Are organisations facing the definitive challenge?

In the last 100 years, recessions have come and gone, politics have changed, people have shifted their understanding of the world. Not since the start of the Industrial Revolution, has there been such a coincidence of dramatic events and shifts in mindset making such a profound impact on organisational life. We now face:

• The apparent collapse of the global economic system
• The need to respond to natural resources running out, waste piling up and the awareness of the effect the energy it takes to turn one into the other on our climate
• Leaps in technology that are leading to increasing virtualisation and connectivity
• Gen Y attitudes starting to reach into the workplace
• Social and political changes causing shifts in longstanding global power dynamics and customer behaviour.

Some would have us believe that if we can just get through the current blip in global economics, things will eventually return to normal. But what if normal as we knew it isn’t coming back? What if we are really facing a new era of global organising and our institutions do not simply need to change (improve, be more efficient, do the same things better) but transform (rethink, be different, do different things)?

Many of our current clients believe that the time has come to transform. They realised that many of their previous change management methodologies were only producing more of the same. The harder they tried to make their accepted change approaches work, the further away it took them from fundamental transformation.

Talk to us about transformative approaches to:

• Process and organisational simplification and cost reduction, through high participation and workforce engagement
• Culture change, values and behavioural transformation
• Mergers, acquisitions and integrations
• People engagement/re-engagement projects using strength-based approaches like Appreciative Inquiry.

Most change management approaches are based on the Industrial Revolution concept that organisations are like machines, which can be re-engineered, and where objective analysis, rational management and structurally-driven change will lead to long lasting shifts in cultural dynamics, behaviour and ultimately performance. While change led from this perspective provides some sense of control and safety, ultimately, our action-research with clients shows it yields little long term, sustained transformation.

So transformational change, requires transformative thinking. One element of this thinking is a shift of mindset from seeing organisations as machines steered and driven by leaders, to seeing them as ongoing social processes and relationships in which everyone participates. Of course, some of these processes are determined by structural arrangements and formal procedures and systems, but most of them are informal, in the sense that people connect up and go about their business in a variety of unprescribed and unpredictable ways. Hence traditional change management focusing on formal structure change, or engaging only the leaders, gives only limited results. The real transformation work lies in engaging with the informal processes, the myriads of interactions which constitute the way people actually talk, act and make things happen together everyday.

Ashridge Consulting has been working with world leaders in the application of this new paradigm thinking for over 20 years. Our change approaches provoke transformation at the very roots of organisational thinking, challenging the mechanistic mindset with fresh ideas based on a unique blend of complexity thinking, sociology, psychology and philosophy, which gives rise to exciting new models of change. While being intellectually challenging, our work is also highly practical, providing pragmatic ways in which leaders can get themselves unstuck from their current assumptions and engage everyone in the process of change. The combination of our unique concepts and approaches strikes at the heart of the paradox of leading transformation in an organisation while also maintaining short term performance in highly challenging times.

A case study

Faced with merging two complex global businesses, many leaders would put aside cultural matters until the new business structure was in place. NSN (Nokia Siemens Networks) did the opposite – the new executive board declared its commitment to building a value-based enterprise with a new culture that would differentiate NSN from its rivals. The new culture should belong to all 60,000 staff and reflect the strengths of the former cultures.

The culture integration programme was lead internally by NSN’s Alistair Moffat, who worked in partnership with Ashridge Consultant Adrian McLean. The process they designed works from the assumption that integration is accelerated when people participate in dialogue, debate, assertion, argument and agreement. Through a company-wide conversation, new norms, values and behaviours can emerge.

Working through a mixture of workshops, inquiry methodologies and storytelling, they facilitated the exploration of the legacy cultures, engaged all the senior management and expanded this out to embrace genuine participation at all levels. This phase was concluded with all 60,000 members of the new company being invited to participate in a three-day, virtual, global conversation using IBM Jam technology. This conversation brought the values discussion to a culmination and generated an extraordinary amount of constructive suggestions.

The output of this was transparently developed further by various volunteer working groups via a Wiki site. These groups helped propose and test high level value statements and behavioural descriptors. A Core Values team worked with process leaders to incorporate the new values behaviours into their designs.

Co-creating these values through an inclusive, pan-company process has made for an exceptionally strong degree of ownership. The values have accelerated the progress of various process re-designs and change projects. NSN also believes that these benefits have reached the bottom line in the form of synergy savings and a sharply increased client customer focus.

At a glance