Organizations go through organizational changes and these changes could be either adaptive or transformational.
Adaptive changes are the small changes that happen over time, for example a decision to introduce a new policy like "work from home policy" or even the introduction of an LMS in the company. Both examples highlight the need for adjustment in the company and affect the way of working. Transformational changes are larger changes that happen in organizations, for example the decision for expansion, or launching a new product or service.
Organizations accumulate organizational debt for every change they do. If the plan is not sufficient enough to manage it, then it ends up being toxic and processes become more and more dysfunctional making everyone's life harder. High employee turnover, employee burnouts, frustration, confusion, low morale, low productivity, the feeling of losing control, the need for building silos and relying more on individuals rather than teams are just some of the symptoms we usually experience in these cases.
One of the most critical organizational debts we experience is when impediments are not being resolved in a timely manner or are not resolved at all. In this case, employees are forced to find workarounds to deliver their work. Those workarounds could be frustrating and usually focus on the symptoms and not on the root cause of the organizational debt and in due time it becomes a routine and without realizing it, the debt grows substantially and the operating model ends up being dysfunctional. The most usual scenario in this case, is that the flow of information, communication and transparency are broken in the organization simply because the main focus is to tick the box of the expectations at any cost.
Agile mindset and Scrum help organizations deal with these situations and significantly reduce their organizational debt. Kaizen and Kaikaku are the two actions that help organizations continuously refactor and optimize their productivity. Continuous improvement is based on evolutionary (Kaizen) action items coming from small and stable teams that are empowered to experiment and discover the best way of working that fits best for them. Continuously refactoring your organization to adjust in the modern era requires revolutionary (Kaikaku) actions in a way that your organizational growth is organic and there is a buy-in from everyone.
Change doesn't happen overnight. You need to prepare the organization for the upcoming change, craft a vision and a plan, set your strategy and strategic goals that must be realistic and measurable. We work with OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) setting the strategy of the change. We identify the main change pillars and then break them down with OKRs linked from top to bottom. Two of the main goals during a change are: (1) to have transparency to the extent that each and every employee will have a clear understanding on why he or she is working on something that has been prioritised in the organizational backlog and (2) to promote team working spirit by having shared goals, removing behaviours between different functions that usually employees refer to "us and them".
Implementing the change is the next step. Implementation is influence oriented and we start with volunteers that believe and understand the value of the change. We work together setting up the "New company" and we design a small agile bubble that we run during our pilot period. Having said that change doesn't happen overnight, the dual operating model is a fundamental key success factor to begin the change. The big bang approach is not preferred as the failure risk is extremely high. The incremental implementation with an evolutionary series of steps is the recipe to successfully change your organization. During the implementation, we measure the progress, continuously reflect the results, take improvement actions and present the outcome to leadership. We revisit the OKR strategy and make sure the overall progress is being reflected.
