During our work we gained our own insights about how things work. Some of these patterns seem to be universal for most organizations and projects. Below we collected a few important learnings. If you can relate to the majority of these observations, chances are, we are going to be able to collaborate fruitfully:
- Urgency: Without genuine interest or perceived threat, resulting in strong intention, no fundamental change can be achieved in an organization.
- Ownership: Organizational culture can only be transformed permanently if the highest-ranking leader of the given organizational unit wants and lives the change. Furthermore, they have to expect the same from everyone below them and follow up on and hold them accountable for the change.
- Communication: Most organizational operational problems can be fundamentally traced back to communication issues. All systems are operated by people who typically haven’t learned how to speak assertively about their needs. Supporting them in developing this skill is essential for any change.
- Practice: The correct behavior (supporting better functioning) can only be acquired through practical means. Theories are useless without experience. Detailed theoretical plans are equally futile before beginning transformational work.
- Planning: In complex domains (most organizations fall into this category), planning for more than a few weeks or months ahead is a harmful waste of resources. Such a grandiose plan creates unfounded expectations, and later, forcing the impossible delivery of it, leads to tension, lying, and maneuvering.
- Customization: Those one-size-fits-all methodological frameworks that claim to be good for everything ultimately only serve as deterrent examples of dysfunction before the next change. Customization and fine-tuning of the tools used cannot be avoided and is also not possible without expertise.
- Motivation: People fundamentally don’t work for money. Money cannot motivate, it can only demotivate if someone doesn’t receive enough. However, autonomy (free decisions), mastery (continuously improving in one’s craft), and sense of purpose (one’s work serving an inspiring goal) create an extremely strong bond in a well-functioning team.
- Horizon: Only a portion of problems can be solved in the present with a short-term reactive approach. Truly significant change can be achieved through longer-term strategic energy investments that aim to transform the system in such a way that the given problems don’t even arise within it. The resource requirements for such transformations can only be drawn from the daily work performed in the present. Expecting unchanged present-day delivery alongside a transformation is therefore misguided and harmful.
- Persistence: Real change can only be achieved through long-term, persistent, and patient experimentation. Every organization has its own unique maximum possible speed of development. Nine women cannot give birth to a child in one month. The progress speed of others means nothing for our organization.
- Experimentation: Mistakes and errors are by-products of improvement and as such are welcome. The best solution can only be found through a series of experiments, which by definition mostly end in failure, and this is good. The effectiveness of this approach has been clearly evident in the evolution of terrestrial organisms for millions of years.
- Management: Involving the middle management layer is crucial in every transformation. In dysfunctionally operating organizations, they are fundamentally opposed to strengthening transparency and communication, as the disruption of these ensures their survival in dark isolation in the current toxic environment. Making these leaders interested should be one of the most important focus areas for top management.
- Purpose: There’s no such thing as an “agile transformation”. Agile operation can be a good tool, but it can never be a goal. Instead, at the beginning of a change, it’s worth defining in which areas, exactly what, and to what extent we want to change the organization.
- Clarity: The most common confusion in leadership work is mistaking desires for possibilities. Just because we want something very much doesn’t make it possible. Just because we don’t listen to the executor’s doubts, doesn’t mean a workaround is born for them. The leader’s job is to create the conditions for change in the organization. The change itself happens automatically if there’s fertile ground for it.
- Consultant: With sufficient time and energy investment, any change can be carried through, but involving an experienced expert at the very beginning of the process saves the organization from many false expectations and futile efforts.
- Governance: Tasks of transformation initiatives can only be realized if the resources needed for them are allocated. The surest way to achieve this is if these tasks are prioritized at the same table as business tasks and are distributed, delivered and followed up in a common control model. If we try to implement the tasks necessary for change through channels parallel to business ones, they will sooner or later fall behind and lack resources, because the executors will not consider them “real” work.
- Resistance: Skeptics are the best potential allies. They can only be convinced through experiences, but once converted, they become champions of change. This is especially true for opinion leaders and influencers within a group.
- Judgement: It’s not always possible to transform everyone to accept a new culture and set of values. It’s necessary to make efforts to convert them, but it’s equally important to recognize when this is not possible. Ultimately, it may become necessary to remove toxic resistors from the organization, which is always the job and responsibility of the leaders. Keeping such entrenched people in the organization undermines the faith and trust of supporters and can discredit or even cause the failure of the change.
- Humanity: People are not machines, but sentient beings blessed with emotions and needs. They will support efforts if the servant leadership approaches them with empathy and openness. Expecting people to leave their private lives at the workplace door is fundamentally an impossible misconception.