Category: transformation

Management, transformation

Why Organizations Struggle with Collaborative Efforts

In an increasingly complex world, collaboration has become essential. Executives and consultants tout its benefits, including increased innovation, knowledge sharing, organizational agility, and optimized collective performance. However, the considerable efforts required to develop collaboration often yield disappointing results. The imperative to collaborate often goes unheeded, and everyone returns to their silo. Why is collaboration, with its obvious benefits, so difficult? Because collaborative efforts come at a cost.

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decision making, Management, transformation

Stuck in their projects? Why managers should learn about politics

There is a paradox in business: many of those who are supposed to lead it sometimes admit their inability to move forward with their innovation or transformation projects. And this is not just true of middle managers. I often hear people say, “There’s nothing I can do at my level”. Coming from senior executives, this admission is surprising. The reason is often that these leaders have not recognized the political dimension of their role. By political dimension, we mean the ability to influence the group to move in a particular direction, in this case, to move stalled projects forward. This ability rarely rests on formal authority; it must be built. A useful historical example is how Lyndon Johnson managed to dominate the US Senate before becoming President of the United States.

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innovation, Management, transformation

Balancing Creativity and Structure: How to Make Sure your Processes Won’t Kill You

In the complex landscape of organizational dynamics, the tension between creativity and structure often emerges as a profound paradox. On the one hand, processes are essential for managing complexity and growth within an organization. On the other hand, the very development of processes can sometimes stifle the creative flow that fuels an organization’s ability to adapt to its environment. How do we resolve this paradox? The key lies in having the right understanding of what a process is.

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Management, transformation

What Does your Team (Really) Do? Lessons From Microsoft’s Windows’ Turnaround

New leaders of organizations almost always face at least one significant hurdle – understanding the intricate web of roles, projects, and methods that interact to produce its results. This combination of skills, culture, assets and processes form the bedrock on which their decisions are built and outputs achieved. This analytic challenge is especially critical in troubled organizations, where the gap between promises and actuality can be glaring. A good historical example of this is Microsoft’s Windows group turnaround.

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innovation, Management, strategy, transformation

How declining organizations create an imaginary double

Organizations in decline tend to create an imaginary double in which they lock themselves. This double is themselves, but in an idealized version. It is a mask that they create to hide and to insulate themselves from a reality that they refuse, letting the world go without them, even against them. The dissolution of this double, i.e. the acceptance of reality, however unpleasant it may be, is a prerequisite for any recovery. A good illustration of this is provided by the Apple turnaround in 1997.

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innovation, Management, transformation, Uncategorized

Rethinking Risk-Taking: Unblocking Innovation by Challenging Mental Models

In the quest for innovation, the encouragement of risk-taking by employees is often ineffective because of entrenched, counterproductive mental models. One example is a successful manufacturing company whose commitment to quality has morphed into a stifling perfectionism that impedes progress. While the organization advocates risk-taking for transformation, it struggles to create change. This article explores the core of this challenge-the ingrained mental models that foster resistance-and advocates a balanced approach that reconciles innovation and stability.

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decision making, Management, transformation

How declining organizations get used to mediocrity

[version en Français ici]

Companies rarely collapse all at once. The collapse is often only the visible phase of a decline that started long before and developed insidiously. Like the famous frog that does not react when the temperature of the water in which it is placed rises, this slowness makes it more difficult to react: the signs of decline seem disparate and it is difficult to link them together to build a picture of danger. At the heart of this difficulty is the silence about the situation within the organization, and the tacit acceptance of mediocrity.

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Management, transformation, Uncategorized

Do you need to build a cathedral to give meaning to your employees’ work?

The pursuit of employee engagement and meaning often centers on the idea of a grand vision, akin to building a cathedral of ambition. However, this narrative oversimplifies the complexity of meaningful work. A fuller understanding recognizes that meaning isn’t derived solely from external goals, but can come from the intrinsic fulfillment found in daily tasks, collaborative efforts, and the intrinsic value of contributions.

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innovation, transformation

The Conflict of Mental Models: The Key to Organizational Transformation

One of the most important reasons why organizational transformations fail is the existence of a conflict between what the organization wants to do and who it really is. This conflict can be understood by means of the notion of mental model, which corresponds to the way the organization sees its environment and itself. With this perspective, transformation is about changing the organization’s individual and collective mental models. While this is difficult in itself, it is even more so when the current model, which must evolve, is perceived as valid, because this leads to a conflict between the existing and the desired model. Surfacing this conflict and explicitly addressing it is the key to successful organizational transformation.

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