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Let’s face it - the most important issue facing business leadership today is the need to prepare their organisations to cope with perpetual change.

But can your leadership team tell the difference between the concepts of transformational change versus incremental change? During these increasingly turbulent and challenging times, there is a pressing need for leaders to view change differently.

They should not try to manage it as a series of independent initiatives, but should rather have a more holistic approach so that people are better able to make sense of the changes.

Wendell L. French & Cecil H. Bell, Jr. (1999) define Organisational Transformation activities as those that involve large-scale system changes, specifically activities that are designed to change fundamentally the nature of the organisation. In the process of true Organisational Transformation, almost everything about the organisation is changed including the structure, management philosophy, reward systems, the design of work and the organisation’s mission, values and culture.

Large-scale transformation in organisations needs to be seen as both a re-socialisation process as well as a journey of discovery. People need to be given an opportunity to internalise new assumptions and behaviours. We know that set goals, supported by time-bound, predetermined plans, are things of the past.

The future state is always going to be unclear, so business leaders need to access the information and knowledge that exists both within their organisations as well as externally to find mutually-acceptable solutions to the challenges they are facing.

The traditional approach to strategy implies that, because our business model succeeded in the past and is still succeeding today, it will continue (with a few minor tweaks) to provide us with a foundation for success in the future.

If we play this scenario out, organisations will continue to reproduce themselves as they have always been, constantly repeating past history and maintaining the status quo – that is, if they survive and don’t go out of business!

This approach worked well for many successful organisations when there was little change in the external environment and when there was plenty of time to reflect and make minor course adjustments, as appropriate. Today, we operate in a very different environment where the only way for organisations to survive and adapt successfully to chaos and complexity is for them to strive for perpetual transformation.

Today’s organisations need to renew and reinvent themselves continually in order to stay ahead of the competition. To achieve this, business leaders need to anticipate trends and grow their organisation’s capacity for continuous learning. Laszlo and Laugel (2000) note that a key focus for leaders should be nurturing the emergence of organisational intelligence.

Global corporations of today need to be less focused on structure and internal resources and more on the dynamics of change. Companies are defined by their ideas and business processes, the nature of their internal and external relationships and by the way they work with their business partners. Organisations are looking for ways to encourage integration and create more fluid boundaries.

And transformational leaders are creating environments in which diverse viewpoints are encouraged in a culture of sharing, mutual respect, active listening and dialogue.

Transformational leaders, when managing large-scale change in organisations, are recognising that they are managing ‘multiple-realities’ to the extent that no single change intervention is now viewed as being sufficient to make large-scale transformational change happen successfully. These leaders are looking for multiple methods for influencing the transformational process.

This is why whole-system participatory approaches, specifically large-group intervention models which incorporate small-group work sessions, are providing some of the best opportunities to leaders who are driving large-scale change in their organisations.

S.G.F Knobel

Lee Knobel holds a masters degree in Organisation Development from Fielding Graduate University, Santa Barbara

Her expertise in organisational change has taken her on assignments to Africa, United States, UK, Europe and Asia, where she has partnered with senior executives to lead transformational change and grow high-performing organisations.

References
Wendell L. French & Cecil H. Bell, Jr. (1999) Organization Development: Behavioral Science Interventions for Organization Improvement. Prentice-Hall: NJ
C.Laszlo & J.Laugel (2000) Large-scale organizational change: An executive’s guide. Boston: Butterworth- Heinemann.