Do You Want to Change Your Business or Transform It?

There’s a difference between change and transformation.

When a business undergoes a change it just means it is becoming different to what it has been in the past. A change can be positive, it can be negative, it can be abrupt or slow, and it can be a small change or a large one. Most businesses are in a state of constant change as customers, employees, investors, and the societies around them evolve, too. The logo and the branding might stay the same, but the business has inevitably changed with time.

Transformation is more than change. It’s not just a more significant change or change on a grander scale. Instead, it means that a company has undergone a fundamental shift in the way that it does business. It’s less common than simple ‘change’ but it can have incredibly powerful effects on the business and its success.

Breaking Down Silos

At CoSMo we’ve seen some of these fundamental transformations up close. Our technology demands companies assess the whole of their business and understand how disparate parts interact and how decisions in one part of the business might affect other parts of the business.

Sometimes these interactions and interconnections are obvious. For example, the purchase of some new equipment or the hiring of new staff has an immediate and logical impact on the cost of doing business.

Sometimes, though, these interconnections are less obvious and not at all straightforward. For example, the deployment of a new delivery system might have flow on effects for manufacturing that were never envisaged, predicted, or accounted for. In such cases a cost saving in one part of a business can lead to higher costs in another part of the business and render the entire thing pointless from an economic efficiency perspective.

Both the obvious and less-obvious interconnections between the different parts of a business are laid bare when that business is analyzed as a complex system by CoSMo. Armed with the knowledge that CoSMo’s technology uncovers, company executives can break down the silos and departments that divide the company and instead focus on making the optimal decision for the future direction of the whole business.

This sort of holistic thinking goes beyond organizational efficiency or interdepartmental collaboration. It’s transformational for the business from the C-suite right through the managers working on daily operational issues.

Next-Level Team Work

Understand that CoSMo has not reinvented traditional enterprise organization and nor are the companies that CoSMo works with necessarily moving away from their existing organizational structures. Companies we work with still have departments, divisions, subsidiaries, and they still assess many of their KPIs in traditional silos.

What we have done, however, is offer companies a chance to understand their business holistically, to see it without the silos dominating the corporate landscape, and to avoid decision making that relies listening to the loudest, most persuasive voice around the boardroom table.

By understanding how each part of the business affects all other parts of the business executives can make the optimal decision for the entire company. Department chiefs or silo heads can more clearly understand how their part of the company contributes to the success of the company, and comprehend in a way that is impossible for human intuition alone to grasp why the best decision for the company might appear at first to be the worst thing for their own area of responsibility.

Put another way, transforming the way that the company understands its business leads to some transformational next-level teamwork.

Will Your Company Change or Transform in 2017?

In Europe, across Asia, and in the United States there is a strong wind of change blowing. Politically, economically, and socially, the world is being changed. Businesses are not spectators to these changes; indeed, some are active in driving the change while others push-back, or otherwise resist changes that impact them, their interests, and their employees negatively.

But while all companies will be impacted by this wind of change it does not follow that all will be transformed. Transformation requires more than adapting to new circumstances or determining where, in the short term, the winds of change might blow strongest. True transformation, the sort that we’ve seen up close where CoSMo’s technology is deployed, is proactive rather than reactive, and the impacts on a business and its path to success are always positive.

In 2017, will your business change, or will you help it to transform?