Transforming Organizational Transformation

An idea for how to scale up and accelerate organizational transformation

The starting point

 Last year I read an article Corporate Rebels Group about the Haier, the Chinese appliance company (https://corporate-rebels.com/disrupting-haier/), and the radical organizational transformation they have accomplished. It is a great story.

 That triggered the central idea in this proposal:

•  Organizational transformation is a major factor in innovation (where “organizational transformation” includes a spectrum of large-scale change practices ranging from culture change to digital transformation.)
• To accelerate innovation at the largest possible scale (my chosen mission), organizational transformation needs to be expanded and accelerated at the largest possible scale.
• Organizational transformation can be accelerated by viewing it as a process, and applying process change techniques to it (my area of experience). 

Please note, I am approaching this as an Organizational Transformation "lay-person". I do not profess to have extensive experience or to have done extensive research on the subject. My view is primarily informed by seeing and reading many articles on LinkedIn about Organizational Transformation. I suggest reading this article from the same point of view, to see if it makes sense based on your own experience.

Organizational Transformation (OT) - Current State Evaluation

My informal assessment of organizational transformation (OT) is that it is not so much an industrial discipline as a diverse set of practices and techniques that need to be custom-fitted to each organization by people with lots of direct anecdotal experience. So OT more like a cottage industry or perhaps guild than a industrial or professional discipline. This presents a major starting obstacle to accelerating and scaling of OT benefits.

Part of this is that there does not seem to be an overall integrated systematic approach by which any organization can be evaluated, and based on that evaluation a set of procedures could be applied that would produce a reliable set of OT results.

There also seems to be no general agreement among practitioners on a standardized theory of how OT can or should actually occur. There are in fact many theories, messages and methods.

In terms of any commonality, there does appear to be a very high level standard approach of interviews and other information gathering, analysis, program design and recommendations, that focus on particular action points such as organizational purpose, executive alignment, cultural values and behavior, and staff messaging, training and exercises.

 Within that context there does appear to be a general trend, which I heartily applaud, towards emphasizing human centered-values such as purpose, caring, engagement, fulfillment, emotional intelligence and so on. 

 There seems to be (again, this is personal perception) a good bit of exasperation in the OT community about the fact that in general business executives don’t appear to quickly understand and act on the critical nature and potential opportunities of organizational transformation and culture change.

 Finally, there does not appear to be much strong interchange and synergy among the major “change oriented” communities: OT, process change (and its numerous clans) and automation/IT. 

 This looks to me like a both an opportunity area and a source of executive resistance: all three types of change are needed (“people, process, technology”), and all three types of change agent compete for executive attention without a coordinated message. 

Transformation:  from cottage industry or guild to widely repeatable industrial discipline

The spark of an idea

 Two elements from the Corporate Rebels article combined to form the seed of an approach to transforming Organizational Transformation.

•  From the Corporate Rebels article I found a “bucket list” which is a “list of entrepreneurs, academics, organizations and business leaders that have become successful by working in radically different ways.”  (https://corporate-rebels.com/bucketlist/).
•  Haier is held up as a potential example as an outcome of an OT journey. An interesting follow up article would be a description of the stages of that transformation journey. How they arrived at their current state? What intermediate stages did they go through?

The proposed approach for transforming Organizational Transformation

From those elements the following approach emerged.

1) Review every organization and entity on the Corporate Rebels Bucket List.

2) For the companies,

2a) Capture all of their major intermediate transitional stages that carried them from traditional command and control organizations to wherever they are today, and

2b) Capture the specific “moves” that carried them from one transitional stage to the next.

An assumption is that successful transformation must have been done through specific, conscious policy decisions, emanating from the command and control hierarchy; it is unlikely that the changes happened by accident.

3) For the “Academics / Writers / Gurus”

3a) Mine their case studies for further examples of companies and their transition states and moves.

3b) Outline all of their suggested “moves”.

4) Compile evaluations of all the moves: success/failure criteria, “how to’s”, risks, etc.

5) Cross reference all the moves to the all the case studies.

6) Add free form search

And then as an extension:

7) Add references to process change and IT automation steps that were associated with the moves and case studies.

Assessment of this approach

Workload

That is a very large amount of work. However, it should not be extraordinarily difficult in analytic terms. The facts are there in the real world; they simply need to be captured and organized. And the analysis and construction work could be distributed in an “open source” project.

For example, university business schools could set up supporting programs that MBA and PhD students could participate in. I can imagine graduate students would see it as a feast. And the academics / writers / gurus could provide guidance, running commentary and debate on different merits.

Goal

The target output would be a knowledge repository, something like a cross between a wiki and an online adventure game, that would provide a “meta-roadmap”. Organizations could use this to develop specific roadmaps for transforming beyond command and control towards any number of alternative future states.

The purpose again would be to up-level the “disruptive transformation” consulting business from what is essentially a cottage industry/guild into a full-fledged industrial discipline.

Issues

There would be obstacles. The companies might not want to divulge their journeys at that level of detail. The academics / writers / gurus might not want to have their ideas/brands pooled and integrated. And the universities might want to adhere to their current programs.

However, there might be sufficient participation from the contributing groups to get started and create a critical mass of viral interest.

Getting started

Actualizing such an approach would require a small launch team to

a) outline the startup/development program,

b) recruit a group of prominent leaders for an initial leadership council and

c) promote the concept in order to start enlisting the larger group of contributors.

So all it really needs is one person who would take responsibility for recruiting and organizing the launch team.

Any takers?

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Call to action

I am not the person to be that initial leader, in large part because I lack the necessary credentials, reputation and experience. And I’m in the middle of launching a new business.

On the other hand, I would be delighted to facilitate the first few meetings if such a group were put together. 

In the spirit of starting with action, what I can do and have done is to create a group on LinkedIn for discussion of this idea.  (The link to the group is here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/groups/13920493/)

If you’re interested in this idea, please comment here and/or request an invitation to the group, and pile in.

Thanks for reading!