Thinking Ahead Insights: Risking the Present for a Powerful Future

Managing the present from the future Assemble a critical mass of key stakeholders. Many more than just the top 8 to 10 leaders. Should include key technologists and leading process engineers. Group should be sufficiently diverse to ensure conflict, which will get issues on the table so they can be resolved. Have to decide how it's going to happen. Do an organizational audit to generate a complete picture of how the organization really works. Understand the competitive situation. Reveal barriers to moving from "as is" to the future. Core values. Key systems. Strategic assumptions. Core competencies, etc. Create urgency. A threat that everyone perceives, but no one is willing to talk about, is most debilitating to an organization Book of Five Rings � Japanese guide for samurai warriors. Written four centuries ago, directs the samurai to visualize his own death in the most graphic detail before going into battle. Idea being, once you have experienced death, there is not a lot left to fear: one can then fight with abandon. This helps explain the value of discussion about not changing and the dire consequences to a company in a difficult business situation. Harnessing contention. Conflict jump-starts the creative process. Most companies suppress contention. Control kills invention, learning and commitment. Emotions often accompany creative tension, and they are often unpleasant. Intel plays rugby; your ability at Intel to take direct, hard-hitting disagreement is a sign of fitness. Many excellent companies build conflict into their designs. Induce organizational breakdowns that foster out-of-the-box thinking and solutions. Breakdowns should happen by design, not accident. In trying to manage back from the future, concrete tasks will have to be undertaken; continuing on the current path will not get you there. Often you don't know how to make these tasks occur. This will generate breakdowns, which can generate out-of-the-box thinking and solutions, if the situation is managed/lead correctly. Continuous open dialogue is key to working through breakdowns. Setting impossible deadlines is another way to encourage breakdowns and out-of-the-box thinking   Insights from: "The Reinvention Roller Coaster: Risking the Present for a Powerful Future." By Tracy Goss, Richard Pascale and Anthony Athos.

Organizational Change: Key elements of success.

1. Successful organizations believe the organization's culture must be changed.
2. Organization change requires vision, tenacity and a long-term horizon.
3. Organization change requires commitment from top management.
4. Organization change requires extensive communication with all stakeholders. Employees must be empowered and educated so they can exploit their new power.
5. It is necessary to systematically measure progress and results.

Key elements of success.

1. Leadership
2. Culture change
3. Work force involvement
4. Communication and measurement
5. Education
6. Supportive Human Resource systems
7. A shared sense of urgency for change

Triggers for change.

1. Organizations on the brink of disaster that had engaged in change efforts consistently rated triggers higher than organizations not currently in dire circumstances.
2. Highest ranking triggers
1. Changing regulatory or legal environment
2. Competition
3. Customer dissatisfaction
4. Declining or increasing profits
3. Second ranked triggers
1. Declining or increasing market share
2. Declining or increasing revenue
3. Rising costs
4. Technology change
4. Third ranked triggers
1. Employee morale
2. Merger or acquisition
3. Public Image
4. Quality

Is there a thing such as the 'right' Organizational Culture?

"Let me begin bluntly there is no such thing as the "right" culture and culture can not be fostered or installed."

Edgar Schein 

1. Success of the company creates organizational culture. If the founders had a wrong set of assumptions about how things are, they would have failed. The right set of assumptions is relative to the business environment. The longer the company is successful, the more stable the culture becomes.
2. Pronouncements that we must change our culture either will be denied or cause levels of anxiety that trigger intense resistance to change. Therefore, you will fail if you take culture head on.
3. If the present culture is dysfunctional, or out of line with current environmental realities, then take these steps:
1. Start with what the business problem is. The issue is not about culture, but about the mission of the organization and whether it is being fulfilled.
2. Figure out what needs to be done strategically and tactically to solve the business problem. What does the organization need to do concretely to solve its survival or growth problems?
3. When there is clear consensus on what needs to be done, examine the existing culture to find out how present tacit assumptions would aid or hinder that. Some parts of the culture may be fine, or certain subcultures within the organization maybe fine.
4. Focus on those cultural elements that will help you get to where you need to go. It is easier to build up the strengths of a culture than to change dysfunctional elements. The diversity of a culture and its subcultures almost always have strengths to leverage.
5. Identify the culture carriers who see the new direction and feel comfortable moving in that direction. This helps create role models, these people are often found in subcultures or in marginal roles in the organization.
6. Build change teams around the new culture carriers. Different parts of the organization, because of environmental needs, may have to go in a different directions to produce the desired changes in thinking and acting.
7. Top management must adjust the reward, incentive and control systems to be aligned with the new strategy.
8. Ultimately the structures and routine processes of the organization must also be brought into alignment with the desired new directions.
4. All of this takes a great deal of time and energy across many layers of management and many task forces and change teams. It is fueled by the need for a solution to a clear business problem. Culture change occurs as a by-product of fixing fundamental problems.
5. If the culture prevents correcting the business strategy, that culture will be broken by destroying the group that carries the culture. That means firing a lot of people, or the organization will die.
6. Culture is not a suit of clothes to be changed at will. The residue of past success, it is the most stable element in an organization.
 

 

Insights from Organizational Culture. By Edgar Schein

Culture is reflexive: In changing culture, there are three critical areas to address

1. Culture is reflexive: Beliefs shape behavior, but behavior also shapes beliefs. Values affect beliefs and behavior, but beliefs and behavior also affect values. Often espoused beliefs and values are not consistent with the beliefs and values that can be inferred from observed behavior. This lack of alignment can cause great dysfunction.
2. Most organizations are a mixture of many cultures: one in R&D, another in marketing / Sales, etc.
3. External forces, historical forces and internal forces all shape behavior. Managers can most affect internal forces giving them a lever to change culture.
4. In changing culture, there are three critical areas to address.
1. Content of the change (vision of the new culture).
1. Do a culture audit: What is the culture like, what needs to be changed?
2. Leadership is essential for successful culture change.
3. Key champions at all levels are required.
2. Leverage points for change (what and how to change).
1. Full-blown culture change requires change in all the key elements of organizational context: structure, business processes, measurement, appraisal and rewards. If, in fact, you do all these things, Nadler argues that culture change will be the ultimate outcome.
2. Values must be articulated in terms of expected behavior. Establishing one value as more important than others is important to give people a set of priorities.
1. Good technique used at AT&T, where Senior Executives interviewed people lower in the organization about the new values and how they saw them being implemented. This is a good check on implementation, and helps senior executives understand the issues involved in the effective transformation of a culture.
2. A key test of culture change is who is getting promoted, the good guys or the bad guys
3. What happens to someone delivering good results but not living the new values? This is a critical dilemma for leadership. Support and coaching for change must be offered; if a person refuses or does not change, then they must be removed. GE under Jack Welch was very strongly committed to having executives both get results and live the values. If they did not live the values, and did not improve, they were out.
3. Tactical choices (when and where to change).
1. Culture and values are the very foundation upon which the overall change agenda rests.
2. Interventions into culture should be sequenced separately from the hardware changes. One effective sequence is to have culture initiatives occur sometime after the announcements of structural and work-process changes.
3. Use bottom-up interventions also, e.g., education and training, meetings, forums, etc.
4. Migrate change laterally from one organization to another. Use beta sites and skunk works to try out changes and work out the kinks. Transfer that learning to the next site. Customer visits can be a very powerful tool in this change. Customer needs get the attention of almost any level in the organization.

Insight from: Delta Consulting's (David Nadler) perspective