B36 – Indefinite Integrals, Airplanes & Change Management 2.0

b36-planes

 

Over the course of my final block week here at Columbia Business School (can’t believe it’s almost finished), I took Advanced Organizational Change with one of my favorite Professors Todd Jick.  If you recall, last year I “tooted his horn” pretty intensely.  I still stand by it.

This class is his playground, his time to put together the most cutting edge advances, to bring in speakers and send us out to visit organizations who are literally in the midst of their own organization’s change.  I tweeted about one great speaker.

 

We had field visits to places like The New York Times, New York Public Library, Lincoln Center and Union Square Hospitality.  Recounting the culture of The Times was a serious reminder of my own experience prior to business school.

The class was beautifully crafted.  We weren’t using 3 year old graphs or data (like some lazy professors), but rather ripped straight from last week’s headlines.  The fact is, organizations are changing, they need to change, and they have no choice if they want to survive in the long run.  It’s up to the leadership whether it’s embraced or not–and hey, some of these businesses have no hope and therefore milk it for all its got.

Throughout the class discussions and guest speakers, which included General Casey talking about his experience leading the army into a totally different style of combat than he (and everyone) had trained for in Iraq, I couldn’t help but think about acceleration its (indefinite) integral velocity and its (indefinite) integral distance.

Now stick with me here, I only took AP Physics and AP Calculus, so we’re not going to be getting to math and science-y.

Let’s simplify here.  Say you have a race and you’re trying to get to the finish line; you have some sort of distance to go.  Two people reach the finish line at the same time, should they be treated the same?

To assess that, you might postulate that it depends if we are assessing just that one race.  If yes, perhaps, but what if there was an immediate other race to run?  You’d then want to know how fast they are moving through that finish line, how sustainable that pace is.

One person might have stumbled, crashed and burned and barely made it to that finish line.  He/she still got there, but he/she is not going to finish that next race as well. The other could be going at a fairly strong pace and continue to move at the same pace to the second finish line. Clearly then, the two should be treated differently.

So let’s make this MBA math and science.  Instead of “person” replace with “company” and replace “finish line” with “goal” and voila, application to business school initiated.

Both companies could have the same goal, but one company’s culture could be struggling to reach that goal while another company will be able to easily reach that and move on to the next one.

But with stagnant cultures, there is a plethora of evidence showing that they will need to improve their cultures in order to be able to reach the next goal–to stay in business.  Why? Because we live in a world of advances in technology, differences in generational thinking, and shifts in global economics that make achieving the goal harder.  The old ways of doing things won’t be as effective. So something needs to change, and that’s the culture.

That’s essentially the basis of Change 1.0.

So what do you do?  You understand, enlist, envisage, motivate, communicate, act and consolidate to get that organization running with a decent culture, at a steady velocity.

Change 2.0 moves to the next level of assessment, to a company’s acceleration.  It’s about being able to not just finish the race and move towards the next race, but also about increasing the velocity with which you finish the race.

Why does this matter?

Because we live in a VUCA world (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity).  We are facing evermore uncertainty requiring changes in how we do things that are growing at a more rapid pace.  The uncertainty in business is not just increasing, it’s increasing at an increasing rate, it’s accelerating.

We face differing head and tailwinds each day that can prevent us from hitting our target.  Organizations have to finish increasingly more races to stay relevant, to stay alive, to stay competitive.  To do so requires an increase in speed with which organizations handle the changes–aka acceleration.

We have moved from uncertainty being one dimensional like a wheel rolling down a hill to one of being three dimensional like an airplane flying in the sky.

It is no longer just about our ability to roll from one point to the next, to move things through an assembly line in a predictable manner, to simply roll down a hill.

It is no longer about our ability to move at the same pace we did before making sure we keep our bearing with a few variations in our environment, to charge the same billable hours by getting new clients, to sail our boat through the water.

It is now about our ability to increase our cultural capacity to handle and excel with VUCA, to deal with disruptive technologies, to fly a plane in the unpredictable sky.

So Change 2.0 is all about accelerated capacity for learning and growth to handle volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.  It is vital to keep hitting our goals in today’s world.

It’s no longer just about getting buy-in, it’s about co-creation.
It’s no no longer just about urgency, it’s about emphasizing the cause and reason for urgency.

It’s about:

Informal networks over communication plans.
About real-time diagnostics over change ROI metrics.

Delegation poker over explicitly defined roles
Avoiding resistance before it happens versus overcoming it once it happens

Small changes, smartly made versus big changes, boldly made
Transparent walls over status reporting.

It’s about moving to the next level of indefinite integrals, from improving the distance to improving the velocity with which organizations handle change.  It is about their acceleration.

And that reminds me of The Fifth Discipline.

Organizations are no longer allowed to think linearly in simple cause and effect frameworks, but rather systematically and holistically.

There is no more room to allow a detrimental culture to hide itself behind waning competitive advantages in this age of rapid change and transformative technology.

For ultimately a culture is defined by the combination of the people in the organization. So to increase an organization’s capacity for change, we must increase the people’s, and that is what The Fifth Discipline is about.

The Fifth Discipline

  • Personal mastery: special level of proficiency, continually clarifying and deepening personal vision, of focusing energies of developing patience and seeing reality objectively, connect personal learning and organizational learning, they’re tied
  • Mental models: ingrained assumptions, generalization on how world works and how we take action, start with turning mirror inward, unearth and assess models with one another in conversation/dialogue that are open to change
  • Building shared vision: not just vision statement and disparate “best practices” but how it’s integrated throughout all things company does
  • Team learning: learn faster when with a team than as an individual and teams are fundamental building block of organizations, be a life-long learner and develop disciplines in particular areas
  • Systems thinking: how everything moves together/impacts each other: combination of all 4, a fusion
    • Shared vision: fosters commitment to long term
    • Mental models focus on openness needed to unearth shortcomings in our present ways
    • Team learning develops skills of groups to look for larger picture beyond individual perspectives
  • Personal mastery fosters personal motivation to continually learn how our actions affect our world, moving from a reactive mindset to proactive in our understanding its all connected
  • Beer game: large increase in demand, long lag time, order more, things blow up
  • Structure influences behavior: systems cause their own crises, not external forces or individuals’ mistakes: when placed in same system, people, however different tend to produce similar results
  • Vital to hold to critical performance standards through good times and bad, those are what matter the most to the customer: product quality, delivery times, service reliability and quality, friendliness and concern of service personnel
  • Commitment to the truth: power of your powerlessness
  • Constantly test what your mental models are: None of us can carry an organization in our minds, we carry images, assumptions and stories that impact what we think do, believe, and measure
  • When at an impasse: ask what data or logic might change their views, if there is any way you both might design an experiment or something that might provide new information
  • Shared vision: not an idea, it’s a force in people’s hearts that manifests through actions, and uplifts aspirations
  • Need Vision (what) the purpose (why) and core values (how) = what do we believe in = painted pictures that focus on the positive aspiration not negative fear
  • Creative tension: to hold their vision while remaining committed to seeing current reality clearly, Vision paints picture of what we want to create, systems thinking reveals how we have created what we currently have