Improve Conditions, Not Processes
Enduring organisational change requires more than process improvement.
Why do ‘Digital transformations’ too often fail? And why aren’t companies naturally adopting UX or Lean Startup techniques, knowing it will make their customers happier and their profits grow?
Let’s explore this together.
Helping a Software Development Team
Imagine we’ve just been dropped into an organisation struggling to adapt to the new world of VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity). What are the different options we have to help them?
The first option is to get hands on with the organisation — taking work onto our shoulders to help them move forward faster. Whilst this adds immediate capacity to the organisation, its effect is limited in duration and impact as we’ll see shortly.
The second option is to improve the organisation’s processes — how the work is done. We do not take their work onto our shoulders, but instead focus on surfacing and removing friction points that would otherwise slow their team down. This could be in the form of reducing costly handoffs between teams, or introducing prototyping or showcases to bring customer feedback forward.
Process changes have the effect of increasing the capacity of teams now and into the future, without any further effort from you. This is great — you’re free to move on to your next mission!
“Eighty-five percent of the reasons for failure are deficiencies in the systems and processes rather than the employee. The role of management is to change the process rather than badgering individuals to do better.”
— W. Edwards Deming.
However, there is a third and more powerful option: creating the conditions for teams to improve themselves. This could involve allocating time for individuals to learn and share, building psychological safety in teams so feedback is received early and often, or changing incentives so multiple teams collaborate towards a single goal rather than compete with each other. This third approach — creating conditions — is the most powerful, providing long-lasting systemic benefits across teams.
The good news is that by creating the right conditions, process improvement and better work comes for free.
The Organisational Change Pyramid
So: we have three options — do the work, improve the process, or change the conditions — with each one we move further away from the frontline and focus more on finding the pressure points.
Helping with the work provides the least benefit for the shortest amount of time, whilst changing the conditions— though requiring a greater understanding of how the organisation really works — creates the greatest systemic benefits for the longest amount of time. We can summarise this as a pyramid:
So Why Do Organisational Transformations Fail?
A process in an organisation needs the right conditions to survive. How can we introduce Agile into an organisation where changing course is assumed to be as a result of bad judgement of the individual?
How can we introduce [Lean Startup] experimentation into an organisation where leaders assume they are in the best position to define project scope, and therefore proving their ideas wrong would cause them to lose face?
A process in an organisation needs the right conditions to survive.
Introducing new processes into organisations requires leaders to first change conditions before we change how the work is done, such as the tacit assumptions of “changing course reflects the bad judgement of an individual” and “leaders are in the best position to define project scope” .
Otherwise, if leaders introduce processes that require a different set of assumptions, the process will not be compatible, and will not take root, costing the organisation time and money.
Organisational change is therefore a process of continuously surfacing and reevaluating assumptions that may no longer be true, creating the right conditions for new processes to take root and better work to be done.
The Curious Coffee Club is a gathering place for leaders who are serious about preparing for our new world, helping them learn and exercise tools for survival. Interested? Let’s connect!
