TO TRANSFORM OR NOT TO TRANSFORM THE ORGANIZATION?

Abraham Schoots Adam Batchaev Adrien Muller Alain Vande Kerkhove Ana Isabel Rafael André Vanden Camp Anne-Marie Zeghers Antoine Gauche Bruno Venanzi Camille Izard Charles Justal Chris Buyse Christophe D. Christophe SIMON Elodie Lalardie Eric Mailleux Fatima Zibouh, PhD ?? Francis Laleman Francois Castelein Fran?ois Delvaux Gaelle Raulo Grégory de Moreau Hannes Van Cauwenberghe Hélène Dandine-Roulland Jack Hamande Jan M. Jean Debrosse Jonathan Kessel-Fell Laurent Tylski - Coach de dirigeants Marc RENARD Maria Cristina Melan Martijn Hassink Micha? Paprocki Morgane Meulemans, PCC Paul ANDRE Philippe Guicheney Pierre YVART Pierre-André Rulmont Pieter Mergan Renaud Montulet Sabrina De Smedt Said Mellouli Servaas Michielssens, PhD, CFA Stijn Follet Thibaut Ladry Tom Goubert Ugo Sibille Vivek Sinha Wim Van de Velde Yannick Huyghues-Beaufond

I am often asked about my professional activity and what it entails.

People who ask this question usually have only a superficial perception of the complexity of organizations and the interactions they house. They generally do not grasp the challenge involved in guiding them to evolve in their form and essence so that they continue to meet the demands of their mission in a rapidly changing world, without giving rise to bureaucratic monsters.

As an organizational coach, I focus on missions involving the transformation of organizations and their ways of working. It is a systemic effort at all levels of the organization.

I assist organizations in getting into a state, a capacity to adapt and respond flexibly to rapid, profound, and unforeseen changes in their economic and working environment.

What kind of changes are we talking about? We can think of the consequences of recent events, more or less predictable and anticipated, such as the energy crisis, the Covid pandemic, the sudden emergence of armed conflicts in Ukraine or Israel, the extreme digitalization of the economy and social life, the emergence of artificial intelligence, disruptions in global supply chains, the entry of Generation Z into the labor market, the climate crisis, the environmental crisis, not to mention the numerous unforeseen events that affect the normal course of operations of each organization (the situation of the chocolatier Galler following the floods of the Vesdre comes to mind), but also more prosaically all sudden variations in competition, price, supply, and demand of products and services to which organizations are exposed.

I do not intervene on these specific subjects. I act on developing the adaptability of organizations to respond to unexpected manifestations of these challenges on their activities.

Doing and being

To describe my field of intervention, I would divide it into two distinct but strongly interrelated parts:

On one hand, there is everything above the surface of the organization, what is visible, tangible, what can be conceived, drawn, decided, implemented, such as vision, organizational structures, roles, responsibilities, flows, engagement rules between teams, governance, definition of objectives, planning, measurement, and evaluation models.

And on the other hand, what is below the surface, which is less or not conscious but underlies the organization's dynamics, its culture, 'à l’insu de son plein gré'. I'm talking about the system's dynamics, groups dynamics and communication modes, the result of identity representations, beliefs, and gregarious engagement modes of the organization and the individuals composing the organization, but also the influence of the context in which the organization and its members act.

So, I help individuals, leaders, teams, change managers, and executive committees to design and deploy their organizational structures, engagement rules, evaluation methods, but also to reflect on and act on what happens beneath the surface, which is often the source of operational dysfunction, both in teams and individuals, and in transformation projects that fail to deliver the expected results. So, I work on both 'doing' and 'being'.

A real organizational transformation requires a permanent cross-sectional approach between the two levels, with perhaps a predominant focus on 'being', the part 'beneath the surface', because desiring change for the organization also means questioning the current and ingrained human modes of operation within leadership, teams, and individuals. It is a pre-requiste to change.

?My work is that of a coach, which means primarily accompanying and sometimes providing training to identify, enable and implement transformation or improvement models and actions to shape the organization and its practices

This means that I do not directly intervene in the production, the operational activity of the organization. This remains the domain and responsibility of the organization, the teams, and the individuals I accompany.

By analogy, Usain Bolt wants to become the world champion in the 100m. He hires a coach to help him be in a state to win the world championships. His coach hears his project, challenges him, accompanies him, helps him define his intermediate goals, sets out the steps to reach them, helps him change his lifestyle, his diet, teaches him new techniques if necessary, draws his attention to areas of improvement, proposes exercises to perfect his physical preparation, supports him psychologically so that he is ready to achieve his goal when the opportunity of the championships arises, and guides him in the necessary introspection to define and shape in details the next steps in his progression. The coach fully shares the athlete's goal, understands all the parameters that influence his performance, but he does not run the 100m himself.

It remains entirely Usain Bolt's responsibility to run, but also to train, but also to decide what his goals are, what training program he actually applies, and to continue or even to stop pursuing his improvement project.

The role of the organizational coach

I intervene as soon as there is a request for change coming from the organisation. And when this request for change is diffuse, not yet crystallized, I help define a general intention plan and initiate a first line of action, following the empirical principle that it is better to take action quickly, even without knowing everything, as we learn more from what we do than from what we think we could ideally do.

If a master plan has already been defined, which is often the case - this is usually prepared by management consulting companies - I assist in its implementation by focusing on its adoption by the members of the organization, ensuring that they themselves are the actors of the transformation in a dynamic of co-creation, rather than a passive execution mode of a plan concocted in an office by a team of transformation experts.

We do not change people, people change themselves. We do not force change, people embrace change. The desire for change, for improvement, must emanate from the organization and must sooner or later be carried by management, since they are in charge of directing the organization. It is the order of things. Successful transformations rely on a strong demand for change, supported and expressed with determination and over time by management.

Then the members of the organization set themselves in motion to identify and implement the means to best meet this legitimate demand.

This is where the Organizational Coach comes in, a neutral resource (because not involved in operations) and a valuable facilitator and support in the journey of individuals and teams towards a new form of organization, new operating methods, and new mode(s) of communication.

I don't know whether the role of "Organizational Coach" has already been articulated today, I mean whether it is already recognized as a role that organizations need, and I doubt that job descriptions for this role are currently being posted in recruitment agencies. What I can say is that this is the role I performed under the designation Agile Coach / Enterprise Agile Coach during the implementation of Agility at ING, Euroclear, NAllo Engie, Allianz during the last five years.

From desire to change to actual transformation

The major wave of deploying Agility was a unique opportunity to reflect on the organization, its structure, and its modes of operation in both 'doing' and 'being'. And being able to refer to a well-documented organizational thinking model as well as collaboration methods provided the ideal framework for a coaching relationship, where the coach and the coachee tackle the same object together to design and give shape to the desired organization transformation.

Today, through all sorts of positive and negative experiences, Agility seems to have become a 'Buzz Word' laden with emotions and has somewhat lost its power of inspiration. Faced with the current evolution of their context, full of uncertainties, many organizations limit their transformation to the implementation of Agile frameworks, 'doing Agile', in the desire to quickly and with minimal effort reap results in terms of productivity, quality, and ownership. In doing so, they repeat the practices of excellence taught for over 40 years that have shaped them as they are today. The result: new procedures, but little transformation. It's paradoxical, isn't it? Focusing on the form of the organization, - on the 'doing' - while neglecting to look at the 'being', is taking the risk of a more procedural organization, with more meetings, more tools, heavier, more rigid, less humane, and therefore less able to adapt to the consequences of the emergence of a chaotic context.

Welcoming and overcoming resistance

It is not a fate. This is where the role of the coach takes on its full dimension far beyond teaching and training new methods. It suggests modifying the organization's focal point while transforming, and directing it specifically towards three cardinal points:

1.???? The service to be rendered and the functionality to offer rather than the activity to be performed.

2.???? The place where decisions are made, ensuring that they are made as close to the information as possible, rather than in a center of experts distant from the field.

3.???? The virtue of divergence and diversity while fostering standardization and simplification.

?It is obvious that undertaking to make an organization more responsive to the challenges of the time, implementing new structures and working methods, and, for example, focusing on the 3 points of attention just mentioned, confronts the organization with its old beliefs and practices in terms of performance, efficiency, control, authority, created value, roles hierarchy, recognition of expertise, evaluation, ...

This confrontation creates stress in teams and individuals. And we know that stress triggers primal reflexes linked to fear, expressed in aggression, flight, or inaction. Therefore, desiring to transform the organization inevitably brings it to a moment of resistance, regression, or a return to its "primitive" habits, old certainties, and behaviors that are inconsistent with its ambition for change. (This explains also why, as seen earlier, some organizations investing heavily in Agile transformation, adopt the methods but not the spirit and remain what they were even if the form has changed.)

The coach's role is also to accompany the organization through this period of stress, to assist in overcoming the moment of discomfort, possibly even temporary loss of efficiency, and in pursuing its transformation journey. It is also about growing the entire organization in understanding and managing this change process. It is about helping individuals, teams, and the whole organization's structure understand what is happening, reserve mental space and time, and develop practices to overcome the stress of change, maintain focus on the ongoing transformation, and avoid succumbing to an instinctive regression.

This illustrates how the organizational coach plays a complex role, on the razor's edge, between 'doing' and 'being,' between the 'desirable' and the 'acceptable,' both close and detached, invested without being included, guiding without being directive, operating at different logical levels of the organization, and whose contribution is essential.

This also explains how this role, although related, differs from that of an operational contributor, project manager, team manager, change program manager, or tools and methods trainer.

This also highlights why his/her intervention as an external contributor to the organization is virtuous in signaling the neutrality of his/her facilitation at all levels of the organization in order to allow the organization itself, at each of its levels, to embrace change and to progress more quickly in the transformation it holds.