Adaptation Enabled Value Creation

In order to enable value from product or programme delivery, it is vital that those impacted by the change, embrace the new capability quickly. To do that we need to ensure that people affected by project or programmes are knowledgeable about what the adaptive process entails, their role in the success of the change, how it links to the strategy or the organisation and have the knowledge, skills and mindset required to be successful in the future state.

Enter the adaptation coach

While the programme or product manager is focussing on delivering the capability, managing the budget, time, cost and quality, resources and planning for value delivery – the adaptation coach is a facilitator and coach to support the customer and delivery team to manage the people side of the change. They are there to ensure the people can generate the outcomes from the new capability (a pre-requisite to any value being realised).

In my work with many global and national company executives and delivery teams, there is a growing acknowledgment that organisations need consider the long term consequences of decisions in today's context. We are in a time of rapid transformation in our societies, organisations and world economies (just take the launch of ChatGPT in a highly accessible and useable form as an example). More people can see how artificial intelligence and other technological advancements can really produce efficiencies and decision making enablement. Therefore the value of investing in the adaptation approach is perceived to be higher than before and in relation a non-negotiable. The faster we can influence hearts, minds and behaviours the faster to see value being created for company balance sheets, but at what broader societal cost.?

The reason to consider adaptive capacity building

Recently a large multi-national organisation, I facilitated the development and embedding of a Value Creation and Adaptation Framework for the organisation. What prompted this assignment was that company executives had observed that they were good at deploying programmes and projects, but failed to achieve the full results or value from the original investment. The main reason stated as to why this was the case, was that the people who were meant to utilise the new systems, tools, products and processes had not been involved throughout the development process and had received only general training. Many were not compelled enough to make the switch across and found workarounds, thus take up was low and the value proposition eroded. This organisation did not have the adaptive agility that their global competitors had which saw their market share begin to suffer in certain product lines. Executives in this organisation had historically told their staff to just make the change or leave – ‘if you are not on the bus – get off it’ one executive was heard to say at a staff town hall. Thus the need leaders and staff to create a shared approach to value management and adaptation and place this design in a framework was born.

Building commitment

A big part of the Framework was to quantify (as much as possible) the value sought from each new programme, and then build customised adaptation approaches that matched the size and complexity of capability impact. The Framework was underpinned by foundational competency development in value creation, futures thinking, resilience and adaptive capacity. Research I have been undertaking over the last 5 years has demonstrated that we need to articulate not just the value expected of doing something new, but provide rich participatory opportunities to experience the future state and understand the compelling reason for why we will launch a new direction (Farrow, 2021). Participatory opportunities involve people throughout the design and delivery process and enable them to increase their desire to know more, learn more and be more. The adaptation approach in each programme is co-designed by participant representatives, covering elements that assist in both the technical skills uplift as well as the psychological and behavioural shifts required to be successful in the future state. Adaptation processes typically included processes that cover communication by a range of agents, customer hearted involvement approaches, diversity and inclusion customisations, learning and re-learning, readiness and impact diagnostics and a formalised accountability on shared value creation and reward.

An Example of Application

The programme was introducing an Artificial Intelligence agent to replace an older partially manual customer engagement process. The value only was to be realised if the new AI Agent was utilised at estimated volume levels and to it's full capacity – so therefore people (i.e staff, customers, leaders, suppliers) had to adapt. Given a number of functions and roles were changing there was a risk of resistance and concerns from staff and leaders, predominately in relation to the fear about about what the replacement of the human in the process would mean for their short term future. In this example I played the role of the Adaptation Coach facilitating directly with the executives and staff impacted to:

• co-design the adaptation approach
• encourage participation and involvement in solutioning (including AI prototype testing and scenario analysis)
• creation of a network of adaptation agents and AI champions
• generate and deploy regular communication (including to impacted external stakeholders)
• build individual and team adaptive capacity, resilience and emotional intelligence
• facilitate human resource and industrial relations stakeholders in an appropriate workforce re-design approach (AI as a colleague)
• allay fears where possible through employee support mechanisms
• coach staff to identify and reveal new areas of career aspirations, and?
• encourage leaders to be visible and actively facilitate the change (acknowledging they too have their own personal change process)

The adaptation teams worked closely with the programme team, they started at the same time and worked together to design the adaptation approach and ensure the programmes technical delivery strategy was appropriate for the specific value being sought in the original business case. The adaptation was successful and the Artificial Agent became a trusted part of the customer and product journey. In this case impacted staff were given the option to switch up to either retrain for other roles in the company including AI technical managers or the option of a package to support redundancy.

In terms of value created over time, the appropriate utilisation and embedding of the AI agent revealed expected time and efficiency savings, reduction in rework and error management, opportunities for staff reduction or redeployment, a decrease in overhead from freeing floor space, increase in staff satisfaction due to reduction of process administrative work, staff overtime and savings in supply chain and inventory management etc. A programme of this nature with this level of adaptation approach, saw the aggregated financial value reinvested in adapting and growing the organisation.

In conclusion

The times of uncertainty, in particular over the past few pandemic impacted years, has seen the need for resilience and adaptive capacity to grow both in our communities as well as in our organisations (Farrow, 2021). Organisations, regardless of size, need to make strategic decisions on the value they are pursuing balanced against the true cost (financial and non-financial). I put to you that in these more uncertain times, building a base of adaptive capacity and resilience in organisations that can flow through to our communities as a bi-product, is an essential rather than a option. Involvement of a diverse range of people in the adaptation and value creation process builds ownership. Ownership brings commitment, problem solving and shared desire for value creation. Having a well defined Value Creation and Adaptation Framework is a good starting point. An adaptation coach is a key asset to any executive serious about creating and sustaining value creation along with enabling broader states of resilience.

References

Farrow, E. (2021) Extending the participant’s voice to guide artificial intelligence installation using futures methodology and layered user story analysis.?World Futures Review.