Fourth in the mini series: uncovering of truths of the failure of change and transformation programmes via a reverse engineering.
Lack of vision, one way or another, is often used to explain failure. In my experience this does not necessarily come at the top. OK, there may be sloppy visions, or half cooked visions, I accept. But nobody is completely blind.
In fact, strong tunnel vision is as big a problem. Something has been decided (a form of restructuring for example) and the red button is pushed with no flexibility to review or change gears. It’s a Brexit type of organizational transformation.
Of course, our wonderful mind mechanism, cognitive dissonance, kicks in and we have a million reasons why what we are doing is perfect, after all we have committed lots of resources and, PowerPoints, you know, have a life of their own. Cognitive dissonance then meets her sister Groupthink, and then it’s all sorted.
I wrote many moons ago that the Proverb’s line, ‘when there is no vision people perish’ needs to be translated in management as ‘when there is too much vision people perish faster’.
Fixed, rigid destinations expressed by fixed minded people, seen as fixed and strong leaders are simply dangerous. If top leaders have all the answers, they are not qualified for the job.
So, then, what? Am I advocating chaos? Never said that. We don’t’ live in a bipolar world. We live in one where navigation skills are needed and that included the ability to change gears faster.
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Hear more from Leandro Herrero and his team as they debunk The Myths of Change [1]. Traditional management and a great deal of academic thinking is responsible for the colossal failure of ‘change programmes’.
To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations, particularly in the areas of change and transformation. We must abandon change as something imposed in favour of people becoming true agents. Organizations that have mastered this have been in ‘the new normal’ for a while!
What attendees said:
‘Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this fantastic webinar. Both the depth of the discussion between Leandro and Carlos and the very intensive exchange in the chat inspired me.’
It was a great pleasure to participate in today’s webinar…. If you would have been sitting next to me, you would have seen a lot of ‘head nodding’ and heard a couple of loud ‘yes’es’ from the bottom of my heart.
WATCH NOW [1]
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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project [2], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral ChangeTM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.
Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements [3] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project [4].
His latest book, The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management [5], is available at all major online bookstores.
