CHAPTER 2

THE POWER AND POSSIBILITIES OF REAL TIME STRATEGIC CHANGE

Real time strategic change defines an overall process, accompanying technology, and the type of results organizations achieve by engaging in the process and applying the technology. First as an overall process, it outlines a complete approach to the business of change, including the specific phases involved and the various roles required. Second as a technology, it provides a method—a set of principle-based practices and processes—that is employed in different ways at different phases of a change effort. Third and finally, real time strategic change defines the results achieved—fundamental, far-reaching and fast-paced change.

Several years ago, my colleagues and I came to call the methods underlying this unique approach a technology. According to Webster’s dictionary, technology is defined as systematic knowledge gained through experience. This definition accurately captures the essence of this work. We have effectively deployed this systematic knowledge gained through experience around different parts of the world and in a wide variety of organizations. Over time, even we have been surprised by the flexibility, rigor, robustness, and power of the technology. Specific roles, methods, and models exist for leaders, consultants, people planning these sessions, and those responsible for myriad logistical details that are part and parcel of bringing together large groups of people for interactive meetings. Strategic options to further support change are unlimited, while unique applications of the technology enable organizations to customize its use to meet their particular needs.

Although the words “real,” “time,” “strategic,” and “change” are commonly used in many different contexts, they have particular meanings in this book. First then, let me define the concepts of real time and strategic change as used throughout these pages.

What Is Real Time?

In this book, I use the term “real time” to refer to the simultaneous planning and implementation of individual, group, and organization-wide changes. The approach described in this book brings this concept into an organization’s everyday life. Participants in large group gatherings experience, experiment with, refine, and institutionalize these new ways of doing business in the events themselves and continue to do so over time as they respond to an ever-changing environment. Individuals, work teams, functional groups, and the organization as a whole practice new ways of doing business as people begin communicating, making decisions, and collaborating in productive and satisfying ways. People leave interactive, organization-wide events clear about why change is needed, committed to creating a successful future for themselves and their organization, and aligned with the organization’s overall strategic direction.

Another aspect of “real time” emphasizes the importance of current reality as a main driver throughout the process. Real current issues and all their accompanying messy interconnections are the basis of this work. No artificial barriers are constructed so that problems get “cut down to size”—a popular organizational remedy to complexity that results in ineffective, piecemeal solutions to systemic problems. Second, everyone who needs to make changes happen is involved in the large group gatherings, not just a small representative group. Third and finally, real, lasting changes can be implemented throughout an entire organization. This approach stands in stark contrast to one in which the planning of change is done by a small, select group of people. If ever implemented, these changes crafted by small groups have half-lives most likely measured in months rather than years. “Real time” means working through real issues with the real people affected by them, and getting real results.

What Is Strategic Change?

I refer to “strategic change” throughout this book to mean an informed, participative process resulting in new ways of doing business that position an entire organization for success, now and into the future. Three questions help to clarify this definition: Who needs to be informed? On what particular topics do they need information? And in what ways do they need to participate in the process? First of all, there needs to be a critical mass of people in an organization actively involved in a real time strategic change process. I offer no mathematical computation or formula for the number of people required in any one organization to achieve critical mass. Instead, think of critical mass as being enough of the right people in your organization to “turn the tide” in the way you do business currently. The number and type of people may vary widely by organization and circumstance. The key is to make sure the right number and type of people are involved in your organization. To emphasize the tremendous variation in defining “critical mass,” we have achieved significant results working with groups comprising less than 1 percent of a very large system and with others that represented 100 percent of smaller operations (Some suggested criteria about who to involve and when to involve them in a real time strategic change process are in Chapter 10).

The work of this group must be informed on two fronts in order for it to qualify as “strategic change.” First, a common understanding needs to be built, based on the current realities of the organization’s external environment. Such issues may include customer and supplier needs, competitors’ strategies, industry trends, market challenges and opportunities, societal values, legislation, or any number of other issues that may be relevant. Second, current, real, and important internal issues and potential implications of the changes being explored serve as a contrast to this external scan. This internal-external balance of perspectives ensures that informed, considered decisions are made regarding changes in how an organization does business.

Participation in this definition translates to people’s active, significant involvement in substantive dialogues. The result of these dialogues is an innovative response to important, organization-wide issues. This process of thinking together leads to more individual perspectives being shared, a more holistic view of the organization’s collective reality and ultimately, a more informed and effective change effort overall.

New ways of doing business introduce fundamental changes into the way an organization and the people in it operate on a daily basis. “Business as usual” is not an acceptable outcome from a strategic change process. New and effective ways of doing business are required—be they based on changes to an organization’s goals, systems, structures, work processes, values, mission, or culture. Using the definition I have proposed, the adoption of almost any new philosophy or practice would qualify as strategic change. These might include total quality, world class timing, self-managed work teams, and the development of knowledge and skill bases required for people to competently do business in new ways.

Any definition of “strategic change” also needs to account for the impact that the changes will have on the entire organization. In so doing, you position it for success, now and into the future. A successful change in one part of an organization rarely translates into successful change for the entire organization. Numerous improvement initiatives fail precisely because only a part of the organization is positioned for success as a result of the changes being made. Systems thinking teaches us that organizations are comprised of highly interconnected and interdependent parts. Anyone who has tried to just make a small change in one function or work practice has felt shock waves reverberate throughout the rest of the organization as representatives from supposedly unaffected areas issue cease and desist orders. The greatest potential for grief, as well as the greatest opportunity for success, resides at the interface between different functions, processes or levels. A significant advantage afforded by the technology described in this book is that vast numbers of people from different parts of the same organization can work together to assess, plan for, and respond to the inevitable system-wide impact of major change initiatives.

How “entire organization” is defined in a real time strategic change effort represents a key choice point in the process. The issues that need to be worked and the changes that need to be made are the criteria by which this decision is made. Sometimes separating sub-systems that are part of larger organizations, such as individual divisions or different businesses, provides the greatest opportunity for leverage and impact. In cases where one division is another’s internal customer, an integrated change process may make the most sense. In yet other situations, the total organization, even those numbering tens or hundreds of thousands of people, provides the focus for the change effort. It is important to remember, however, that this definition of what constitutes the entire organization can change over time as new information is gathered and the impact of early initiatives is assessed.

“Success” in this definition is determined by each organization, based on the unique set of challenges and opportunities it faces. Quantitative criteria such as cost, quality, or time may be used as measures of success. Others may include observable behavior changes, feedback from customers, suppliers and other key stakeholders, and the subjective experiences of people working in the organization. In addition, organizations must be “positioned” to achieve these results immediately and on into the future. Both the real time strategic change process and the technology support people in making fast-paced changes that have an immediate impact, while the common database of strategic information they develop and keep current prepares them to effectively respond in real time to changes in the future.

Typical Results from Real Time Strategic Change Efforts

With these definitions in place, let’s focus on the type of results achieved from the innovative, interactive large group events that form the foundation of the real time strategic change approach. Just as the issues outlined in the first chapter are part of the inherent design of many common approaches to change, the results I describe below are part of the inherent design of all real time strategic change efforts.

More Informed and Ultimately, More Effective Change Efforts

Real time strategic change processes focus on three questions as a basis for achieving this result: Who is involved in developing these broad, whole-picture views? What perspectives are included? And how do these views, once integrated, become the basis of information used to support people in making changes?

First of all, at least a critical mass of, if not all, the people in an entire organization are involved in developing these views. These include all its key internal and external stakeholders. This widespread involvement serves three purposes:

1. A data-rich, complex, clear, composite picture of the organization’s reality can be constructed by integrating the many perspectives represented.

2. Shared insights that emerge from this more informed view pave the way for establishing internal and external partnerships that previously would have made no sense when these stakeholders operated solely out of their limited perspectives.

3. All key stakeholders understand, accept, and can start to use these broad, whole-picture views in deciding how they want and need to do business in the future.

Second, the real time strategic change approach inherently demands inclusion of many different perspectives. For example, during typical events, people’s views are expanded beyond their traditional boundaries. Whether it is physicians and medical record keepers, finance staff and marketing personnel, or production workers and research and development scientists who integrate their unique views, a holistic snapshot of their organization is created. Also, people at different levels see different, but equally relevant aspects of an organization’s reality. The real time strategic change approach enables senior executives, middle managers, and front line workers to pool their collective perspectives resulting in a more complete picture as these vertical (level) points of view are integrated with horizontal (functional) perspectives. At another level, key external stakeholders such as customers, suppliers, benchmarked organizations, experts from the industry or field and other relevant external stakeholders have their say in piecing together a complex puzzle called reality. Finally, these multiple perspectives are shared and combined against the backdrop of an organization’s past, present, and preferred future, ensuring that decisions and actions taken are based on reality, not restricted by its partial presence or fragmentation.

Third, these perspectives form the basis of information used to support people in making changes, because they establish a common database that results in a shared understanding and reference point for the entire organization. From the foundation of this albeit complex platform arises the capability to distill a congruent and clear direction. This leads to the development of considered, congruent plans across the organization, within each of its units, for each individual, and with key stakeholder groups. As people begin doing business in new ways, the real time strategic change process established provides a system-wide forum within which these new ways can be explored, agreed upon, integrated, and initiated. Further, this process allows the continual sharing, updating, and renewal of the common database both to support ongoing implementation and also to identify the initiatives needed for an organization to remain relevant and responsive to the realities of dynamic and uncertain internal and external environments.

A Critical Mass of People Making Changes That They All Believe Are Needed

Social scientists have told us for years that the level of buy-in, commitment, and ownership people have for change efforts (or anything else for that matter) is directly related to their level of involvement. When people become involved, their level of interest increases, which in turn, results in greater involvement. This cycle ultimately leads to their having a big stake in what gets said and what gets done. Widespread involvement of people from all parts of an organization is a basic premise of the real time strategic change approach. People come to believe in the changes they are making because they have been key players in the process of deciding which changes need to be made and how they can best be made. Separate strategies and methods do not have to be developed to garner support for change. People’s involvement in the process through substantial participation in real time strategic change events is the strategy and method that meets this need.

By gaining people’s buy-in, commitment to, and ownership of the process, the time, money, energy, and other resources usually allocated to securing people’s support can instead be brought to bear directly on the task at hand. It also means that more people care sooner that proposed changes are implemented successfully.

A Total Organization Mindset

The real time strategic change approach helps break down barriers constructed by the parochial win-lose mindsets and behaviors that have built up for years in organizations. Through large group events and subsequent implementation of change initiatives, people from all parts of an organization learn to see, appreciate and consider systemic implications of their individual and team decisions and actions. Changes are planned and implemented as a total organization using the jointly developed strategy as a guiding light, further strengthening people’s awareness of and commitment to the organization’s success. Almost every aspect of the change process serves as a live, practical course in systems thinking. Individuals, functional groups, process and project teams gain an understanding of the larger context in which they are operating and of the unique contribution they need to make to support the success of the entire organization. People become committed to collaborating in order to achieve common goals that best serve the total organization and its customers, not just their own functions or work groups. Redesigning reward and communication systems, in particular, helps to reinforce changes in behavior over time, further strengthening the impetus for change. Cross-functional working agreements become commonplace instead of being seen as isolated incidents. Institutionalizing this process of learning to see a bigger picture of the organizational universe that people can and must impact also provides significant support for people to do business in new ways.

Simultaneous Change

This result becomes possible because people from different functions, levels, and locations in an organization come together at the same time and place to plan and implement changes that they themselves have helped shape. The real time strategic change technology provides a path to greater coordination and integration of numerous change initiatives across an entire organization, while also ensuring that individual efforts are aligned and consistent with the organization’s overall strategic direction. This is not to say that all change happens at once. Rather, there is a readiness developed in an organization that facilitates the implementation of multiple, simultaneous changes, while promoting the further evolution of those changes that have longer timelines.

The benefit of having changes occur simultaneously throughout an organization is the achievement of leverage and synergy. The more people in an organization making aligned changes at the same time, the more direct and indirect leverage is gained for achieving desired results. Archimedes, the Greek philosopher, described the concept of leverage when he said, “Give me a lever long enough, and single-handed I can move the world.” Further, mutually supportive decisions and actions have a multiple or synergistic effect. It accomplishes this by giving each person and each unit in an organization a lever on the organization’s overall strategy. With hundreds of people simultaneously implementing new ways of doing business and consciously prioritizing their daily actions and decisions based on the same strategy you can develop a powerful stimulus for improvement and for achieving the results desired. Although some of these efforts may seem inconsequential on their own, collectively they result in a tremendously positive impact on an organization.

Change Is Perceived as an Integral Component of “Real Work”

No matter how it is perceived or responded to, change itself is a constant and driving force in all organizations. As a result, changing the way you do business on a regular basis has become an integral component and significant focus of the business that organizations actually do. Said another way, organizations now often devote significant time, energy, and resources to continually responding to and promoting change as part of their daily operations. Stop for a moment and consider your own organization as an example. The odds are that you have been engaged in at least one major initiative requiring substantial change and impacting a good portion of your people during the past year.

We all regularly rate how effectively our organizations do business by using commonly accepted measures such as financial return on investment, equity and capital; supplier, customer, and employee satisfaction levels; and cycle times of everything from product development and inventory turns to responses to customer requests or complaints. However, given a steady diet of change as the current norm, these critical measures used to assess how effectively organizations do business, have become directly dependent on how effectively organizations change the way they are doing business.

In a real time strategic change effort, people are equipped with the information required to make informed decisions about how they need to do business to succeed in the future, and are empowered to make these decisions on an ongoing basis. In this approach, change becomes a positive opportunity for personal influence, even in extremely large organizations. This is in contrast with traditional approaches where change is usually code for “someone else has a good idea for me to implement.” Given the broader perspective to which people have access in a real time strategic change effort, change becomes an entirely different and more useful version of “business as usual.” Overall strategic direction and initial plans can be formulated effectively in these large group gatherings; however, actual change efforts succeed or fail in the day-to-day decisions and actions that follow them. A key reason real time strategic change efforts succeed is that people learn to view change as an integral component of their “real work,” a part of their jobs that enables them to positively influence their own and their organization’s future.

Fast-Paced, Real Time Change

Common knowledge suggests that change occurs in two discrete phases: the first is the planning stage, and the second is the implementation stage. Traditionally, a lot of time, energy, and resources put towards innovation in organizations is allocated to the planning side of the ledger. All too often, implementation efforts are treated as mechanical. Even the most brilliant plans sometimes yield disappointing results. Russ Ackoff, a professor at the Wharton School of Business, likens planning in organizations to “…a ritual rain dance which is performed at the end of the dry season to which any rain that follows is attributed”(Ackoff, 1977). He adds that this rain dancing has no effect on the weather, though it may have therapeutic effects on the dancers.

Organizations that use time as a competitive advantage in their product development, manufacturing, and distribution channels reap rewards ranging from lower inventory costs and higher quality (work must be done right the first time), to new market introductions that are more responsive to continuously changing customer demands. However, these changes can only happen as fast as they are implemented. In other words, the implementation of strategic change is the normal bottleneck, with the slow adoption of new ideas and changes being the limiting factor in the achievement of successful results.

The real time strategic change process described in this book creates an entirely new paradigm in which the cycle time between planning and implementation can be dramatically reduced, making it possible to accelerate the pace of change throughout an organization. Hundreds of people meeting to align their thoughts and plans with an agreed-upon strategic direction—and then beginning to implement these plans immediately—makes change happen faster. No time is lost moving from one work group to another in “spreading the word.” No meaning of the message is lost through memos or by holding countless small group meetings with different people interpreting the strategy based on their individual perceptions. Using the real time strategic change technology ensures that the same message is sent, received, interpreted, and acted on by a critical mass of people in an organization at the same time.

Further momentum is gained by the power of numbers, with hundreds or even thousands of people supporting each other’s change efforts through congruent thought and action. Change not only becomes socially acceptable, it becomes culturally desirable as people see an improved image of their collective future emerging. People make decisions in these large group sessions based on the realities facing their organization, and a bias for action ensures that these decisions rapidly translate into new ways of doing business. Rather than working at cross-purposes to each other, which makes progress difficult and slow, people collaborate across levels, functions, programs, and processes in support of their own and each other’s change efforts. All of these factors provide a jump start for implementation efforts, thereby accelerating the pace of change.

Substantial Changes Across an Entire Organization

Rather than having to choose between either substantial changes made in limited parts of an organization or modest changes made across an entire organization, the real time strategic change approach makes it possible for substantial changes to be made across an entire organization. Successfully implementing substantial changes across an entire organization is the result of three key factors inherently designed into this approach.

First, people in real time strategic change efforts have had significant involvement in planning and implementing changes at the level of overall organizational strategic direction, in their particular team or unit, and in their individual work. This results in ownership of the entire change effort at all levels and collectively, a lot of concerted change happening in all parts of the organization. This involvement also creates an opportunity for members to envision a future they prefer for themselves and their organization and to have a hand in making it happen. Second, people are able to develop a deep understanding of the organization’s issues and why change is needed, enabling them to make wise choices regarding which changes need to be made, when, how, and by whom. Third and finally, people make solid commitments to doing business in new ways. Ideas for innovative business practices emerge from the synergy generated during large group events. Given the opportunity to integrate their thinking, people from different disciplines gain valuable insights which trigger creative changes in how work gets done on a daily basis.

Suboptimal either-or choices do not have to made when operating out of this new mindset. Because the real time strategic change technology makes it possible to bring together so many people at one time and in one place, substantial change can be made across entire organizations.

Comparing Common and Real Time Strategic Change Approaches

Table 1 summarizes the key distinctions between the results inherent in the common approaches described in Chapter 1 and the results inherent in the real time strategic change process discussed in this chapter. A side-by-side comparison highlights their fundamental differences and the potential value added by engaging your organization in real time strategic change.