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Creative Organizational Change - DisOrganization Chapter 1

This is the first chapter of the book DisOrganization by Brian Clegg, founder and director of Creativity Unleashed Limited, and Paul Birch of VisionJuice, one of Creativity Unleashed’s lead trainers. Both have experience of training in creativity in a wide range of organizations. They are co-authors of a range of books on business creativity, including Instant Creativity.

Why bother?

 

Change is frightening, exciting, challenging, stimulating - take your pick. Most significantly, though, change is here to stay, and if you don't cope with it, it's going to walk all over you.

 

Unless you have been living in a monastery, you will have come across books on organizational change before. It's time for a fresh approach, though. Traditional management techniques are becoming increasingly weak when faced with the new world of ultra-rapid transformation. In a bewilderingly flexible marketplace with new challenges emerging all the time, the whole concept of strategy begins to fail. There may not be an obvious business route forward, yet to keep things as they are is not acceptable. Stay still and you will perish. DisOrganization provides a guide to recreating your organization, using creativity techniques and business skills to give the company a new sense of direction and purpose.

 

It's not my job

 

We're in the business of radical change; reformation is not for wimps. Chances are you will have to take your organization by the scruff of the neck, turn it upside down and give it a good shake. This is all very well if you are the CEO or on the board, but what if you aren't? Make it happen in your department or team, as if it was your own company. Does that mean breaking company rules? It certainly does. There are two possible outcomes. Either the big boys will love you for it, and maybe you'll influence the way the whole enterprise develops (let's hope so for all your sakes), or they'll hate you.

 

So you're in a fix. Maybe you've had time to make your company-in-a-company work. If you have, you'll be hard to fire. Your external contacts and influence will be too important to your parent company. But you will still need to think about moving on. If your top management can only recognize gold when they're threatened, you ought to be elsewhere. If it's still early days and you've no protection, all the more reason to walk.

 

What about the small business? You've already got all the advantages fragmentation can bring, so make sure you pay attention to the other areas. Your centralization imperative is with your external partners - make it work. And there's plenty of leverage still to be had from the other dimensions. Get on with it - and remember to resist the temptation to become another big, faceless company as you grow.

 

Direction

 

Without a direction, your enterprise is rudderless, drifting in the sea of business possibilities to strike land if you're lucky. To make matters worse, you are in the middle of field of icebergs, and the currents are ever changing. Before this metaphor gets strained beyond breaking point, two considerations emerge.

 

The first is the need to have a clear target, a set of goals, a purpose for your existence as an organization.  The second is not to set your goals in concrete. Don't forget those changing currents. We can't repeat enough how fluid the business world has become. This is a world where a company like Netscape can move from little more than a garage outfit to the producer of the world's most popular application software in a handful of years. Selling (or even giving away) software that meets a need that wasn't even envisaged a decade earlier. What's more, that same changeable world could drop Netscape on the scrap heap tomorrow.

 

Postmodernist sociologists see a world in backlash against the rationalist, science-loving, stable Victorian views that drove early business theory.

 

It is this postmodern world that makes the ability to change and adapt an essential. This isn't a comfortable situation. You only have to look at the scorn heaped on politicians who make U-turns to see that managers are expected to present a consistent line. Yet the postmodern world will demand a responsiveness that makes last week's right answer into this week's failure. The concept of the learning organization, described in the Weapons section, is one way to help cope. But also there is a need for a dynamic method for establishing and maintaining the direction of the company, rather than pointing one way and going that way for evermore.

 

In the Direction section of the book we examine four dimensions which together set the overall destination of the company. By making these dimensions explicit and known to the whole company there is an opportunity to go beyond the rigid mission statement into a comprehensible navigation of the company through the iceberg-laden sea. The dimensions are defined by their extremes, like centralization or fragmentation, and management or leadership. Most of your companies will be at a certain position on each dimension. We'll be checking out where. Chances are it is not ideal. So we need to find a more ideal location. That will probably be in the middle, a balanced approach, right?

 

This seems eminently reasonable. The trouble is, being reasonable does not win the day. Do you know what's in the middle? A weak, mushy compromise. It just isn't good enough. Does this mean we're advocating extremism? Yes and no. Not a politician's answer but the exact truth. Yes, you must aim for the extremes, but no, not in the sense that is generally understood. You shouldn't be a pure management fanatic or a leadership buff. You have to be both. The target is not the middle, but both ends of the spectrum simultaneously. Difficult? Yes. Impossible? No.

 

Taking such an extremist view, you will need to have pure leadership setting the vision, mission, principles etc, and micro-management ensuring the best is delivered in meeting them. Then you've got to put your people first and empower them, but always to help them focus on the task. At the same time you must innovate wildly while always listening to the market. Not to mention totally fragmenting into small companies, while establishing a mechanism that pulls them all together.

 

Weapons

 

If establishing a new direction is hard, providing the means to get there is even harder. (Don't think, by the way, that the need to be positioned at both extremes of each dimension makes finding an initial direction any easier. Remember, there are no easy prescriptions. You can't DisOrganize off the peg; each company will have its own extremes, its own scale, its own universe.) We can no longer rely on weaponry of change that was designed for the twentieth century. In stable times, there is less need for innovation, but in a fast changing world that shows no sign of slowing, creativity becomes an essential for survival. Accordingly, we need creative means to achieve change.

 

Our first concern will be weapons of clarity and direction. Once these would have been driven uniquely by the conservative ends of the directional dimensions: management, task, reaction and centralization. They still play their part. But there is also need for vision, mission, and principles. Support for communication and the free dissemination of information will matter every bit as much as control systems and project planning.

 

Next are the weapons of fun and empowerment. Most talk of fun and empowerment in business has been just that: talk. It makes great theory on a planning session in an expensive hotel. It sounds good when talking to the staff. But when the day-to-day circus of problems and decisions strikes, fun goes out of the window to be replaced by the miserable countenance that is considered the only context for "real business", and empowerment is replaced by the chains of tight budgetary control. We'll look at why very few businesses have done anything to make these concepts real, why they can slip under pressure with disastrous results, and how to take fun and empowerment as seriously as the more traditional tools of management.

 

Finally we will be looking at the weapons of creativity and innovation. In fact creativity will be important throughout the process of change, but here we focus on the explicit application of creativity. Again, there is an overwhelming temptation for creativity to go the wall when things are most critical, yet it is when problems seem insuperable that creativity is most needed. Obviously hitting the innovation target on the reaction/ innovation continuum will require some creativity. Paradoxically, reaction also requires innovation - the innovation of problem solving, rather than idea generation, but innovation nonetheless.

 

Inward channels

 

You don't apply your weapons of change to your direction - the direction is the outcome that you hope to bring about. Instead, the weapons are focussed through a number of channels. In the next section of the book we look at the inward channels, the targets for change within your direct control - your people and teams; your organization as a whole.

 

The main vehicle we're going to use is the "how to". Rather than spout endless theory on applying particular weapons to particular channels, and ending up with a screed that's about as readable as a railway timetable, we're going to take a series of key questions that arise from our fundamental assumption that your organization needs to take the radical step of moving to both extremes of each dimension simultaneously. By addressing these questions, we will bring out the lessons, without a boring list-every-combination structure.

 

Your inward channels are the starting point. It's no good saying the customer comes first. Your people, your resources have to be the initial focus, with the understanding that they're there for the sole reason of making the customer's life joyful. That's why we'll be looking at your people, your teams (whether small project teams or whole departments and divisions), your resources and your organization.

 

Outward channels

 

Next it's time to bridge the gap to the outside world. We start with products and services. They could arguably appear as both inward and outward channels; we put them here as they are worthless without an eye to the market. After all, apart from subsistence farming, it's hard to think of any business activity that isn't dependent for survival on external factors just as much as internal.

 

We also apply the "how to"s to your customers, partners, competitors and broad communications. Don't be put off by the "partner" word. It's another management buzzword that has become meaningless through brainless repetition. Traditionally a company dealt with suppliers, other companies used to provide the needs of your business, in a strict relationship of "take them for all they're worth". From the buyer's viewpoint, the aim was to minimize cost; from the supplier's to maximize profit. You can't afford that outlook any more. What's more, if you've achieved a split down to small units, their relations with external partners are likely to be more important than with many other units in the original corporate. Remember too that innovation can provide new opportunities for supplier partnerships. After all, every supplier is also somebody's customer.

 

All channels, inward or outward are about communication, so why give it a chapter of its own? Some communication is indirect - it will slip through the cracks unless it is explicitly dealt with. Use of media, and now the Internet, requires a quite different approach to conventional dealings with staff or customers. Creativity is often left in such circumstances to an outside agency, but is this the right approach in a new world where advertising can be changed daily in direct response to customer comment? Marshall McLuhan's observation that the medium is the message may not be entirely true, but it reflects the need to be more aware than ever of how you are putting across your message internally and to the wider world.

 

The cycle

 

Surrounding our DisOrganization map is a ring labeled "the cycle". The cycle is pure chicken and egg. It comprises monitoring and starting over. Monitoring, because what gets measured gets done. When you measure the right things, you are taking a big step towards success. Not an easy step, though. Measurement can become an obsession that gets in the way of action. How do you know what to measure? How do you measure it effectively? How do you minimize the cost of measurement on the bottom line and yet maximize its impact? Creativity keeps the measurement towing the line.

 

Starting over is more insidious. The world does not stand still. The days of a successful idea or a single static structure that offers sustainable competitive advantage are long gone. What a business needs for long-term success is fast-paced innovation that is never ending. This not only means changes in products and services, but an organization that itself is ever searching for a better form. DisOrganization is not satisfied with a major upheaval that is supposed to result in stability for the next ten years - this is a fiction. DisOrganization requires not a big bang followed by stagnation, but continuous creative development.

 

DisOrganization

 

Each section of the book ends with a summary chapter that pulls together the section and points on to the next. It's a reminder that whatever directions we are setting, whatever weapons we establish, whatever channels we attack and cycle we follow, DisOrganization is about more than simple creativity techniques, more than organizational change, but about a reformation into a new, more flexible entity.

 

Thanks, Tom

 

With many others, Tom Peters has already recognized the need to fragment. In The Tom Peters Seminar, he comments on the need for decentralization, and how in most cases where this has occurred that it hasn't been enough to bring in the small company feel. In fact, he observes that companies need to go beyond decentralization to disorganization.

 

We hadn't realized when we titled this book that we were hitting on the same word as Peters uses for a book chapter on fragmentation. It doesn't really matter; we might not always agree, but our approaches are complimentary. If you like what you read here, check out The Tom Peters Seminar ... and thanks, Tom.

 

Moving on

 

It's time to move on to establishing your direction. We begin with the management/leadership dimension. Without a change here, nothing else can follow.

Brian Clegg & Paul Birch