For most organisations, change is prohibitively expensive in every way –e.g. finance, time, pain. It doesn’t have to be. Much of the expense is caused not by the change itself but by the traditional approach to change. An approach that is wasteful, time consuming and usually unsuccessful. The challenge is for us to adopt a more natural approach to change.
Our approach, “Change the Natural Way” is similar to how we learned as young children or how nature “learns” and adapts to challenges in its environment. It is made up of 5 key elements. They are:
The first principle of natural change is desire. Whilst it is a strange word to use for an acorn desiring to grow, there is some energy within any plant or shrub that strives to grow and express what is inside. In organizations, helping people connect with their inherent desire to improve performance and then create and maintain that momentum is the primary challenge. Improving Shareholder return does not and never has motivated employees. Something far more relevant must be established.
Further, scarcity is not a concept that nature understands in the long term. Resources, if encouraged appropriately and in balance, will generate abundance. One of the biggest impediments to productivity gains is the belief that it will be less than 5-10%. If you look beyond the physical aspects of business, where this abundance exists most readily is in people’s capacity for performance improvement – for knowledge workers productivity improvements of 30% in three months is relatively easy to achieve. When looking at a typical team or board of directors then 50-100% within a year is entirely feasible. You just have to know what makes the difference in that area and focus on it intently.
To make change the natural way you must be acutely aware of the current environment around you. For a gardener, these include soil type and quality, weather conditions (micro and macro), the impact different plants have on each other, pest threats and so on. In business, the current environment or reality relates to the market situation, the true position of your brand in the market place, competition, market activity and so on. Much of this information is stored within your company but is largely inaccessible as it is stored in the minds of your employees. We have established simple and robust methods for ensuring that teams create a shared view of reality. This alone can make a dramatic difference to performance.
Further, it is crucial to become aware of the most likely “future realities”. What are the trends that need to be addressed? What is likely to happen? And most importantly, linking with Creative Desire – What do we want to happen?
To truly get the most value from EA, one must have, at its heart, an obsessive interest in how things work and how to make them better. If you can't look at your business for 10 minutes and come away with a month's worth of questions to be investigated and answered, you need to step back and reassess your real interests. Interest and the subsequent questions that stem from that interest are as vital to the long term success of a business as cash flow is to the short term.
Beauty and elegance are determined fundamentally by the relationships between things and not the things themselves. Beauty or elegance demands simplicity, efficiency and effectiveness. If we are to compete in this century, we would do well to make them a priority as beauty and elegance lead to profit. If your processes are elegant, customers will be more loyal and will recommend you to their friends more frequently. If you have effective or beautiful relationships, you will respond to challenges more quickly and be ahead of the competition. It is not essential for people to “get on” in a personal sense (at times conflict will be the most desirable thing for the relationship), what is important is that the working relationships help people to deliver more for the organisation.
This is best demonstrated by a spirit of collaboration – a conscious desire among individuals to to work together for a mutual goal. By definition, the desire to control another is absent. The best gardeners know their gardens don't really belong to them. In nature, control is illusory. You can't have what you want. Instead, you must work to stimulate and generate your vision. It is not the gardener's job to make plants grow. Instead, it is the gardener’s responsibility to select and position the most appropriate plants and then create the optimal conditions (light, space, water, food etc) and give the plants every opportunity to grow. And they then focus on the relationships between all the individual elements that make the garden work – ascetically and practically.
At ALP, we help you move from coersion to collaboration, from imaginary control or power to influence. This then prompts their people to move from reluctance to change to willingness to change.
It is truly staggering just how much wisdom exists within an organization. This could be in the form of experiences of people in customer facing roles. It could be in failed (yet still potentially profitable) market experiments. It could be in repeated conflict within the boardroom. The energy is there to be used more efficiently. It just needs to be channelled to where it can be used more effectively.
It is staggering to us that organisations set targets for resource recycling such as paper and plastics, but hardly any make any serious efforts to recycle it’s most important resource – employee learning.
The other thing here is to distinguish between growth and evolution.
In business, there is often plenty of growth but far too little evolution. In times of great change this isn’t just dangerous, it’s fatal. Fundamentally, any action must become the means for achieving the stated goal and increasing future performance. So the budgetary season can still go ahead but you can see it as a chance to review and renew everyone’s perceptions about how your market operates, to challenge the assumptions within the business and to get everyone learning about the environment in which you operate. Instead of being an expensive drain on resources, it builds them.
Energy never disappears. It can only be dispersed or transformed. Everything is working, moving,changing. Organisations use (and hence generate) extraordinary levels of energy. What we encourage leaders and businesses to do is to understand where all the energy goes. And we have found that much of it goes into resisting poorly implemented (yet often sound) change ideas. Key relationships within their businesses can be made much more effective and efficient. They then use far less energy leaving much more (30%+) to make the changes needed to put the business on a more successful footing.
We encourage clients to work to reduce resource requirements. Again, this is about business critical resources, not carbon emissions or paper usage. Reduce the rate at which a top banker or lawyer uses up their personal resources [how long can you continue at this pace?] and you extend their productive life by years. This means the organisation does not need to replace people as frequently. Does a leader really have to give themselves stress related Diabetes to be successful in your firm? Not only does this save them (on average) one year’s salary per replaced employee, it allows their people to improve the efficacy of existing relationships, directly affecting bottom line performance.