Organizational transformation equals organizational life. Sometimes we add an adjective to signpost a direction. For example, digital transformation. Very often I am not sure what the adjective adds.
My average, large company, client has at least seven big initiatives running in parallel. There is Six Sigma here, leadership programme there, employee engagement cascade workshops, simplicity, diversity and inclusion, quality improvement, innovation programme, talent management programme, you carry on please.
Each of them have their own sponsor, likely their own budget, their own tribes, their own need to deliver, their own defence mechanisms, their own identity and their own self-inflicted blindness to their neighbouring initiatives.
Ah, by the way, they all compete for the most precious currency in the organization’s life: airtime.
That the staff are often confused should not surprise us. Being clear would be surprising.
Programmes that are constructed as A,B,C, steps 1 to 8, number of workshops, number of activities, will be favoured. So all those trains will depart from the same station at different speeds and avoiding collision, what else?
There will be transformations, however, that don’t fit into a 1,2,3, a,b,c engineering style. They are more like a journey, where you need good equipment, a sense of direction and a shepherd if you are trying a Himalayan one. (You don’t need a shepherd to go to the grocery store on the corner).
Those real, true transformational programmes are harder because they need a leader (a) who can trust others, (b) who is prepared to accept the unplanned and emergent, and who (c) does not have to have all the answers pre-cooked.
There are those leaders around, but not many. But these are the ones who can exploit the full, real richness of the journey.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Read about GSK Vaccines’ culture change journey, powered by Viral Change [1] (article written by: Hilton Barbour).
Or watch our Change Journey video [2] and hear how Viral Change is successfully driving change across many organizations.
