The Enterprise Transformation Leader: From Instilling 'Change' To Catalyzing 'Emergence'

The word “transformation” has become ubiquitous in the world of organizational change, especially in today’s hyper-turbulent, unpredictable, complex, and ambiguous world (“VUCA”).

However, to truly leverage the power of “transformation” in a VUCA world, we need to transform the way in which we understand the term “transformation” itself:

• FROM that which we understand purely as a linear, strategically oriented process—TO that which we understand as a non-linear ecosystemic process;
• FROM that which focuses mostly on organizational structures, processes and systems—TO that whose focus broadens to also include the dimension of human relationship and consciousness.

Let’s take a moment and look briefly at each of these points.

First …. While it is an important element in any systemic change endeavor, strategic planning reflects a deeper assumption of stability and predictability: that we can predict a future and on the basis of that prediction make a step-by-step plan. While not at all untrue, per se, such a view of reality cannot easily deal with the uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of the world we actually live in today.

A different understanding recognizes the inherent complexity and unpredictability of life in a VUCA world, knowing that “best laid plans often go awry.” From such an understanding we approach the facilitation of change ecosystemically.

By “ecosystemic”, I mean that we endeavor to create conditions which favor the emergence of new capabilities from which arise new kinds of behaviors, attitudes and outcomes.

What I mean by “capability” points to a deep kind of know-how, a deeper kind of understanding, a more complex way of thinking about things and making sense of things. Such an upgrade in people’s capability naturally and spontaneously yields a new range of actions, practices, and attitudes—actions, practices and attitudes that are more likely to be in alignment with, and better support, the kinds of outcomes and impact we envision for the enterprise in which we live and work.

Second.... In order to facilitate the emergence of the kinds of deeper capabilities I’m talking about here, we need to widen the lens through which we look at organizations, from a narrow focus on organizational systems, structures and processes, to a broader lens which takes in the human dimension of meaning-making, relationship, and consciousness. We need to move from a largely engineering understanding of organizations to one that expands out to include a human systems perspective.

In the following, we take a moment to look more deeply at these things.

The Nature of the Role of the Enterprise Transformation Leader

Such a shift in our understanding of the nature of organizational transformation calls for a shift in the nature of the leadership and stewardship role by which such transformation is guided and facilitated. I call such a role the “enterprise transformation leader.” What is the nature of this role?

First, it's a leadership role, but not in the sense of telling people what to do and how they are supposed to behave. Rather, it is a leadership role in the sense of helping others see a new way—a new way of thinking, a new way of sensing, a new way of acting. And, it is about helping others see a new possibility—for who they are as individuals and as an enterprise, for the outcomes they want to generate, for the impact they wish to have in the world. And not only to see and envision that new way—that new possibility—for themselves, but to be ready to take action in a way that is in alignment with, and makes very real, that new way, with that new possibility.

It's a transformation leader role, not just in the sense of changing the structures, processes and systems so that they better support the new kinds of outcomes intended for the enterprise. Rather, it is a transformation leader role in the sense that its focus is to upgrade the deep inner operating system which determines how people make sense of their world, their capacity to relate with and work fruitfully with others, their ability to create and innovate. It's about upgrading people’s ability to truly take responsibility for their world—that is, to live and work in an enterprise as though they themselves own it.

It's an enterprise transformation leader role in the sense that the domain of the work one does moves beyond a single person or team out into the realm of the broader organizational sphere. In such a role, one may not have controlling power—i.e. they are not in a positional leadership or management role. But, one does have influencing power—i.e. they are able to significantly influence those who do have controlling power.?

The Job of the Enterprise Transformation Leader

With all of this in mind, we might describe the job of the Agile Transformation Leader as follows:

To catalyze the growth of a new energy and capability within a system such that it is able to make real the behaviors, outcomes, and possibilities that align with the desires and aspirations of that system and its people.

Let’s unpack this a bit….

First, notice there’s nothing there about “change.” Instead I refer to the notion of “capability” and of “alignment.”?This is a rather nuanced reframing of the role, but it is an important one. In a complex, unpredictable and ambiguous world, we can’t predict a future and plan for that future. What we can do, however, is create conditions which favor the emergence of deep know-how, perspective, and mindset from which a whole new set of behaviors, skills and practices are the natural by-products. These new behaviors, skills and practices make realizable a whole new range of outcomes and possibilities—outcomes and possibilities that are congruent with the kind of future which organizational leaders see for the organization—and which we, as an institution and as people, can get behind, and which organizational leaders.

Note also the use of the word “catalyze.” To catalyze means to accelerate the rate at which something happens—whether that is a chemical reaction, or the growth of some new capability within a human system. What it is we are wanting to accelerate within the context organizational transformation is the rate at which organizations, and their people, can upgrade their capability and skillfulness such that they are successful in meeting the particular VUCA challenges they face, and to leverage that capability in the service of that to which they are most ardently committed.

An important feature in the use of the word “catalyst”, as I am applying it to the domain of human systems transformation, is that it points to a kind of leadership that is not something someone does by oneself. Rather, it is a leadership that happens through genuine collaboration and partnership with others within the constraints of a particular system.

Three Horizons of Enterprise Transformation Leadership

Such a manner of leaderful engagement with others and with systems necessarily unfolds across three horizons of our leadership: the horizon of System, the horizon of Relationship, and the horizon of Self. Let’s look at each of these.

The Horizon of System

The horizon of System refers to broader organizational environment. Organizational systems are inherently complex and are characterized by discontinuities in their ability to be seamlessly unified entities. These discontinuities manifest themselves as distances that separate individuals and collectives from one another. When we look, we can discern at least four kinds of distances in an organizational system: Space, Time, Focus, and Perspective.

The most obvious kind of distance is Space—which is that people are not in the same physical space at this moment, or their location in different places makes it difficult, and certainly impractical, to bring everybody together.

Time is also a kind of distance. Organizational systems—just like any system—have a history, and the nature of that history has an effect, often hidden, on what is happening now. What is the historical lineage that determines this or that rule, practice or cultural habit? What happened ten years ago and what is the nature of the impact of that event on how we think and how we work now? These are the kinds of reflective questions which point to the factor of Time.

Focus relates to the fact that, in a larger organizational system, different parts of the system are focused on different tasks, and exist in different organizational settings, each of which is constituted on the basis of the tasks they are organized around. Those people who are focused on accounting, for instance, are not terribly interested in, or concerned with, the kinds of challenges and tasks that those in marketing are focused on.

Perspective relates to how people see the world, and correlates to a number of factors, including the area of focus (people who work together in the same focus area tend to share perspective), culture, economic status, and sensemaking capacity. The differences in perspective among non-allied groups present significant challenges to communication, and certainly in collaboration. A great number of gaps—in vocabulary, in knowledge, in emotional dispositions, in developmental capacity—have to be navigated in order to come to a place where shared understanding, shared alignment, and shared commitment can happen.

These distances make it very difficult to see an organizational system in anything like its entirety. In fact, I would dare say that we can never really see an organizational system in any definitive way. Organizations are inherently complex and non-linear and are therefore unknowable in any definitive or final sense of the term. An ecosystemic approach to facilitating organizational transformation that focuses on growing capabilities is a powerful approach in working with, and in fact leveraging, that complexity.

The Horizon of Relationship

Such an ecosystemic approach to organizational transformation begins with the growing of relationship capability. Relationships constitute, in many ways, the irreducible quanta of organizational life, especially in a VUCA world. When they are healthy, resilient, and intelligent, relationship systems—teams, groups, partnership, and smaller collectives (20 people or fewer)—are the most powerfully catalyzing force in any kind of broader, organizational transformation. Growing relationship capability is thus a key focus in growing organizational capability.

Key to relationship capability is the complexity of shared understanding, commitment and alignment which a given relationship system is able to generate for themselves. Such capability doesn’t just happen: it requires the growing of skillful practice in the area of communication, collaboration, conflict and in the ability to hold, and in fact elicit, a wide variety of perspectives. Such skillful practice is both a pre-condition for, and the very context of, deliberate relationship and engagement. Under such conditions of intentional and skillful practice, relationships and relationship systems (e.g., teams, groups, and partnerships) become the primary means by which we grow and develop, both individually and organizationally. That growth and development, in turn, becomes the very foundation of high performance in organizations.

There are very specific practices and skills in the domain of relationship that can be learned and developed (these are all well-documented in my book Evolvagility: Growing an Agile Leadership Culture from the Inside Out). There is a fairly high degree of commitment required to learn and sufficiently practice these skills—no different than is the case for many of the kinds of engineering skills which software developers must learn and master, for instance. However, such commitment pays off in the significantly higher performance of the relationship systems in which those skills and practices are learned—a payoff that translates into a powerful institutional capacity for broader organizational intelligence and skillfulness.

The Horizon of Self

The horizon of Self refers to the dimension of our own inner leadership capability—our individual consciousness. In a certain way, this is the center of it all: the inner capacity we have of making meaningful sense of situations such that the complexity of that meaning-making is a match for the complexity of those situations.

Oftentimes what happens is that situations arise which in some way stress our capacity as individuals—whether emotionally or cognitively—to face them in a relaxed and creative manner. We find ourselves somehow feeling “in over our heads”—vaguely confused, uncertain, lacking confidence, or anxious. Or, by contrast, we may experience none of those things, charging head-on into the situation but, in the end, somehow making a mess of things.

In all such cases, our ability to perform effectively falls short, in some way or another—not because we aren’t smart enough or even sensitive enough, but because the inner meaning-making (which, for the most part, we are not consciously aware of) which determines how we perceive and react to a situation is unable to take in the full picture, whether because we are somehow emotionally triggered or because we are unable to see the full picture, cognitively—or some combination of both of these.

So, the horizon of Self has to do with deliberately growing our own, individual emotional and cognitive capacity for complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity. To the degree that we can do that, we become better able to embrace the skillful means necessary for growing a broader relationship capability as well as a greater ability to work in a generative manner within the even broader organizational context.

Key Practices of the Enterprise Transformation Leader

Taking all of this in, we can now say something about the kinds of practices in which the enterprise transformation leader engages--in partnership and collaboration with others within the system.

An enterprise transformation leader….

1.????Designs and facilitates processes which reveal systems to themselves. Helping people see the systems in which they work, and of which they are a part, is the first step toward not only creating awareness of those systems—and hence, a greater degree of choicefulness in dealing with unwanted qualities within those systems—but in developing a broader intelligence regarding systems and systemic behavior more generally.

2.????Introduces a new vocabulary. A “distinction” is a named concept which makes visible something we couldn’t see before, and/or it creates a new possibility that wasn’t possible before. An example is the distinction called “ScrumMaster”. Or “Sprint.” Both are distinctions which help us understand and be able to engage in a completely new way of working. A new vocabulary constitutes a coherent—though not overly large—collection of distinctions which together help individuals and organizations orient themselves around new categories for thinking and action.

3.????Establishes a new set of institutional practices, conditions, and norms. This goes hand-in-hand with new vocabularies, except here we are introducing specific practices by which people learn and develop new, though highly relevant, skills; specific conditions which make it possible for people to stretch into the new territories which these skills begin to make real; and specific norms which establish boundary conditions which define what now constitutes right practice. It's important to recognize that such practices, conditions and norms can't be the same old thing wrapped in new wrappers: in order to be truly meaningful, and to meaningfully catalyze new ways of thinking, being, and acting, the must be at once genuinely new and well-tested--those that come from a solid body of research and practice.

4.????Tunes processes, systems, and structures to support the new capabilities we want to grow. At any moment, organizations are constituted to function in a particular way. When we change the way we want an organization to function, its current constitution becomes an impediment to that new functioning. To orient toward a new way of functioning, we need to change aspects of the current constitution. These aspects are typically operationalized within the processes, systems, and structures by which we get work done in a particular organizational setting. It is important to be vigilant and highly attendant to changes that are needed within the current constitution of an organization—while, at the same time, knowing that we have to be deliberate and selective in our methods for doing so, if we are to not trigger the emergence of institutional antibodies.

5.????Orients shared vision. A shared vision acts as a kind of systemic “attractor.” It is a guiding force, a kind of north star to which people look in order to continuously orient their actions and intended impact. This can only work when the vision is something which people throughout the organization care about and can personally relate to, in which they themselves have a personal, emotional investment. There are very specific practices in which you can orient shared vision—both across whole organizational systems, and within smaller groups--that are well-researched and documented.

6.????Takes a deliberately ecosystemic approach. In helping organizations become more adaptive and agile, we need to approach organizations more as permaculture than as machines. In permaculture, we want to understand the nature of the system in order to grow the system by enhancing some of its native qualities. Within the context of organizational transformation, one such quality arises from individuals who are inspired by the new direction, who want to help move the organization (or at least that part of it which they touch on a daily basis) in that direction, and who are able to inspire others to align in moving in that direction. These individuals are your partners; they are your eyes and ears; they are foot soldiers and architects for transformation. As such, you want to find them and you want to enable and empower them toward whatever actions they might take, or initiate with others, which at once satisfy their inspired itch for transformative action while helping those parts of the organization they can affect move in directions that are congruent with the broader envisioned direction.

Resources for Further Exploration

To explore these ideas further, and to learn about the practices and conditions through which they might be realized, I invite you to take a look at my book, Evolvagility: Growing an Agile Leadership Culture from the Inside Out.

If you would like to explore what it might be like to dive more deeply into the nature and realization of the kind of leadership which this article points to, check out the Enterprise Transformation Leader: A Path to Mastery, an eight-month transformative (and informative) leadership journey into both your inner leadership and your capacity for impact within the larger enterprise setting.

Foundational Resources

This article is based on many years of work in the field, which would be hard to document here. However, it is also based on a lot of research over a 20-year time span. I provide a number of these resources here, in case the reader would like to follow the lineage which informs my work over all these years.

• Basseches, Michael. Dialectical Thinking and Adult Development. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing, 1984.
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• Goldstein, Jeffrey, James K. Hazy, and Benyamin B. Lichtenstein, Complexity and the Nexus of Leadership: Leveraging Nonlinear Science to Create Ecologies of Innovation. Macmillan, 2010.
• Hamman, Michael. Evolvagility: Growing an Agile Leadership Culture From the Inside Out. Agile Leadership Institute, 2019.
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• Pascale, Richard, Mark Milemann, and Linda Gioja. Surfing the Edge of Chaos. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000.
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• Wheatley, Margaret. Leadership and the New Science. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2006.