Moving from Complexity to Clarity
First – The Bad News
Whether change is thrust upon us or we are in an organization where we initiate a strategic change, the chance of success is rare and the risks of failure are great. Research from Gartner shows that 50% of organizational efforts are clear failures and another 16% deliver mixed results.
This is a bit of a conundrum for most leaders. In order for an organization to thrive, it must engage in proactive strategic change and organizational development. However, the risks are large. If this statistic shows the bad news, can it get worse? Maybe. 2020 has turned up the heat and 2021 isn’t showing many signs of cooling.
The Change Challenge You Face Right Now – The Heat Has Intensified
Right now many organizations are facing a very special change challenge and that change challenge is to become a workplace that enables the flourishing of people. We call this change challenge, building a people-centric organization. The heat and intensity you feel about the need to create true systemic change has increased and will only continue to increase. As we are more than halfway through 2021 it is important to notice that the demands for change at work have only grown louder.
Demands for change include: employees wanting more flexibility and control over the how and where of their work, employees prioritizing their mental health (and we’ve all seen a very important example of this with the recent courageous actions by Simone Biles), employees unionizing in order to get important needs met that employers are ignoring, and the list could go on. You don’t have to look very hard to find many articles discussing the “great resignation” as employees seek to rewrite the old contracts of work that have led to burnout, high turnover, and low employee engagement.
What Can You Do?
As a leader of an organization, a division, a function, or a team, you know that you must respond to the demands for an organization that is more people-centric, and you also have three immediate questions:
Where should we start?
How can we make adequate time to engage with and lead this work?
How do we ensure our change efforts don’t drag on and on?
And you also have some dread in your belly. You have likely experienced the Garter statistics personally. Even if we can answer these questions, can we really create successful change? The answer to that question is yes! You can create successful systemic change and we can help you do it.
How We Can Help – We Guarantee It
To help you drive strategic, proactive, and successful change and build a people-centric organization, we’ve designed a process by which any leadership team can, within 20-weeks::
Identify and align on where to start
Communicate and engage with the organization as a whole to develop ideas
Create a feasible plan of experimentation that delivers clear learning
To help you identify and align on where to start we have developed a simple and powerful organizational scan that measures the current level of people-centricity in your organization. This process takes four weeks from start to finish.
If you’d like support beyond this scan, we have developed a sixteen-week process we call Activ8. Activ8 integrates individual, team, and organizational development and includes a focus on engaging others throughout the organization. You exit this stage with a clear sense of where you are going on both individual and collective levels.
Lastly, you can move to the final step of the approach, which we call Regener8. Regener8 is where the rubber meets the road and you ignite opportunities across your system to test out and learn from the ideas you’ve incubated in the Activ8 Stage.
We’ve been exactly where you are. Overwhelmed with the complexity of figuring out how to make strategic change and feeling like many of the consulting offerings you see are either too transactional, (i.e., implement an employee wellness and resilience program) or too all-consuming, (i.e., embark on a three-year change effort that delivers mixed and unclear results).
Let us help you move from complexity to clarity. We do that by grounding your efforts in useful data, through the organizational scan, and support you with a clear timeline and process. To help you manage the risk (helping with that dread in your belly), we also guarantee our work.
P.S. If you aren’t pleased with your results, you don’t pay us.