BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION

In today’s businesses there are no accidental successes: harness the power of emotional intelligence in a rational environment to make the most of business transformation.

Unable to make progress with traditional “mechanical” models? The issue is usually not which tools and techniques are used, but a question of attitudes and mindsets. Read this page or follow the links to find out more about our approach to create sustainable change.

On this page:

• The good of the company – or protecting my interests?
• Change management – what does it all mean?
• Adding culture
• Transforming your business successfully
• Reasons for choosing us as your consultants for change

“One for all and all for one” may have been good for the three musketeers, but does it actually work in business?
Conventional wisdom these days seems to say that if you are looking after the good of the enterprise as a whole, you are failing to look after your own interests. This may well be true in the short term.
In the long term however, things are different – shares go up and down, positions with good salaries might suddenly disappear, new technologies may create radical change.
We take an holistic view and invite you to consider the long term vision. A company successful over time is more attractive to investors, staff and customers alike. We look at a company as an organic system. Our approach to change uses holistic organisational consulting principles. We include people into change management and hence call the process business transition.
A healthy company has happy customers, happy share-holders and happy staff. We think the musketeers were right.

Often “business transformation” (and the management of change) is conceived as the:

• Installation of new technologies
• Software and scheduling
• Who gets transferred across and when

Communication on the timing and impact of all of this is via newsletters and personal emails. Know the story? Have you been involved in it? Was the implementation successful?
I don’t know about your experience, but I have been involved in many projects where the result was well short of anticipation (with commensurate impact on the business case). Some of these projects didn’t even get off the ground. And in most instances, I came across fierce staff resistance to the change – voiced to me as an external person delivering training.
What went wrong?
Effective and lasting change needs more than attention to detail in a technical or process mapping sense, or in selecting the statistics measuring process performance. Such an approach is:

• Focussed on process re-engineering
• Workplace redesign
• Process maps
• Diagnosing problems
• Data driven
• Focussing on planning, delivery and communication
• Valuing analytical skills

Such an approach is required for any change project to succeed, although on its own it is not enough. What made Motorola a successful company? Was it the invention and application of Six Sigma and process improvement? Malcolm Duffield has first hand experience and is sure it wasn’t just that, it was process focus plus the heart.
What makes an organisational change successful and sustainable? In addition to the topics listed above, a cultural change is needed to:

• Ensure people own the change
• Get the buy-in of every member in the organisation
• Prevent staff and middle management from sliding back into old behaviours

The culture in an organisation is just as (if not more) important as the processes in place. Customers pick up on the culture of your organisation more than the actual processes.
Have you heard this said before?
What does it mean to you? What does it mean to your customer?
What is meant by “culture?”
What does it mean in today’s world, where individual tasks are increasingly specialised, and narrower in scope, in more and more companies?
We typically know about the culture of a region reflected in architecture, language, food and personality traits - developed over a long time. We have also heard about companies, in particular family businesses, where people feel proud to belong and responsible for the company.

The culture of a company

What contributes to the culture of a company? Is it a set of rules plus membership of the social club?  Is it whatever the boss says?  Or is it a more organic, growing product – a “compost of the characteristics of its members?” Experience suggests that every company has its own distinguishable culture, even where it shares the exact same rules as other companies.
People form the culture of a company
Consider a food dish specific to a region. Ingredients have been put into patterns and, if they worked, have over time become stable and repeatedly replicated. This is the process applicable to behaviours in a company. These behaviours can reflect:

• Patterns of a region
• Professional blueprint
• Position in the organisation
• Gender and age specific prototypes

There are more that could be listed here, and you may know of some that are specific to your organisation or industry.
Behaviours in a company can also be inexplicable. They point to a hidden dynamic. And we have the tools and techniques to expose such dynamics. Once understood, hidden dynamics can turn in to a creative and productive force.

We believe that change in a company is possible – with the right kind of impetus.
Often in change projects, the people factor is either overlooked or not given the consideration it demands.
For example, in outsourcing bids the people that will be changing company (transferring to the outsourcer)are examined only from a wage perspective for cost modelling, and from a skills perspective for placement in the structural hierarchy. Other factors, such as how these people, and those staying behind, feel, is not valued. This can have an adverse affect on the project, with users resisting the change openly, or as more often happens, through negative talk. If not asked for in the Request for Proposals, as a bidder you could offer as a value added service, transition support from a human perspective, including services such as:

• System analysis to understand the current fabric of the organisation
• Organisational Constellations to find weak links, establish a good order and evaluate the impact of strategies
• Holistic IT training to help prevent implementation trauma
• Systemic coaching for vulnerable members of staff
• Team development workshops to promote buy-in

We take a holistic approach to change. Not only are we up to date with the “traditional” change management methods, we also have the skills, tools and techniques to initiate a cultural change. We look at organisations as a human system and set about business transformation using our holistic organisational consulting concept.
Above all we honour the things that work – this gives us the right to change what doesn’t.
We apply organisational constellations as an instrument of change and to foster wise decision-making. For example, a result could be a new organisational structure, where everybody feels they have a rightful place in the company and can work together in harmony.

• We see the small detail in the big picture and the big picture in the small detail
• We include employee development in an organisational change management program
• Whilst working on individual change we are ever mindful of the enterprise transformation as a whole
• We are aware the implementation trauma and work minimise lasting effects
• We know how important the recognition of an employee’s contribution to the organisation is
• We can address large scale changes, such as mergers and acquisitions
• We help to make transition periods exciting. Thrill to the possibilities of the new!

Preeti Helena