04/03/2019
From the book, Shift: 8 Great Strategies for Successful Transformation.*
There are eight organisational responses to change. Take the following test to identify which of the eight fits your organisation – and what you can do today to improve your performance.
Every organisation responds differently to change. How they respond though determines their fate. The following eight organisational responses to change illustrate symptoms, diagnosis and treatments for each typology.
#1 RUSHED RESPONDERS
Symptoms
Action at any cost
Aren’t inclined to question or forecast beyond short-term
Acts without thinking
Busy, not necessarily productive
Diagnosis
Will not lead market
Will consistently react to outside influences and situations
Little planning
Will typically act first, question results later
Treatment
Slow down organisational recklessness
Identify purpose, vision, values, mission
Align beliefs and behaviours
Put new systems in place
Connect work of employees to the larger context of the business
For more help, try these activities:
Create a war room. Like Churchill during World War 2, you need to find a space from which you can direct the efforts of your campaign to better prepare for change. Find a room, claim it for its sole purpose and make it command central. Build your war cabinet (see below). Meet often. Discuss everything: customers, employees, services, experiences, innovation, marketing, communications, competitors, the industry, the economy. Create an environment where the conversation is open – but targeted. Decorate the space with pie charts, customer journey maps, questions, quotations, sketches and anything else that will inform, influence or inspire.
Form a war cabinet. Like all great leaders, when preparing for any campaign, you need to surround yourself with talented advisors. Form a war cabinet that includes strategists, visionaries, futurists, analysts, technicians, historians, customer anthropologists and logisticians. They don’t have to be from within your organisation. Meet regularly in your war room and strategise.
#2 NON-RESPONDERS
Symptoms
Denial
Lacking direction
Unengaged
Lacks purpose
Work is not clear
Accountability is rare
Diagnosis
Will quickly fade from competitive landscape without radical and urgent change
Poor performing
Poor communication with customers and employees causes poor connections
Treatment
Create a sense of urgency
Align people with purpose
Engage leadership team
Communicate vision and mission authentically to employees
For more help, try these activities:
The destination is not the journey. Without a clearly defined path and a mission, your people will struggle to make the journey. North American explorers Lewis and Clark planned and plotted their destination well before commencing one of the most treacherous and uncertain journeys of their time. They also ensured their companions were informed and prepared. When they set about crossing North America, Lewis and Clark confronted many journey-ending decisions. In most instances, the risks associated with moving forward are not significantly different from those associated with staying put. In these situations, Lewis and Clark always opted for the decision that would keep the Corps of Discovery moving forward.
To help your people take the journey of change, consider the following:
Make sure they see the destination clearly (and that it has meaning)
Give them the means to reach the destination (resources, skills, tools)
Deliver valuable rewards along the way
#3 PROTECTIVE RESPONDERS
Symptoms
Eliminate people, processes, systems and cost-incurring resources to protect core
Lean and mean
Consumer and employee distrust
People become self-protective, which impedes growth and customer relations
Possibly too aggressive in good times, which may lead to excesses
Most commonly a mature organisation
Diagnosis
Creates levels of anxiety and uncertainty among employees
Could lead to higher levels of disengagement and sense of futility
May lose connections with customer segments based on certain elimination strategies
Treatment
Communicate
Engage people in the process
Get better at future-casting and innovation
Come back to the core
Realign people with process and values
For more help, try these activities:
Cut time, not jobs. Don’t be too quick to slash jobs and place people’s livelihoods in jeopardy. They were once the engine that drove the success of your organisation. They were the people who believed in the brand, delivered its promise to customers and helped make your organisation competitive. Don’t alienate them. Don’t treat them with anything less than the respect they deserve.
Consider your options: Will certain employees take pay cuts to stay on? Will people job-share in roles? Are there government subsidies or programs available that will allow employees to work fewer hours and receive benefits to compensate for lost wages (enabling you to keep 100% of your workforce but only paying for 50%, for example). Do everything in your power to find ways of keeping your people. If all else fails, and you must end employment, ensure that you maintain the dignity of those terminated – and, where possible, avoid a hire-last fire-first policy, as this is often counterproductive; most organisations hire better as they develop and grow, so you may end up eliminating some of your best people. Also, look at cutting costs before you cut people.
#4 AGGRESIVE RESPONDERS
Symptoms
Strategic
Action-oriented
Innovative
First-to-move, fast-to-move actions
Typically market leader or a #2 that sees an opportunity; or a start-up
Diagnosis
May be too abrasive for consumers in cautious times
Could be viewed as market-leader bully
Treatment
Communicate values (internally and externally)
Connect with customers through open and regular communications
Engage people in the process and push the importance of values
Connect with local communities wherever possible
For more help, try these activities:
A little R&R. Recognition is one of the most powerful motivational resources available. People will do more for recognition than reward (even those who may be primarily extrinsically motivated). Psychologically, people often feel indebted, unworthy or uncomfortable when they receive rewards. However, recognition provides higher levels of authentic engagement (particularly in the social sector, where most employees are intrinsically motivated) and builds an expectation of performance that employees feel unconsciously compelled to sustain.
Walk the talk. How are you recognising employees who perform well? How do you currently assess performance? Do your people know that standard of assessment. Make sure they’re recognised, and make sure they know what they’ll be recognised for. As Napoleon said, “A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of coloured ribbon.”
#5 PLANNED RESPONDERS
Symptoms
Forecasting
Organised
Believes in its own future
Meeting-heavy
Diagnosis
Could get too caught up in over-analysis
May focus too much on business operations and not enough on customers and employees
Could be too bogged down in planning and organising to be an industry leading innovator
Treatment
Communicate values
Create streamlined processes and systems for innovation
Engage people in the process
Connect with stakeholders with regular communication
For more help, try these activities:
Adding new value. New value creation is about the art of possibility. It’s about looking at how one act of creating new value makes possible others. Great employees are constantly thinking about how to create new value in each part of their world. Action by action, they then go and create it. In doing so, they open up infinite possibilities of how to grow. Reward and inspire those people within your organisation who seek to add value. The people who question everything. The ones who are constantly in search of making things better. Don’t diminish their enthusiasm or behaviour. Don’t devalue it. Don’t allow it to be stopped by cultural limitations (for example, “That’s not how we do things around here” or “We don’t have the time or money for that”). Embrace it and give them the freedom to act. You don’t have to like all their ideas – you just have to listen to them and act on the right ones.
#6 SHADOW RESPONDERS
Symptoms
Tentative
Hedging
Lacking faith
Waits and watches early responders
Cautious
Diagnosis
Will be too slow to change in fast-shifting environments
Will always be playing follow-the-leader
Will not be an innovator or early adopter
Treatment
Become more courageous
Create cultures of innovation and performance
Create systems to support speed of ideas and outcomes
Shift values and align beliefs and behaviours
For more help, try these activities:
Create a process for breakthrough innovation. Use the following INNOVATE model to help.
Investigate: Investigate the world at large and open your mind to new possibilities.
Necessitate: Identify and understand your customers’ unmet needs.
Navigate: Navigate a clear path from idea to concept.
Observe: Observe and discuss how your idea will improve the lives of your customers.
Visualise: Visualise future uses, challenges and opportunities.
Actualise: Build prototypes, models and maps of your concept.
Test: Create a pilot project, an Alpha version or a rehearsal model and test it thoroughly.
Engage: Take it to market. (And continue to learn about it.)
#7 SLOW RESPONDERS
Symptoms
Denial
Overly cautious
Poor planners
Not strategic
Poor vision
Diagnosis
Will quickly lose market share and customers
Will fail to connect with customers’ new value definition in changing times
Will slip further behind the competition as technology changes and industries develop
Treatment
Get faster and smarter
Redefine strategies and strategy sessions
Create a sense of urgency
Shift values and align beliefs and behaviours
For more help, try these activities:
Scenario planning. In a 2001 survey of North American senior executives, only 30% said they used scenario planning (or future-casting) during the course of their business. In a 2008 survey, more than 85% of senior executives indicated their one regret (on reflection of the global economic crisis) was not planning well enough for the future. If you don’t plan for the future (and all its possible variations), how can you be prepared for the different environments it may bring with it? If you don’t have contingency strategies in place, then you’ll be playing catch-up with your competitors – and in change environments like the NDIS, that can be catastrophic. Be wary of the Rip Van Winkle effect. In good times, in an economy of abundance, organisations can become complacent, drift off to sleep and awake suddenly to profound changes in their environment. Stay alert. Tomorrow’s successes are determined by today’s actions.
#8 SHORT-SIGHTED RESPONDERS
Symptoms
Ignorant of economic/industry impacts
Very poor planners
Just a place to work
Lacks purpose
Diagnosis
Will be very quick to disappear from the competitive landscape
Will rapidly lose customers and profits
Treatment
Identify purpose and align business objectives and strategies
Communicate vision, values and mission to employees and stakeholders
Create processes
Reconnect with customers
For more help, try these activities:
To do, or not to do. That is the question. Every situation presents two distinct choices:
Do nothing.
Do something.
If you do nothing, you’re at the mercy of others. If you do something, destiny is in your hands.
Do nothing: Linens ‘N Things believed that the global economic crisis would be a speed bump on the financial freeway, and that their current strategies would serve them well. With 571 stores and 7,300 employees, the 24-year-old retailer with $2.75 billion in revenues in 2005, liquidated in October 2008.
Do something: Netflix. The U.S. internet and mail-order movie retailer, saw an opportunity early in the global economic crisis. Realising that people would most likely replace social entertainment with home entertainment, the company made a substantial marketing push. The new home movie and entertainment producer king (goodbye Blockbuster) registered a 19% increase in revenues during the deepest period of the GFC.
