Transformation & Change Excellence
Leading Change Becomes More And More Challenging
Does this feel familiar to you?
- Are you facing challenges due to accelerated change and competitive pressure?
- Do you find it challenging to prioritize forward-looking change while balancing the operating business?
- Are you torn between fire-fighting and driving change?
- Do you have a vision for your organization but lack the support to make it happen?
- Is your leadership team overwhelmed and unprepared to drive change?
- Do you see your teams struggling with a long list of recommended actions to turn your business around?
- Do you miss the traction of putting change plans into action and encounter high-level resistance across the organization?
We can help you figuring out how to address the need for change.
Change Has Changed
Organizational Perspective To Change
- Increased Sense of urgency – from rare to perpetuating change.
- Increased speed of change – high-speed change with shorter cycles.
- Skyrocketed impact – moving from era of mechanical to digital innovation.
- Technological advancements, the 4th. Industrial revolution, drive unprecedented change for Businesses happening 10 times faster, 300 times the scale and roughly 3.000 times the impact compared to the industrial revolution. (according to McKinsey Global Institute, 2015).
- Experience of permanent crisis and poly-crisis – From single trigger to multiple, simultaneous triggers on business inherent levels (market, customer, organization, society) and exogenous risks like climate change, pandemic, political and geopolitical risks
- Increased risks with pressing social, environmental challenges, scarcity of resources posing risks for stability and well-being
- Increased transparency requirements and reputational risks, due to mobile technology, social media, increased information flow, connectivity of people around the world.
Human Perspective To Change
- Perpetuating company transformations: the average company lifecycle dropping from 75 years in 20th. century to 15 years in 1989 to 6 years in 2022 (Reinvention Academy, 2022)
- Average employee experiencing planned enterprise changes: in 2016: 2 and in 2022: change 10 (Gartner, 2022)
- 85% of senior leaders have been involved in 2 or more major transformations in last 5 years (EY/ Oxford University, 2022)
- Negative emotions increased by 25% in successful transformations and more than 130% in underperforming Transformations and 50%, if employees experiencing underperforming Transformations, think “Transformation” is a different word for Lay-off. (EY/ Oxford University, 2022)
- Change fatigue as new challenge: Too often, leaders and employees endure a tumultuous journey fraught with stress, uncertainty, and, at times, even emotional trauma. The heavy emotional toll is evidenced by a significant decline in employee support. Willingness to support enterprise change dropped from 74% in 2016 to 43% in 2022 (Gartner, 2022).
Facing the Challenge: In today’s era of poly-crisis and rapid innovation, the need for transformation is universal and more urgent than ever. Every business, every employee, and indeed, every individual, will inevitably confront with disruptions and the pressing need for change and adaptation.
“When the rate of change inside an institution becomes slower than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight.” – Jack Welch in GE annual report, 2000
New Responses & Innovation Required
From Organizations
- Enable speed and scale: from building expertise and linking technology to building capabilities to connection people for innovation, agility and adaptability.
- New approaches: from formerly effective linear, check-the-box approaches with small project team to agile, adaptive and emerging approaches engaging the whole organization.
- Change strategy: from planned, one-off implementation project to treating it proactively with a continuous process perspective embedding change anticipation into operating system.
- New Leadership model: From command-control to cultivating innovative, creative, collaborative, inclusive behavior, stakeholder engagement on all levels and inter-disciplinary skills.
From Individuals
- Shift Perspective: from narrow, internal and mechanical to systemic perspective to understand long-term impact, emerging technologies, new requirements and stakeholder perspectives.
- Mindset shift: From problem to an opportunity, from risk-reduction to taking risks.
- Emotional shift: from needing in control to getting comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty.
Today’s world requires to move from sporadic to constant, adaptive change and leaders who take along individuals and shift mindsets towards continuous adaption, transformation and reinvention. We know how to avoid pitfalls in driving change.
“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” – Peter Drucker
Why Most Transformations Fail
Ignoring Human Nature
- Human beings inherently seek balance and survival, driven by core needs like safety, belonging, and mastery.
- These needs influence all cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses, even in an environment considered as rational.
- Individuals bring subjective perspectives, fostering a social dynamic focused on collective survival.
- Organizational structures and systems (e.g., processes, procedures, KPIs) often employ rational, technical approaches masking the human element.
Approach Problem
- Unprepared leaders, lack of practical experiences and tendency to immediately jump into solutions.
- Applying an oversimplified, mechanistic approach that ignores the interconnectedness of processes.
- Treating every change as a project and with the same approach.
- Relying on traditional project management tools focus on critical paths and KPIs, neglecting the psychological foundations of change.
- Approaching transformations with an engineering mindset fails to address the cultural and individual mindsets, underestimating human resistance and group dynamics within social systems.
The world today requires transformative responses that go beyond mere content and results.
We meticulously plan and execute strategies to address external and internal dynamics, including environmental, market, and cultural factors, as well as behavioral and mindset shifts among leaders and employees.
Our Transformation approach
Any Change Is A Disruptive Innovation –
Different Types Of Change Require Different Approaches
Types Of Change –
What’s Your Challenge?
We know how to prepare and drive any type of change and levers for success.
Incremental Change
Adjusting to deliver better performance, better results, better quality or operate at lower price.
Developmental and “boxed” in nature it improves an existing skill, method, performance standard or a condition that does not measure up to a current or future need.
Low risk and scale with limited impact on people side.
Transition
- Adjusting to a changed environment to remain competitive by building structures to respond to changed requirements, replace old systems, carving out or divest business.
- Old way of operating is dismantled in a transition phase that creates something new.
- It needs careful planning, project and risk management with special attention to human change response to avoid unnecessary trauma responses.
Transformation.
- Refers to the outcome of a large-scale change leading to a new way of operating.
- A change in strategy changes organizational design, structure incl. roles & responsibilities, new processes, systems and is so significant that it requires a shift of culture, behavior and mindset of everyone involved.
- High risk in nature it can lead to break-through or breakdown and requires a comprehensive approach and thoughtful management through the “chaotic” phase of discovery and co-creation.
Roadmap To Sustainable Change
A thorough roadmap to prepare, plan and implement any change is critical for success.
Our transformation approach follows six steps. All of them are crucial and require careful preparation to guarantee sustainable success.
- Define: Requirement definition
- Create: Create the environment for change
- Plan: Develop change
- Execute & improve: Execute the change plan, track progress, improve where needed
- Integrate & sustain: facilitate way forward, capture lessons learned & continuously improve results
Current State
Define
Create
Plan
Change
Transition
Transformation
Execute
Integrate
Sustain
Future
State
“All change is hard at first, messy in the middle, and gorgeous at the end.” – Robin Sharma
We can help you sort it out and design an approach customized to your type of change and your unique needs.
Our TRansformation Services
- Development of the CEO-Agenda
- Change Planning & Preparation incl. Change Capability & Impact Assessment
- Current state assessment, future state definition and required change transformation roadmap
- Establishing and enhancing Quality & Compliance culture
- Improving Customer-centricity and service orientation
- Engraining Continuous improvement and excellence culture
- Deploying Digital transformation roadmaps
- Shaping Cultural change after take-over and integration
- Establishing Sustainability and net-zero orientation
Transformation or Program Offices
- Concept, set up, capability building and management
- Portfolio Management incl. Interim Management
Enabling Transformation Leaders to drive change
- Coaching for Leaders of Transformation to embrace change, understand their role and build capabilities for transformational change leadership
- Facilitating leadership teams to embark to the journey and build change capacities
The changing world requires leaders adapt to the new reality of constant change. It is time to shift from sporadic to constant, adaptive change.
We know how to avoid pitfalls in driving change.
Our Transformation Results
- Clear, compelling strategy, approach, messaging and people engagement beyond traditional communication to avoid emotional turmoil
- Survive disruption and adaption to change
- Future-proofed organization
- Smooth transitions into new set-ups (organization, technology, services, systems, policies or procedures)
- Sustainable change & transformation
- Establishment of an adaptive culture