Small steps keep the balance
Keeping organizations in productive state over time is a complex and challenging task.
Organizations are like spider webs
Organizations as we seen them nowadays are a delicate and complex fabric: processes, decision making, knowledge management, meetings and coordination, organizational debt. Keeping this fabric in a good and productive state is the daily challenge not only in management.
Any major change to one of these pillars will, in most cases, result in a series of unknown side effects that will cause the fabric to vibrate. This can amplify to the good, or to the point that the balance shifts to the negative. And let’s be honest here: we’ve all seen companys break due to changes that killed motivation, knowledge sharing, collaboration and more.
It is a central insight from organizational research that people and the social systems they form cannot be directly controlled or changed by decision.Nevertheless, we need to make adjustments where and when necessary.
Limit the side effects
Two things can be done to limit side effects:
- Build hypotheses: even for (small) organizational changes, it is good practice to be clear about what your intendion in three steps: 1. current state/observation, 2. analysis/assessment of the current state, and 3. intention of change/target state. This helps to reflect before jumping into ad-hoc ideas that might hurt the company and teams.
- Incremental approach: although there may be moments for a tabula rasa and fresh start, a step-by-step approach is the best way to understand and counteract side effects or ineffectiveness of your change.
- Involve stakeholders and affected teams and persons in meaningful ways. Very few things are more demotivating than an unexplained and misunderstood measure introduced by the hierarchy. This also helps to challenge you personal biases which are kicking in 24/7.
What is described here does not refer to large transformation projects, but in particular to changes on a smaller scale, e.g. new meeting structure, introduction of other tools, format for roadmaps, etc.
That’s it for this week’s food for thought. Have a great one!
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Photo credit: Mads Schmidt Rasmussen on unsplash.com