As things get more complex, organizations are looking to get more agile. And they‘re looking at a wide variety of approaches in different areas. It can be agile, digital transformation, design thinking, and more. And, by and large, these are all good things. And all of them are quite simply insufficient. Why do I suggest this insufficiency? Because the solution is complex.
Organizations are complex organisms. If you try to address them with simple solutions, you will perturb them, but the results will not be as expected. Whether you believe the 70% failure rate of org change initiatives, the fact is that many or most organizational change initiatives don‘t achieve the desired outcomes. As we explore this more, we understand that it requires a ‘ground war, not an air war‘ as Sutton & Rao put it in Scaling Up Excellence. And I‘ll posit that there‘s more.
This isn‘t unknown; regardless of label, the folks who are responsible for such initiatives typically argue that that it‘s a process. Yet orgs still look for the simple packaged program that will turn things around. And while it‘s understandable, it‘s decreasingly likely to work. It takes a system approach.
And what I haven‘t seen, and I‘m willing to hear of one, is a comprehensive program that addresses the full suite of skills and culture together that constitute a coherent organization. And that‘s a non-trivial compendium of elements. There are the cultural elements, and skills, and tools, and more. PKM, WoL (SyW), 70:20:10, teaming, collaborating and communicating, etc, are all elements, but they need to be tied together.
My point, I guess, is that there needs to be an entry point, but also a plan to develop the full suite of skills and move the culture. And, like most meta-learning, it needs to be done around something. So you need a concrete focus to start, some problem you‘re working on that you‘ll do in the new way, and practice the processes and develop the competencies and culture as you go. For the org, it should be a necessary new extension to the organization‘s competencies. For L&D, it should be first applied for some L&D project.
In both cases it needs a plan and support for acquisition. And include a realistic time frame for starting, and then spreading. It‘s not simple, but it‘s necessary. Anything else, I fear, is truly insufficient.
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