Brandenberg / Hess / Osmianski Changeonomics

The simple formula behind complex change
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-3-7568-4978-9
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 418 Seiten

Culture is the key for lasting success! As Peter Drucker already knew "Culture eats strategy for breakfast"! We can have the best vision, the best strategy or the best processes the world has ever imagined - as long as our culture does not support that, our activities will lead nowhere. This is a nice explanation for why approximately 70% of big corporate transformations fail to produce the intended results. The necessity of sustainably improving the corporate culture becomes also evident in diverse empirical studies: According to, e.g., Gallup, the culture in most (western) organizations is far from being open, empowering, honest and motivating. As a result, in fact, the average employee spends his time at work being rather demotivated and disengaged. What a waste of precious lifetime and resources! As a result, working on and improving the corporate culture should be at the very heart of every corporate transformation! But how to do so? Change can be fun! People CAN enjoy change! Certain elements can make the change a success! Be inspired by our practice and evidence-based thinking of how change works - to make it work for you! The LxAxR=I formula depicts the ocean of change in a simple and comprehensible way: To generate desired Impact you need to get the Leadership, Approach and Resources right - at the same time. This approach is very different from any other change approach we know and builds on more than 100 transformations which we have been running. And it works! Follow us on exploring the formula and make it work for you!

Dr. Arndt Brandenberg works as Executive Coach and Senior Advisor for the set-up of transformation programs and is a university lecturer for change management at the University of Cologne. Prior to this he worked as Project Manager for McKinsey before he joined the utility RWE. Here, he led several Controlling teams and worked as CFO at RWE Hungaria before he managed the overall change journey of RWE towards achieving excellence by sustainable cultural change. Arndt has studied Economics and holds a PhD in motivation theories and incentive systems from the University of Eichstätt.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brandenberg, Arndt

Hess, Roland

Osmianski, Kamil

Steinbacher, Georg

Leseproben

1
Introduction
1 Introduction – Understand Change
AND THIS REALLY WORKS? Recently I met an energetic lady at tennis. Our daughters were playing against each other. Judith is my age, she has started her career with the other leading consulting company, has been working with the other big utility and we’ve got mutual acquaintances. “What are you working on?”, Judith asked. “I am a change manager”, I replied. Pause. I felt some explanation was needed. “So basically, I support people to change their behaviour, to increase the company performance.” I saw her face puzzling. “And this really works?” she said. We are used to those reactions. Many rational managers have a profound scepticism on Change Management. Unfortunately, often there is little to learn on the subject at university – apart from Change Management equals Change Communication. So, what can I do? Maybe I can read one or two bestselling books on the topic – giving me recipes for changing organisations from stable state A to stable state B. Maybe I can follow some inspirational speeches by change gurus at company events. Unfortunately, many of the knowledge I will then get is just theory. Practice is different. In practice I might have gone through multiple complex change events by myself – mergers, re-organisations, downsizing – badly executed and most of the time destroying more value than creating value. There is never a stable state achieved but permanent instability. As a result, what shall I do except for regarding Change Management as something esoteric with little practical use? Our view is very different. We learned that Change Management can work, what it takes to make it work and that it delivers huge value. However, to make it work, we needed to develop the right mental model – i.e., our view on how companies and company change works: To us, companies are not machines, but systems. COMPANY MACHINE OR COMPANY SYSTEM? The industrial revolution brought along new technologies and with it new forms of human collaboration in large corporations. With this, new thinking about organisations arose. Leading minds of the time – Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915), Henry Ford (1863-1947), Henri Fayol (1841-1925) or Max Weber (1864-1920) – created a worldview which is still deeply ingrained into how most of today's managers look at their organisation and themselves. More than a century later, many managers still view organisations as machines and themselves as the operators, steering the machine from their control room. They use analogies like the ship in the stormy sea and themselves as the captain at the wheel.1 When I was a young consultant, my view of companies tended to be similar. I led multiple reorganisations and was pretty good at it. When managers were operators, then I was the engineer. My projects always followed the same approach: Develop options for a new structure, let leaders select one, detail out the new structure, define new processes, define job profiles, let leaders select the best person for each job, announce it, go live – done. As a trained engineer, I was designing new and better machines for the operators. People were the replaceable components of the machine. When one component was not functioning as required, the component had to be changed. Those reorganisations usually resulted in some temporary cost savings, but the sustainable performance improvement was more than questionable. No wonder. Why should people change their behaviour because they got assigned to a new box in the organisation chart? Illustration 1: Company Machine It took me years of working with organisations to understand what was going on and adapt my worldview. Today, I view companies as a system. A company system is a group of people which regularly interact with each other for the purpose of running a business. How is system thinking different from machine thinking? The people create the system with their actions not the other way around – the machine determining what people do We are all actors in this system – our behaviour (the actions) determines the behaviour of the whole system Underlying mental models (how people view the world) and systemic structures (ways in which the system is organised) determine the observable system behaviour The system behaviour finally drives the system performance Illustration 2: Company System The implications of system thinking are huge. Contrary to a machine, a system cannot be simply engineered and built. It cannot be steered via a control panel. It is also not stable. It constantly evolves over time as actors in the system influence the evolution by their actions. However, most of the time we are unaware about the implications of such actions on the system. This is where system thinking makes the difference: When we see the system as a whole with its basic mental models, its systemic structures and resulting behaviours, we can take conscious actions – we call them “targeted interventions” – to improve the system behaviour and performance. This is what change management in our view is all about. No longer will we view ourselves as captains or engineers. We will act a little bit like farmers who care about the land to increase the harvest yield and pass it on in best shape to our children. INSIGHT View companies as “systems” – and not as “machines” We compiled all our insights into Changeonomics. Changeonomics is our philosophy and methodology of change management for a better performance of an organisation. Specifically, there are three basic principles which we learned early on and wove into everything we were doing. We would now want to explore these principles in more detail: We will start with Chapter 1.1 “Systems Thinking” to explore the importance of understanding the observable company culture as a result of the system which is working on the levels of “Me”, the “Team” and the “Organisation”. When we have the proper understanding of the current situation and the system we are operating in, and we want to personally start the change the question comes up on how to actually do this? For this we used insights from neuroscience and have developed a very simple principle, which we call “Leading from the Future” (Chapter 1.2). In order to create momentum and get the company and all its employees moving into a new direction we finally need to address three key elements simultaneously, in an integrated way: The “Why”, the “What” and the “How”. This is what we call the “Magic Triangle” (Chapter 1.3). Finally, we will have a closer look at the Change Formula and its inherent logic (Chapter 1.4). 1.1 Systems Thinking: Change starts with Me!
BACKLOG ITEM How to see and understand the system with all its behavioural patterns and mental models? PARALYSIS BY ANALYSIS Working as a leader in corporate controlling in SolidCo was often not an easy task: Whenever a large investment in the business was due, it had to be confirmed at Board level. Then all relevant corporate functions like Mergers & Acquisitions, Strategy, Legal, Finance, Tax, Accounting, Controlling, Human Resources and others analysed the proposal and tried to make it “bullet proof” against risks from their functional perspectives. This process, well intended, often felt like a very nasty one, lasting for an extremely long time with lots of distrust on all sides: Sometimes, e.g., the business tried to hide risks or waited with the proposal so long that time pressure did not allow a thorough analysis. Or, e.g., the corporate functions developed more and more into a kind of “police” function and investigator, basically convinced that business will just try to fool them. The results were decision papers with more pages on potential risks than on the case itself. No entrepreneurial risks where taken. Potentially good investments got stopped. Especially investments outside the well-known core business were “analysed to death”. One person called this pattern “paralysis by analysis”. How could intelligent people behave like this? In order to understand the situation above, we need to consider three characteristics of systems thinking: First, what we see in the example described above is a “system at work”. What does that mean? INSIGHT Companies are social and economic systems – A group of people which regularly interact with each other for the purpose of running a business A system is a set of connected elements which interact to fulfil a function (Meadows, 1993; see Figure 1). The people in a company come together for the purpose of running the business. This shared purpose is forming the boundaries of the system which distinguishes the people in the company – leaders and employees – from the people outside. A more compelling purpose increases cohesion within the group and forms a stronger binding. Figure 1: What makes a system Within the company system you will find subsystems or teams which are groups of people coming together for...