business transformation

The two biggest issues faced by organisations today are the changing business context and the changing people context.

The changing business context 

Organisations are shaped by the needs and demands of the eras they have travelled through. Change has always been part of a business, but the seismic changes brought by technology today means organisations need to change faster than they ever have before.

It’s not that organisations haven’t done change before – it’s just now it’s a lot faster. And to cope with change that fast, some things need to be done differently.

Software is eating the world. Startups become unicorns overnight. Tech giants move into any industry. Autonomous cars make diesel irrelevant. Alternative sources of energy. Smart everything. Data abundance. We are in the middle of a technology revolution. One new concept, however, is corporations starting to imitate best practices of startups and tech giants. Corporate innovation is no longer done by an R&D unit that is separated from the main business.

Nowadays the term Lean Management (LM) is widely used and mostly understood. However, implementing a proper LM program requires some expertise to guide you through the different stages and fully achieve the desired results. Here's a quick guide of what you need to consider in order to successfully implement such a program.

We conducted a Q&A interview with Suzie Lewis, Managing Director at Transform for Value, around business transformation, strategic organisational change, and the importance of inclusion and wellbeing within an organisation.
 

Could you introduce yourself and what you do?

Change has fast become the one constant in businesses today, but can there be a point when too much change is no longer good for business?

If the changes aren’t fully considered, fully implemented and the people are not engaged with the process, then yes.

In 2013 a large London based organisation commenced a two-year transformation programme looking to change everything from their systems, processes, policies, procedures, structures, IT infrastructure and nationwide office locations.

Agile is a word always on the lips of digital business leaders.  It’s the way to be if you are working in digital and has set the popular standard as the recent way to work.  This isn’t the first time a methodology has grabbed the business world so completely –  after all the world of business does like its new ways of working.

When I started working as a management consultant, the industry had different buzzwords. We were TQM, Balanced Scorecard and Lean.  We had our core ways of being, all helpfully documented in books we could buy out at the airport.

During a recent conversation with a family member about the data-age, she shared with me that she never thought there would be so much data at her fingertips -- anything and everything you could ever think of. We both agreed that no matter what “data” was available through online resources, friends, for example, nothing would take the place of experiencing first-hand what you just Googled.

Over the past decade or so, the concept of Design Thinking has become a popular approach to problem-solving. In some circles, Design Thinking is viewed as a methodology with several different process models (see IDEO, Hasso Plattner Institut, as examples) that provide guidance on how to engage in this process. In other circles, Design Thinking is viewed as a philosophy or a mindset that guides problem-solving.

You’re about to embark on a change programme, you’ve spent weeks or months planning the changes behind the scenes and you’ve announced the changes to your people. You’ve got a communication plan with all of the announcements, the meetings and the emails scheduled and still your people don’t seem engaged with the changes or understand the reasons for them – what’s next?