Have you embarked on a digital transformation journey and like 8 out of 10 organisations, your destination is not what you had in mind? Indeed, the journey may not have matched expectations either.1

One of my first exposures to digital transformation was 7 years ago with a local media client moving to a digital platform.

Two things stick in my mind:

  1. The vendor’s education of users was not very brain-compatible (a conversation I had had with the management of that vendor some 10 years prior to that.) This meant super-users had to do a lot of additional work to bridge the gap between what was provided and what was needed to embed the new capability
  2. There was a ‘shock and awe’ component to the new way of working.

This begs the question: how change-ready were people and organization?  Change mastery and learning are capability sets; how could the journey and destination have been improved if these capabilities were already developed in both people and organization? In other words, how much better would the transition have been if transformation had preceded digitization?

Employees have typically had such awful and alienating experiences with organizational change that while you may have landed a change project on time and on budget, you may well be left with an organization stripped of goodwill and resources needed to sustain the gains.

With this, you may have set the organization up for repeated aftershocks as talent and institutional knowledge drains out leaving you exposed in every way. You may even find you need rehabilitative post-transformation re-transformation.

In the early 2000s, Jim Collins differentiated the Great transformations as those following a steady, ‘flywheel’ continuous momentum build up. He distinguished this from those that lurch back and forth – the ‘shiny object’ syndrome, perhaps? ‘More haste, less speed’ and many similar proverbs come to mind. They aim to get to the breakthrough without the buildup. His message seems as relevant today.2

Change Versus Transformation – The Difference?

When Jim Collins wrote ‘Good to Great’, organizational change was the theme du jour. Nowadays, talk is about transformation. Are they fundamentally different or is the difference simply one of scale and reach?

 According to Managing Partner, John Palinkas, “Change uses external influences to modify actions, but transformation modifies beliefs so actions become natural and thereby achieve the desired result.3

Transformation may therefore be seen as more of a state of being that comes about from the process that Collins describes as buildup and breakthrough, where persistent, continuous effort creates momentum.

 Quake-proof Structures

In New Zealand, unsurprisingly, there is an interest in earthquake-resilient structures. Readiness for seismic shifts – expected or otherwise – is crucial to survival.

In business, fragility is not as acute. Response times are more generous. But then fragility is increased by the fact that no leader has the sophistication of seismic instrumentation providing precise early warnings of change forces otherwise hidden from the human eye.

In the same way that some cities are built to absorb and survive seismic disruption, and structures are being explored that flex and twist in response to violent and unexpected forces, so organizations need structures that flex around the main thrust of organization purpose.

Transformation of the Third Kind

In my experience, there are three approaches to the digital transformation challenge:

  1. Command and control: a small group of titled people make decisions about how things will work for customer and investor benefit realization, an executive sponsor is appointed and then the ‘project’ is delegated (abdicated?) to the IT department.
  2. Item 1 above plus a ‘consultation’ phase whereby people are asked for input (but where they suspect none of their thoughts will affect any decisions) after which the project is given to the IT department.
  3. The organization prioritizes its purpose and digitization is seen as one vehicle for achieving the core purpose. There is collective involvement in ensuring all work furthers that purpose. As there is alignment from one end of the organization to the other, there is trust in people doing the right thing. Structures form and dissolve as needed; whoever sees a risk to purpose sounds an alarm that triggers an adaptive response.

The third approach to transformation described above is where transformation is a way of being; where an organization continually transforms in natural pursuit of the best fulfillment of its core purpose. Anyone and everyone shares responsibility to make the necessary calls, and take the necessary action, to fulfill this requirement.

Here are some characteristics of this type of organization where transformation is a state of being. How does yours compare?

  • The team is more important than individual ‘superstars’4
  •  People contribute in roughly equal amounts
  • People have high social sensitivity – they notice and respond to others’ needs
  • Communication is a strength5
  • Collaboration is high

“Every desk in SEI’s (a global provider of outsourced investment solutions) offices is on wheels, allowing workers to constantly adapt their settings to the work at hand. When teams need a collaboration space, they roll their desks together. When they need a quiet space, they separate to allow for focused work.”6

Change-agility and a transformational state comes from leaders who connect, who encourage meaningful contribution and who facilitate people doing their best work using a ‘one team’ approach to all work. There is simply no place for egos or individual agendas.

If this describes your organization you may already be transformative and may not need ‘re-transformation’ to take full advantage of the digital era. If not, it pays (literally and handsomely) to get the organization, leadership and culture ‘disruption-ready’ before expecting to realize transformation benefits – digital or otherwise.

Sources:

1“Why 84% of companies fail at Digital Transformation” by Brian Rogers. 7 Jan 2016
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucerogers/2016/01/07/why-84-of-companies-fail-at-digital-transformation/#70571ef0397b

2Jim Collins. Good to Great. Harper Collins Publishers. 2001. www.jimcollins.com

3“The Difference Between Change and Transformation” by John Palinkas. CIO Insight. 28 June 2013. https://www.cioinsight.com/it-management/expert-voices/the-difference-between-change-and-transformation

4“Forget the Pecking order at work.” Meg Heffernan. 16 June 2015
https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_why_it_s_time_to_forget_the_pecking_order_at_work?language=en

5“The simple secret behind high-performance teams.” Diana Tapp. Idealogue. 04 Mar 2016
https://idealog.co.nz/workplace/2016/03/truth-about-businesss-favourite-four-letter-word-team

6Deloitte Access Economics. “The Collaborative Economy – Google”. 2014.
https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/au/Documents/Economics/deloitte-au-economics-collaborative-economy-google-170614.pdf

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