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Th e transformation of a company is like a journey of discovery. It requires a change of roles for senior exe-cutives, and HR concepts supporting self-controlling learning processes.

he paradigm of working within the boundaries of team structures and organizations is currently being replaced by collaboration. Th e greatest challenges for companies are to operationalize these working scenarios in terms of transforma-tional management and creating business cases for it. Th ere is currently no company that defi nes these strategic missions as a self-contained, stand-alone project from a global perspective or can be taken as a distinct market leader. Instead, drivers for individual projects in diff erent fi elds and sizes are mainly overall cost reduction programs. In addition to the known solutions in temporary employment, outsourcing and project business, those many individual projects show how unique trends will shape the near future. One shift of paradigm is the understan-ding of a new set of drivers that are infl uencing the way of wor-king.

A multigenerational workforce, demand for skilled workers, global competition and other factors are contributing to change in the resource management. Some of these changes continue to aff ect where, when and how work gets done.

Th e success of collaboration is about a partnership between the organization and its employees. Th e allocation of resources needs to be based on required expertise, economic criteria and availability. Creating a value chain along the business process – being aware of a resource intelligence model.

T

Transformation Journey

About the Paradigm Shift in Working and The Tale of Change and Transformation

Labour resources are allocated to such processes to accomplish dedicated tasks within the business process in order to achieve an agreed upon business goal.

Th ese resources may be assigned from within a company´s own workforce and/or from outside. Based on a proper underlying technology and collaboration platform the resources are not ne-cessarily co-located but may be spread across diff erent locations or even continents.

Resource Intelligence is about:• Allocation of capabilities, availabilities and knowledge • Enabling collaboration, scaling and accelerating co-creation by providing a collaborative eco-system for agile, easy, global, secured, ip-protected collaboration solutions.• Engaging micro-crowd based interaction beside heterogenic governance structures and working paradigms.

Essentially such new working paradigms, rise the question how companies can drive the change on that?

Transformation challenges taking the example „airport design“

A real business example of the challenges that transformation poses is an airport design. Th ose at the older age bracket of the

57 Detecon Management Report blue • 2014

baby boomer generation will still remember a time when air-ports were places you turned up at about an hour before your flight. You checked in your bag, grabbed a cup of coffee at one of the few coffee shops that existed in the airport, sauntered through immigration and boarded your plane – notice at this point no mention of any serious security checks.

Things are different today although ironically the core purpose of processing passengers is the same. Essentially an airport is designed to take its passengers into a departure terminal, have them check in their luggage while issuing them with a boarding pass. After that they go through immigration and security and then sit in the departure lounge until their plane is ready to depart. On arrival at their destination they go through immi-gration again, collect their bags from baggage claim, go through customs and depart from the airport. As core processes go it is not a particularly complex one.

Some years ago airport authorities realized that as they walked through airport terminals looking at how space was allocated to this core process they discovered that it only occupied 40-60% of the total space available. So what occupied the rest of the space? The answer to the question continues to evolve.

When it was first asked in any serious way, the answer was shops and restaurants. Airport authorities had begun to realize there

was potential revenue to be made from a captive audience with not much else to do than sit around and wait for their plane.

Today an audit of airports around the world would include shops, restaurants, casinos, games arcades, golf ranges, hotels, nurseries, places of worship, airport lounges, barbers, massage parlours, movie theatres, sleeping pods, children’s playgrounds, nature trails, gyms, swimming pools, spa services and art exhibi-tions – to name but a few. This explosion of services represents the first transformational dilemma. If the purpose of an airport is to move people quickly and efficiently through a terminal why would you clutter up half of the building with activities which appear to contribute little to that process. In fact many around the world would argue that it is precisely because there are so many distractions flights are constantly being held up. Passengers become distracted and despite endless announce-ments they lose all sense of time.

When it was decided that passengers should arrive two hours ahead of their flight for an international flight and one hour ahead for a domestic flight there was a reason behind it. Some-one had worked out that it represented the time necessary to move passengers through the core process of an airport – and only that. The rise of terrorism was the first tipping point air-ports had to adjust to and the security checks in airports today probably account for more heated disputes and raised blood

Source: nexeda based on „The Transformation of Business“ from Ross Dawson

Figure 1: Paradigm of New Drivers for Organizational Development and Co-Creation

Business Driver

TechnologyDriver

New Drivers forBusiness Improvement

SocialDriver

Economic Structure• Media economy• Divergence in performance• Distributed work• Modular business

Competitive IntensityDemand for a talent •

Blurring industry boundaries •Everything global •Pace if innovation •

Exponential GrowthMobility •

Data and storage •Interface •

Prosesing power •

Expectation• Excellence• Meaning• Transparency• Accountability• Opportunity

• Scalable relationships• Governance for transformation• Talent supply chain• Flexible organizational structures• Dynamic strategy• Distributed innovation

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pressure than almost any other business activity. Equally the area required to carry out the searches has expanded considerably, but interestingly the time to report for a fl ight has not changed, which puts the system under constant pressure.

Yet without doubt the most signifi cant tipping point was the realization that airports had become massive revenue generators despite the fact that little of the activity associated with passen-gers spending money in airports has little to do with embarking passengers on planes in a timely fashion.

Ultimately the design of airports and the facilities provided within them illustrate the two key elements facing all businesses, predictability and complexity. If all planes arrived on time and the time a passenger had to report to an airport to catch a fl ight was an accurate refl ection of the time needed to process them it could be argued that all the amenities provided would be largely unnecessary. Of course the world isn’t predictable and that creates complexity. Once you assume passengers will have time on their hands providing a coff ee shop and a book shop is not going to meet customer expectations, but the more that is built into an airport terminal the more complex the process becomes. Some argue passengers should be made to report three hours ahead of time for the international fl ights and two hours for domestic. Th at would ease pressure on security and immi-gration but then how do you amuse passengers?

How does the solution of complex transformation projects look like?

Th ere are no easy answers. After all, creating and implementing a strategy, providing leadership and generally infl uencing the environment in which everyone works are the key factors. Essentially the answer lies in four diff erent categories:

Strategic Reasons: Th e degree to which companies will tolerate ineffi ciency is much higher than most people would imagine and this starts with a company’s strategy, or frequently, lack of strategy. Th e number of companies that don’t have a strategy that has been well conceived, discussed, clearly communicated and well understood at all levels is maybe a little higher than many people imagine. Admittedly, very large organizations may have an over arching corporate strategy and then regional or business unit strategies within that which makes life more complicated. Whatever the organizational construct, a coherent strategy is at the heart of every company’s existence and confusion over what it is or a complete lack of one causes hours of fruitless labour, duplication of eff ort and general frustration.

Business strategies are often long and complex documents created after equally long and complex discussions but essentially they are trying to answer one question:

“What do we have to do uniquely or at the very least better than our competitors to succeed?”

In a world where the external environment moves faster than ever before this is becoming an increasingly diffi cult question to answer but listed below is an example of the type of key success factors that companies typically use:

Th is list is illustrative rather than exhaustive so if there is a fac-tor essential to the company you have in mind and it is not on the list, feel free to add to it. Th e exercise requests you to list a maximum of four. While there are many factors that need to be considered as part of strategy formulation, one of the biggest challenges is that companies try and do too many things, which is ultimately self-defeating.

Once you have decided upon the four, ask 30 of your senior colleagues from the same company to do the same exercise in-dependently. Once everyone has listed their four, share your collective results. Th e perfect answer is 4 – i.e. everyone chose the same 4 factors showing a deep and consistent understanding of what the company is trying to achieve and a single sense of purpose not often found.

Th e nightmare scenario is 120 diff erent factors. Th ankfully you are not likely to face that dilemma if for no other reason than it is diffi cult to imagine 120 diff erent key success factors. However, if the number of factors chosen starts to creep up into double fi gures – which is not unusual in an exercise like this – the dilemma facing the organization becomes all too apparent. Th is lack of focus cascades down through the organization and it is possible for people to work signifi cant hours and never achieve the return such eff ort deserves.

Key Success Factors:

• Economics of scale

• Research and Development

• Product Development

• Quality of Product

• Innovation

• Organizational

Effi ciency

• Unique Proposition

• Procurement Capability

• Quality of Technical

People

• Customer Service

• Image

• Pricing Strategy

• Creativity

• Speed to market

• Niche Player

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Organizational Issues: It is one thing to agree to a strategy – it is a whole different challenge to align a business to deliver it. The environment in which companies operate today is signi-ficantly more complex than 20 years ago. To begin with, the speed of change is accelerating, shortening product life cycles and in some cases the lives of companies themselves. Pressure from some parts of the financial markets community and cer-tain shareholders has created an expectation of instant gratifica-tion. Such demand for short-term success has made “organic” growth difficult to achieve. As CEOs are questioned every 90 days about the progress they are making it is not surprising that short term solutions are often sought. This in turn creates poor quality decision-making and if a company is not careful leads to a vicious cycle.

Cultural: It is claimed that no-one lying on their deathbed has ever been heard to say that they wished they had spent more time at work and transforming the company. Yet if you ask most people who they are, they will start by describing what they do to earn money – that isn’t who they are, but it does seem to play a significant part in how we define ourselves.

Cultural reasons for people working in transformational pro-jects are probably the most difficult to deal with because is many ways they are the most deeply entrenched. Top of the list of such examples is what is generically referred to as the “macho culture”. Broadly speaking the argument ranges from “I did it to succeed – so you can do the same” through to “no one was ever successful in business just dancing in the ring of transformati-on projects.” There is a difference between running large scaled transformation projects and transforming smartly. The latter still requires time and effort, but it is characterized by people who step back for long enough not to lose sight of the big pic-ture, and who keep their efforts in perspective.

Practical: It is ironic that the last category has largely arisen as a result of advances in technology and in particular the dreaded email. A recipient of more that 50 emails a day – and that would include almost all executives – is likely to spend up to 3 hours a day just reading and responding to emails. If they add 4 or 6 one-hour meetings on a daily basis it is easy to understand how many executives find their time totally occupied by emails of attending meetings – as opposed to dealing with the outcome of the meetings. Attendance at so many meetings should be questioned, as should the efficiency of such meetings and how well people prepare for them.

Good old fashioned “time management” went out of vogue a long time ago. Yet the principles apply as much today as ever before. In a given day, week, or month there is only a finite amount of productive work an individual can produce and the

ability to prioritize is essential. It might be that people are beco-ming increasingly aware of the issues caused by excessive hours being worked on transformation projects. Yet surely people have been concerned for years and it doesn’t seem to have had any effect on the willingness of people to commit to such transfor-mational demands.

Arguably, the most pressing issue is whether a business has a sound basis on which to operate, identify new opportunities and convert those into competitive advantage when the most senior in their ranks are working under permanent stress. Hard work and long hours will keep a business and transformation projects ticking over but it is exceptionally difficult in such situ-ations to know how well a transformation is performing. So if it is apparent that there are so many concerns what is the answer?

New roles for Senior Executives

The fact that complex transformation projects are still the domi-nant modus operandi in most organizations, underlines that the answer isn’t simple. Equally even if there are generic solutions, how they are applied will vary from company to company and that level of detailed analysis is seldom done. The fact that it will take time means that each afflicted company will need to find a CEO or Senior Executive team who is willing to go through the pain but who might be around long enough to experience the benefits. To that point it might be that trying to do something like this across a whole company in the first instance represents a step too far. Separating out a business unit and conducting a “controlled experiment”, a “minimum viable product” might be a better solution until the lessons can be scaled up: “Incubating a prototype of transformation projects”.

The desire for greater transformational balance, the demands of young people, the weakening of the employer/employee bond and, the speed, at which change occurs makes it difficult to ima-gine how a company will benefit in future by not facing up to the challenge. The most important action is for companies to do an accurate, detailed and honest analysis of how they operate. Most companies believe they know a great deal more about how they operate than is actually the case. Interestingly Employee Engagement surveys often serve to highlight this but senior ma-nagement is so anxious to be seen to be doing something that they enter into an endless cycle of addressing symptoms without fully understanding causes.

A clear strategy and agreed key success factors should become one of the products of such analysis and this alone should drive out many efficiencies and enhance a company’s competitive ad-vantage by transformation projects.

It might be that a clear setup of transformation projects for everyone represents a bridge too far in terms of what they are willing or able to do, but in a world that will become increasingly complex and uncertain:

• it is very difficult to see how transformation projects is going to be the solution for everything.• it is very crucial to aware the issues of change management and leadership development.

It applies to the managers to review critically the current per-sonnel and management development paradigm. It is about to identify those components in the existing development system may that be used further and those that need to be updated or replaced. Let us consider that more and more companies are reshaping their way of working by the extended use of agile work solutions and by operationalization a “fluid organizational model”. It makes the ability to design and execute change much more important, but also to ability to empower employees to accompany this change. In addition, managers must ensure and facilitate that the increasingly number of operating teams continue to work towards the company‘s overall strategy.

Assumed from current “standards” in talent management the following points will find a special attention:

• Engaging the strategic components of workforce planning and talent management.• Revision of competence models and competence profiles.• Change in the management culture and governance models• Utilisation and operationalize of change management und project management methodologies.• Usage of digital technology, especially social media and collaboration tools.

If you concentrate on the role of the managers, this means that they transfer much more power and responsibility to teams and concentrate to take over and facilitate a much more strategic and entrepreneurial network role.

The paradigm shift for the role of a managers transform them-selves „from-to“:

• Administrator to entrepreneur and „co-founder“• Instructor to facilitor• Trainer to mentor

Source: nexeda

Figure 2: Transformation Journey

• Clear Direction• Key Focus Areas• Strategic Mission• Readiness

SCAN

• Adaption• Success Stories• Piloting• Execution

FOCUS

• Framework• Prototype• Leverage• Clarity

CREATE

• Improvement• Agile Support• Partnering

MOBILIZE

• Scaling• „Co-Invest“• Multiplication

ACT

Through the Learning Journey your people grow and are able to unleash their capabilities to execute a transformation!

Accelerate your Transformation Process

Collaboration LeadershipExecution Capabilities

Social Learning

Open Innovation

TraNSFOrmaTION JOurNEy Growth Path

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about nexeda:

> Experts in Resource Intelligence

> nexeda is an independent information, competence and resource hub for executives & organizations.

> nexeda has developed integrated collaboration techniques that help customers take advantage of collective intelligence and crowd sourcing.

> Within nexeda we analyse, design and work together with companies on their challenges of daily operations and resource management.

> We research, develop and use cost-effective solutions to accelerate – the „return on information asset“.

> The company bases its services on a managed pool of experienced executives & specialists, linked together into a global working party, dedicated to co-creation

The standardized organisational model is transforming itself to a situated, changeable and crisis-grade network. How all these aspects can be adapted and made be real life has to be accom-panied, because „no-one fits for all“. But one aspect is fact – our economy is undergoing a radical transformation. Business models that have been successfully used for decades are covered by a massive wave of digitization and individualism. This reminds for HR departments a request to rethink people and organisational development to be more collaborative and on the other side more individual.

Therefore, sustainable HR concepts are increasingly concentrating on self-controlled learning processes that are largely integrated into the everyday work of employees. The total paradigm shift in the way of working, smart HR solutions and the associated change in the learning culture and manage-ment culture is an exciting journey – an exploration journey for HR transformation.

Peter Wright is CEO and Founder of Acorn

Strategy Consulting and Competence Partner for

people transformation & change management at

nexeda. He is a truly global executive experienced

in leading HR functions for some of the world’s

best-known companies. Peter is highly skilled

in leading organizations and executive teams

through significant growth, crisis and business

transformation, including mergers and acquisi-

tions divestitures, restructuring, organizational

transformation and public offerings.

Dr. Frank Edelkraut is a Managing Partner at

Mentus GmbH and Competence Partner for

change management & leadership development

at nexeda. Frank is an experienced HR interim manager

with a sound background in project management and HR

management. Focusing on change and transformation

projects, he is an expert in social learning methods like

mentoring. As an expert for leadership development he

focusses on programes that are value creating by delivering

learning scenarios and training, e.g., 70:20:10-model, within

the operational workin g environment.