The 5 Waves of Transformative Change: Moving Beyond Superficial Thinking

Many organizations, in their quest for improvement, fixate on making their processes and technologies faster or cheaper. I guess the thinking is: "If we streamline our systems, everything else will fall into place." But here’s the hard truth: faster processes and new technologies don’t inherently cause organizations to become better at adapting to disruptive change.

Organizations that focus solely on optimization (while ignoring the evolution of beliefs and behaviors) often miss the bigger picture of transformation. As such, they become stuck in an endless transformation loop, chasing superficial problems with superficial solutions.

Transformative change requires going beyond the superficial thinking so many organizations suffer from. It demands systemic awareness, collective reflection, and personal awareness.

The 5 Waves of Transformative Change:

1. Superficial Process Thinking: "This process will fix our issues." Co-opted processes have been a popular trend for decades. However, retrofitting a new process to fit your old thinking rarely leads to better outcomes.
2. Improved Process Thinking: "Maybe this isn’t the right process." Organizations begin to question the efficacy of their processes, but the focus remains on tweaking rather than rethinking.
3. Systemic Awareness and Reflection: "Maybe it’s not the process." Organizations start to look beyond any one process and realize that the entire organizational system needs to be examined.
4. Collective Awareness and Reflection: "Maybe it’s us." Groups of people recognize that the collective organizational behaviors and attitudes need to shift.
5. Personal Awareness and Reflection: "Maybe it’s me." Leaders and employees alike begin to take responsibility for their own behaviors and how they impact the larger system.

Reflection Time:

I once worked with an organization whose leadership knew that the market was shifting and that it needed to change with the times. They knew they weren’t adapting quickly enough and that competitors were starting to outpace them. However, they struggled to shift their thinking on how to transform the organization. They landed on sticking with what they knew, which was the same strategy of optimizing processes, implementing new tools, and hoping that would do the trick.

After months of this approach, nothing changed. They had optimized their processes, yes, but the organization as a whole was still struggling to keep up. What was missing?

The problem was that leadership hadn’t yet recognized how their own behaviors and beliefs were keeping the organization stuck. They believed that if they could just fix the parts of the system they individually controlled—like processes and technologies—everything else would fall into place. But they hadn’t reflected on their own role in the dysfunction.

The real change began once they started having conversations about systemic and collective awareness. Some leaders began to reflect on how their micromanagement, urgency, and desire for control were preventing deeper transformation. Only once they mentally moved through the waves of systemic and personal awareness did they start to see real, impactful change.

A Few Key Takeaways:

• Optimization alone won’t transform your organization. Quick process fixes only scratch the surface of deeper, systemic issues.
• To move beyond superficial change, leaders must engage in personal reflection and recognize how their own behaviors and beliefs may be contributing to the dysfunction.
• Real transformation happens when groups of people engage in collective reflection and ask hard questions about how they are interacting together.
• Systemic awareness is essential. Instead of just changing processes in isolation, take a step back and look at the whole system — how it all connects.

If your organization feels stuck in a cycle of endless optimization, it’s time to reflect: Are you ready to go beyond superficial change and move into deeper waves of transformative change?

I’d love to hear how you’re navigating the challenges of systemic and personal awareness in your organization.

Join our sense-making sessions to learn more - https://cvent.me/dg2DZ4

Buy "The Six Big Ideas of Adaptive Organizations" book

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Read other articles about The Six Big Ideas of Adaptive Organizations:

• The 5 Leavers of Change
• The 2 Change Strategies of Effective Organizations
• The 5 Universals of Change
• The 3 Agilities of Effective Organizations
• The 4 Dimensions of Change
• The Vortex of Behavioral Patterns