Engaging people in strategy development and business transformation

By Matthew Rogozinski

Many executives can see an opportunity to transform their organisations.  Perhaps for some it’s an imperative.  At any point in a business cycle there are managers in all sectors of the economy whose careers hinge on the success of an upcoming transformation.  

If you are in the public sector, the challenge confronting you may be to realign your organisation for a new authorising environment.  If you are a company executive, it could be working out how to make sure your business competes with other players that are fast evolving into new kinds of businesses.  The common question for either manager, however, is to ensure that the transformation succeeds and the challenge is met.

This means making sure that the change process doesn’t go on for years, as teams tinker at the edges of the problem and generate rafts of changes that don’t yield any evident benefits. It also means eliminating the bureaucracy of the endless meetings, and the series of progress maps that are shown on the journey so far, when the end-goal continues to be nowhere in sight.

Put simply, for a large scale change program to be successful, it mustmake the transformation that is envisaged at the outset a reality.  And many C-Level Executives tell us that it’s their role to do just that. 

Charting the Journey Together

Our experience tells us that actually transforming the dynamics of an organisation is well-nigh impossible without looking beyond the limits of its defining horizons.  

For any entity looking to transform itself, we advocate what we call an ‘organic’ approach, which is all about engaging the organisation from the outset in the design of its own future.  This involves much more than the familiar syndrome of “bringing people along on the journey”. It’s essentially “charting the journey together” in a genuine process of collaborative design.

Our transformation program, which is called Going Beyond the Horizon, engages an organisation at three levels: 

• At the level of the Executive Team, involving all direct reports to the C-Level Executive; 

• At Board level, including all advisory, management or supervisory members; and

• At the level of its people working in the broader organisation.  

How Going Beyond the Horizon Works

After about 10 week-long ‘hot houses’ (these are the workshops you can read about in the Cut-through to Break Through article), we expect that the organisation will have set its new strategic direction and established a transformation agenda for endorsement by the Board and the other stakeholders.  The Executive Team will then become responsible for realising the transformation initiatives, which will be carefully scoped to within a 90-day deliverable timeframe to minimise scope creep and delays. 

A key feature of the Beyond the Horizon approach is that the initiatives are never implemented through a separate transformation program - they are always delivered through ‘the line’.  The role of the program office is limited to providing resources to supplement available skills and making sure that progress is transparent.  There won’t be any ‘progress updates’, though - only milestones met or missed, and how to deal with those. 

Beyond the Horizon is neither a bottom-up nor a top-down process, but rather a harnessing of the talent and knowledge of the whole organisation in authenticating the task of transformation.

What Happens After Beyond the Horizon?

After a Beyond the Horizon program, an organisation will typically see:

• A widespread understanding of the case for change, which is very immediate for the people who will deliver it.  This accelerates buy-in and creates the momentum for change very early on: all stakeholders are aligned on it, including the Board;

• An intense level of excitement and passion for the developed direction of the organisation among its people: silos get broken, people start to collaborate, and this creates a strong platform for delivery;

• Natural selection: those who decide to get on board, stay for the journey, which strengthens the Team as a whole;

• The opening up of a fast-forward road to change: business-as-usual stops quite quickly, and is replaced by a new way of working.

If you are interested in knowing more about this transformation program, please contact Inhance Partners.