unique way of unpacking complex issues through systems thinking, economics, social philosophy, pragmatism, positivity… and humor.