The Power of Structure in Complexity

Najim Dost, a Harvard-trained economist with nearly 20 years of experience in strategic planning, performance management and program evaluation across Asia and North America, will deliver one of the keynote sessions of the GPAU Performance Excellence Digital Forum.

As Associate Director, Strategic Planning & Performance at Canadian Forces Morale and Welfare Services (CFMWS), his current work focuses on enterprise strategic planning, performance measurement and organizational maturity.

The environment in which his work takes place is anything but simple.

CFMWS serves more than 100,000 Canadian Armed Forces members and their families across more than 30 business lines, making it one of Canada’s most operationally diverse organizations. Its services span physical and mental wellbeing, financial support, recreation, social connection and other areas contributing to the quality of life, resilience and readiness of the military community. 

The mission is clear. Delivering it requires managing significant complexity.

Wellbeing itself is multidimensional. Different individuals and families require different forms of support, delivered through different services and at different moments in their lives. CFMWS therefore has to coordinate a broad portfolio of activities while ensuring that they continue to contribute to the same wider purpose.

Its social-enterprise model adds another dimension. Financial and operational sustainability remain essential, but they are not the final objective. They enable the organization to deliver on its mission.

This creates an important performance management question: how can an organization maintain enterprise-wide alignment without removing the flexibility required by very different business units and services?

Finding the right level of structure

For an organization of this scale and diversity, too little standardization can lead to fragmented processes, inconsistent information and limited visibility across the enterprise. Too much can restrict the ability of individual business areas to respond to their specific operational realities.

The challenge is therefore identifying what needs to be consistent across the organization, and where variation creates value.

The GPAU maturity assessment conducted with CFMWS identified a number of foundations already supporting this balance. Strategic planning operates across clearly defined time horizons, performance measures are connected to strategic objectives, and regular business reviews provide structured oversight of performance and improvement initiatives. The assessment also highlighted a formalized employee performance management system and a strong organizational focus on employee wellbeing, learning and development.

Together, these practices create greater clarity around priorities, performance and accountability while supporting continuous improvement across different areas of the organization.

Managing maturity in complex organizations

At the Performance Excellence Digital Forum, Najim Dost will share insights from the CFMWS experience and explore some of the questions at the center of managing performance in complex organizations.

His keynote will address:

• the challenges and solutions associated with enterprise performance management
• the balance between standardization and customization across diverse business units and 
• the role of the Integrated Performance Maturity Model in strengthening strategy and performance management systems. 

The CFMWS case offers a useful perspective on a challenge faced by many large organizations: as complexity grows, alignment starts to depend on having systems mature enough to manage complexity without eliminating the differences that make the organization work.

Join Najim Dost on 9 December 2026 from 17:05 to 17:25, for Managing Maturity in Complex Organizations: Canadian Forces Morale and Welfare Services, as part of the GPAU Performance Excellence Digital Forum.