An excerpt from the book Homo
Imitans by Leandro Herrero:
A reorganization has taken place. A new
structure amalgamating old divisions is in place and now the ways of
doing must change. The Big Consulting Company has left (well, not
quite, they never do) and there is a myriad of PowerPoints and
fresh materials articulating the new structure, the new
operating model and the new processes and systems in extreme detail.
Senior management cascades this information
down through all the layers of the organization (from VPs to
directors to managers) in a series of workshops. It’s all very
rational, sophisticated and legitimized by the enormous budget used to
reach this point.
(1) The ‘small’ detail of how people
are actually going to work together in the new regime...is not in
‘the slides’
A key component for successful change is that
people not only understand the new structure (they are now de
facto part of it) or the new processes (they all make sense on
paper), but also that they actually behave differently. Suddenly,
they have to share information with people who they have not
worked with before.
They can no longer draft their business plan
in the cosy isolation of their office with the assistants of their
three loyal lieutenants. Now, they have to ‘co-develop it’ (sic) with a
dozen of interconnected ‘stakeholders’ who didn’t need to know about
each other before (or if they did, they pretty much
ignored each other without the sky falling down). There is
nothing in the colossal stack of PowerPoints left behind by the Big
Consulting Company that even touches on explaining, suggesting or
helping with how people are going to behave differently. Why?
Because the Big Consulting Company operates in world I and in
world I, the availability of the information is an end in
itself. After all, if new B is better than old A, Homo Sapiens will do B. ‘OK,
and if not, we’ll train them.’
(2) So they make an attempt to define
which new behaviours are needed
Their management team has become acutely aware
of ‘the small detail’ mentioned above and now develops a
series of exercises to define the kind of
behaviours that may be needed.
For more visit www.viralchange.com
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