How Do You Create An Organization That Is Ready To Accept Change?

I have talked in recent articles about the need to re-imagine your organization and how this is sometimes forced on business leaders by events such as the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. Change can be driven by events or competition, but sometimes we fail to re-imagine because we never expect the foundation of our business to fall away so quickly. 

I’m sure it’s easy to find videos of successful restaurant owners back in January 2020 predicting a record year ahead - for their own business and their industry. In December 2020, many of these businesses have closed forever. An entire industry can dramatically change almost overnight. 

The problem is that nobody can be in a constant state of re-imagination. Once your business is running well then you can just keep steering in that direction and this is exactly what most people usually do. I once asked a banker at one of the largest banks in the world what he would change about his company and he replied that nothing needs to change because they are already making so much money. That was before the financial crash of 2008. 

Getting ready to change is more about introducing flexibility into a business. Making the people receptive to new ideas and change and aware of what it going on outside their immediate orbit. Many people don’t even pay attention to other areas of their own organization, let alone broader industry trends, but should we allow this situation to persist? 

I think that 2020 has demonstrated that we need agility and an ability to change quickly, but also a better way to think about how our organizations work - and how they can be changed.  

A book published in 2020 called “Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat”, by Bruce Daisley describes how leaders can design a better workplace, but what he also does is design a template for the kind of organization that is always pushing boundaries and questioning the way things are done. 

Daisley was previously the European head of Twitter, so he has seen a large organization grow rapidly and struggle as the competition kept on redefining their marketplace. His book is broken into three main sections: 

1. Recharge: actions to make work less awful 
2. Sync: making teams closer 
3. Buzz: the secrets of energized teams 

In contrast with many self-help books, where the author proclaims a guru-like wisdom about their subject, Daisley is fairly modest. He talks about his own work experience and then synthesizes examples from academic literature. 

But, the important point is that he describes how to address the things that everyone hates about work, how to get people working better together, and how to get to the kind of buzz you feel when everything is running perfectly. You may not be able to operate inside the buzz 100% of the time, but if you can remove all the problematic issues that prevent your organization from operating well then that’s a great start. 

This approach means that your team can start imagining again, thinking about where the organization could be if only you could do things better. In 2021, this ability to re-imagine your organization, and have the clarity of thought to really set sail in a new direction, will be even more important than ever before. 

Let me know what you think about how to build an organization that is ready for change, wherever it appears. Leave a comment here or get in touch with me directly via LinkedIn.