Disruptive markets, competition and technology is now the norm rather than the exception. Consumers are more sensitive to bad service and poor quality products. Web 2.0 technology provides consumers with the power to create or destroy a business within hours.
Traditional change practices in organisations are too slow and expensive for organisations to use to adapt to changing business conditions.
And too many organisations continue to build their adaptive processes on sand rather than take a more fundamental approach and build adaptive infrastructure foundations on rock.
Organisation Change
Organisation change typically describes a major, transforming discrete event that impacts across the whole organisation. Transformational change has disadvantages. For example:
{ It is resource expensive and intensive
{ It exhausts managers and staff
{ the change is often just too big and managers give up.
{ Outcomes are often patchy
{ It can take too long to implement and the organisation continues to experience an alignment gap
These problems lead to managers and staff resisting new transformational change initiatives. The result is that organisational change can have the paradoxical effect of freezing the organisation preventing future critical alignment programs.
Organisation Renewal
Organisation Renewal is the process of achieving growth, agility and sustainability through the continual adjustment and synchronisation of strategy, culture, organisation, management, roles, skills, people, processes and technology.
This means developing manageable organic alignment processes and infrastructure so that organisations can continually adjust and synchonise performance factors to adapt to continually changing market conditions.
This framework can help organisations avoid the big bang, cage rattling change programs. A greater awareness of organisational renewal processes can help avoid organisation freezing and keep people open, positive and innovative all the time. This means change is sustainable!
Key Organisational Renewal Factors
Organisation renewal is a scientific, evidenced based approach to understanding the factors that enable organisations to continually adapt to their environment. The key factors are, have always been, and will continue to be;
{ Socio-Technical systems
{ Information Management
{ Culture
{ Organisation structure
{ People Capabilities
{ People engagement
{ Business processes
{ Technology
{ Knowledge Value Management – creating value from knowledge held by people in organisations
It is not necessary to be expert in these fields. However it is necessary to understand how these factors intersect and how they interrelate with each other across the organisation. Avoiding Change Silos (see article posted in Organisation Renewal on 24 July 2008) is also critical.
Summary
Ironically, organisation renewal is not new. However in recent years it has been lost to the mumbo jumbo of change agents, fads and myths. Organisation Renewal means addressing the critical fundamentals in the organisation. Not to address these fundamentals is like trying to put icing on a cake that has not yet been baked!
Dallas Burgess
© PeopleAdvantage Pty Limited 2008.
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