Embarking on a Change Journey?
Episode One
This is the first in a series of articles that talks about the Journey of Change, the common challenges at each stage and some effective tactics to overcome them. It’s the story of a journey, not only for organizations, but also for the individuals within them, and one that ultimately puts them both on a path to better performance.
Evolve believes that organizations increasingly recognize that building organizational capability and achieving operational excellence, or what we call the relentless pursuit of performance, is a fundamental requirement for long-term business success. As business theorist Arie de Geus put it, "the ability to learn faster than competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage." The relentless pursuit of performance provides the opportunity for organizations to do exactly that.
However, succeeding in this pursuit is much less common than many would like to believe. For example, in a Harvard Business Review article from September 2017 titled "Why do we undervalue competent management?" the authors found that "Firms with strong managerial processes perform significantly better on high-level metrics such as productivity, profitability, growth, and longevity. In addition, the differences in the quality of those processes—and in performance—persist over time, suggesting that competent management is not easy to replicate." Further complicating matters, according to the authors, is that "a large number of managers can’t objectively judge how well their firms are run."
So why is this journey of change so difficult and elusive?
For most businesses, the journey to better performance is a challenging one for many reasons - from limiting organizational structures and processes, to inadequate systems, unhelpful policies and poor management and leadership. These obstacles are merely what we immediately see on the surface. As we look deeper into why organizations stumble, we discover that often it is the human factor that is the cause - how people interact and what their beliefs are about what is permitted and what is possible.
To continually achieve better performance means that every person in the organization needs to understand that what we "know" to be right today can be ultimately limiting, because those beliefs may not deliver desired results in the future. In the words of Marshall Goldsmith, "What got you here, won't get you there".
The difficulty in embracing this conundrum means that we behave in ways designed to preserve the past, holding us back from creating new ways of working. In order to overcome these limiting beliefs we need a culture of humility, curiosity, vulnerability and courage to open ourselves to new learning - to explore, to create and to solve both current and future challenges.
The journey to better performance requires slowly changing the "state" of the organization, over a period of time, moving from stagnant to dynamic and unbounded states; from a place where performance is mundane to one where performance is remarkable. This requires changing people’s beliefs about what is possible, building skills to overcome existing challenges, and developing an organization that is open to learning so that they can anticipate and solve future problems.
It also requires thoughtful, powerful and engaging interventions that are connected, and build upon one another to create a positive experience for the organization. These interventions are each designed with purpose and intent - to build awareness of the journey, engaging people and removing fear. Over time, this instills a culture of learning and a deep passion for achieving new levels of performance.
Most importantly, the journey tends not to follow a simple, straight path where completing a series of activities in a particular order yields the desired results. It is much more non-linear and dependent upon a set of conditions and variables, including the skills and capabilities of those on the journey, the terrain to be traversed and the seemingly random external forces that buffer, constrain and sometimes even facilitate progress.
"Like it or not, the Relentless Pursuit of Performance and the need for change, is inevitable." Rupert Hucker, CEO Evolve Partners