Transformation and system thinking
More often than not, executives are quite good at managing their operation, not so at transforming it. Their intricate understanding of their business helps them reaching excellent decisions to keep their operation effective. Yet, the progressive shifts of market conditions become less and less well addressed. As a fault line starts to appear between the business aspirations and its delivery, no-one has a real understanding of where it all went wrong.
The executive team would then call for a diagnostic of where the problems are rooted. Irrespective of their level of comfort with ambiguity, the management should require a case for change underpinned with deep analytics. This will help to build a baseline of the current performance and bring fuel to the discussion when communicating with parts of the organisation more wedded to a status-quo. From this diagnostic, the executive team needs to define the scope for the change to come. Without this mandate, no change can be either defined, scaled up or embedded in the organisation.
Staff in the organisation are more likely to be convinced of the need to do something differently if they can see how it will impact their activities and what kind of improvement these changes will bring. A very efficient way to craft that kind of evidence is to develop small pilots to come up with “invented here” solutions that can then be scaled up across the whole organisation. It also helps creating change agents from the rank and file, making the subsequent adoption of changes easier for everyone. Finally, this approach avoids the risks of a Big Bang approach where a myriad of small adjustments can progressively take the sting out of the transformation.
As things are rolled out, the communication material needs to play two different roles. Firstly, it has to emphasise the benefits brought by the transformation. The typical audience to resonate with this content are the staff members who have a clear and positive trade-off in moving to the new ways of working. At the same time, this material has to mitigate the fears of staff members believing that these changes are going against their interest. This second audience is the most likely to derail the change at a mid- to long-term horizon, so the content of the material addressed to them is key to the success of the implementation.
Most transformations will stop with a ribbon-cutting event celebrating the end of an effort to rejuvenate the ways of working of the organisation, letting things to settle in a steady-state. This would be a lost opportunity to put in place mechanisms to make the operating model more adaptable. Such an approach marks a denial that reasons for an organisation to go through a significant transformation can be self-inflicted. For those organisations deciding to establish an authority to take decisions about the future evolution of their operating model, the threshold for making adjustments will drop, as will the effort required to keep the organisation aligned with its market conditions. With larger or more geographically spread structures, segregating the design and the usage of the operating model will ensure that a consistent way of working is in place across the whole organisation, especially with a robust change control mechanism in place.
More often than not, executives are quite good at managing their operation, not so at transforming it. Their intricate understanding of their business helps them reaching excellent decisions to keep their operation effective. Yet, the progressive shifts of market conditions become less and less well addressed. As a fault line starts to appear between the business aspirations and its delivery, no-one has a real understanding of where it all went wrong.
The executive team would then call for a diagnostic of where the problems are rooted. Irrespective of their level of comfort with ambiguity, the management should require a case for change underpinned with deep analytics. This will help to build a baseline of the current performance and bring fuel to the discussion when communicating with parts of the organisation more wedded to a status-quo. From this diagnostic, the executive team needs to define the scope for the change to come. Without this mandate, no change can be either defined, scaled up or embedded in the organisation.
Staff in the organisation are more likely to be convinced of the need to do something differently if they can see how it will impact their activities and what kind of improvement these changes will bring. A very efficient way to craft that kind of evidence is to develop small pilots to come up with “invented here” solutions that can then be scaled up across the whole organisation. It also helps creating change agents from the rank and file, making the subsequent adoption of changes easier for everyone. Finally, this approach avoids the risks of a Big Bang approach where a myriad of small adjustments can progressively take the sting out of the transformation.
As things are rolled out, the communication material needs to play two different roles. Firstly, it has to emphasise the benefits brought by the transformation. The typical audience to resonate with this content are the staff members who have a clear and positive trade-off in moving to the new ways of working. At the same time, this material has to mitigate the fears of staff members believing that these changes are going against their interest. This second audience is the most likely to derail the change at a mid- to long-term horizon, so the content of the material addressed to them is key to the success of the implementation.
Most transformations will stop with a ribbon-cutting event celebrating the end of an effort to rejuvenate the ways of working of the organisation, letting things to settle in a steady-state. This would be a lost opportunity to put in place mechanisms to make the operating model more adaptable. Such an approach marks a denial that reasons for an organisation to go through a significant transformation can be self-inflicted. For those organisations deciding to establish an authority to take decisions about the future evolution of their operating model, the threshold for making adjustments will drop, as will the effort required to keep the organisation aligned with its market conditions. With larger or more geographically spread structures, segregating the design and the usage of the operating model will ensure that a consistent way of working is in place across the whole organisation, especially with a robust change control mechanism in place.