How to Lead Change Systemically and build Sustainable Organizations - A Framework

As a change manager of over 25 years, I’ve seen how corporate leaders struggle with the one thing that is the only constant in life: change. Taking their organization and their people to a level where they thrive in our current world of crisis is a major challenge for many leaders worldwide. As systems practitioners, consultants, coaches and constellators, we can make a huge difference in their success.

Why we need a systemic approach to change leadership

According to a recent study by Gartner, the average organization has undergone 5 enterprise-wide changes in the past three years, expecting this to increase to 6 or 7 in the upcoming three years. Other studies show that over 70% of companies use traditional top-down change management approaches that no longer work, and, as a consequence, an equal amount of changes fail. If we add the tremendous impact of COVID-19, I don’t need to tell you the impact on change success rates. 

That said, whether in times of crisis or not, I’ve discovered there are always three main reasons why leaders struggle with leading change:

1. They keep fighting symptoms instead of tackling the root causes. They try to solve complex problems with the one-size-fits-all solutions they have always used, but that do not work and cover only one or two pieces of the puzzle. 

2. They do not know how to lead change and let go of behavior patterns in the organization that are no longer suitable, given its context and its purpose. This means they do not address the people-side of change effectively. 

3. They do not understand how to continuously and sustainably build the change and innovation capabilities of their organization. I have met many leaders who say things like “we've gone through many changes, and we're still here, so we must be doing something right” or “we are already agile.” Merely surviving through change processes is not enough in the long run. Currently, many are paying the price because their business is not able to reinvent itself quickly enough. 

Overall, these three main reasons lead to rehashing of old patterns and to the use of business models that are ineffective for leading change successfully and creating a sustainable organization. What these three main reasons have in common is their linear A to B approach. Change is shaped like fixing a machine. 

Unfortunately, many changes are complex and need methods that match the complexity and the interconnectedness of the problems that leaders seek to solve. That’s where systemic work comes in. 

A Systemic Framework for Leading Change

In 2019, I developed a systems-thinking based framework to help leaders increase their change leadership success by 50% within only a few months. It allows them to take their organization from surviving to thriving, without wasting a lot of time, money, and energy on one-size-fits-all change don't work. The framework is called “The Systemic Change Leadership Journey?” and consists of three phases.

Phase 1: See the System

This phase is about getting to the root cause of the problems and stopping one-size-fits-all solutions. It has to do with seeing the organization that you lead as a living human system and using a systemic approach to change and leadership. The shift from seeing your organization as a machine, to seeing your organization as a living human system is usually a big one. It allows leaders to take a completely different, much more effective approach to the complex adaptive system their organization really is. They realize that their organization’s problems are actually patterns and that leadership is actually not just in individual people, but a role in the entire system. And so, this stage is about putting the systemic lens on your organization, the way you approach change, and the way leadership is shaped. 

Phase 2: Share the Space

Then we have stage two, which is very much about lifting behavioral patterns in an organization that prevents it from moving forward. And it's very much about how you can leverage collective intelligence and how you have generative conversations and deal with conflict in this stage of the journey. The first area in this phase is change communication. This has to do with the, what I call the oxygen flow in the living human system. And that is information. So how freely can information and energy flow through our organization? Especially when we introduce a change in an organization or when we need to change in the organization. Who is allowed to know what, and what will the facilitation of more free flowing information look like? The next steps then deal with: how do you have generative conversations and interaction between diverse groups of stakeholders, so you can come up with new ideas and solutions to deal with the current tide and the upcoming new reality? And how do you facilitate and leverage constructive conflict to ultimately decide on the best ideas that emerge? That’s what is addressed in this phase. 

Phase 3: Shape the Shift

And then, stage three is about how to build the change and innovation capabilities that are needed in your organization to thrive in a fast-paced, complex world. This is usually where many organizations want to go, like decisions to have self-organizing teams or a want to be agile, and so forth. These are deliberately steps seven, eight, and nine in the framework because with the phases See the System and Share the Space, you need to have some groundwork in your journey first. This is before you move into really building strong and sustainable change and innovation capabilities for your organization to continuously align with all that's happening within it, and around it. Again, even though the steps are not a linear approach, the ones that work for you depend on the stage you find yourself in with your organization and the groundwork you’ve done. 

Short Case Study

One of my clients, a company in the telecommunications business, wanted to outsource part of their customer service organization. We used the Systemic Change Leadership Framework to help the leadership see their organizational system, its potential, the change they wanted to implement, the systemic function of outsourcing, and the relationships between these elements. 

The CEO realized how important it was to communicate the shift the organization wanted to make in their role in the ecosystem of their industry: it made the reason why this outsourcing was needed so much more comprehensive and straightforward for all involved. 

In the project team, we used constellations to see how the change and its approach would impact the organization and to facilitate change interventions. People in formal and informal leadership roles took shared responsibility to co-lead the change. 

With collective intelligence and deep democracy approaches, the organization was mobilized to carry the change together and deal with conflict constructively. Employees took responsibility to learn from each other and use the subject matter expertise available to give the outsourced location a head start. Some employees had to be made redundant: this process was guided more effectively and in a much more human fashion than before. 

Methods for self-organization and innovation during the project were used to increase change capabilities for future changes in the organization and to anticipate further shifts that needed to be made. 

The outsourcing was successful in the short run, both in terms of the change process and the ROI (return on investment). It also created a strong foundation for the long run. 

How I developed The Systemic Change Leadership Journey?

The first time I learned about constellation work was over 20 years ago. I was working as a consultant in the change management discipline within a big six consulting firm. From 2000-2002 I participated in an intense program on Systemic Work and Constellations at Phoenix Educations in the Netherlands. 

After receiving my diploma, I transferred my systemic knowledge into my work as a change manager and consultant. My education and certification in Organization & Relationship Systems Coaching at CRR Global (Netherlands and US) from 2008 till 2012 was a strong tipping point for me: I was struck by the powerful impact of systemic approaches and interventions on the change projects that I was leading with clients. They help reveal patterns, reframe problems and restore the ability of systems to grow, change and evolve. 

From then, my experience expanded with many other systemic approaches at the Academy for Organizational Culture, the Deep Democracy, Tavistock and Bert Hellinger institutes, as well as in other programs, and experiences. 

In 2016 I decided to further build on my mission to spread more systemic leadership into the world and the Systemic Leadership Summit was born: an annual conference for leaders and systems practitioners to learn about the power of a wide range of systemic approaches.

I developed the Systemic Change Leadership Journey? based on 1. my experience as a change manager and systems practitioner, and 2. interviews of 80+ international systems thinking thought leaders and experts in which we dive deep into systemic leadership and systemic methods in the Systemic Leadership Summit. 

Ultimately, my framework consists of a blend of systemic approaches: constellations are one methodology amongst many within this framework. 

More information and obtaining your own copy of the framework

The Systemic Change Leadership Journey? is a proven framework: a systemic approach we can use to help leaders increase their complex change leadership success. It allows them to take their organization from surviving to thriving, without wasting a lot of time, money and energy on hypes, one-size-fits-all change management and leadership methods that just don't work. Download your own free copy of the framework here:

Systemic Change Leadership Framework

This article also appeared in the e-magazine of the Institute for Systemic Constellations in Slovenia.

=================================================================

Jennifer Campbell is a Change Manager and Systemic Leadership Expert. She has over 25 years of international experience in Change Management, Executive & Leadership Team Coaching, and Systemic Leadership. She holds certifications in many systemic approaches, including Organization & Relationship Systems Coaching, Organization Constellations, Team Coaching, and Deep Democracy.

Jennifer is also the Creator & Host of the annual Systemic Leadership Summit. This worldwide event has, to date, presented 80+ expert speakers, and attracted more than 4500 participants from over 48 different countries. Jennifer is a successful online entrepreneur of 7 years. She has been featured in Forbes.com, Financieel Dagblad and Management Team magazine. 

Jennifer’s mission is to help leaders & systems practitioners successfully lead change, leverage systemic approaches, and create strong, sustainable, and human-focused organizations.