- Strategy is traditionally all about change management,
going from what you are today to what
you want to be tomorrow.
But what if the change you're trying to manage
never actually stops?
You need to move from change management
to managing change forever.
So let's say that MegaCorp wants to manage
the strategic change from a decentralized
to a centralized organizational structure.
Why?
Well it turns out that the cycle between being
decentralized and centralized is as old
as human organization.
Back in the early '90s, I wrote a piece
for a technology magazine that I called
Scatter Gather from an old programmer's term
for managing lots of information at once
and leaving it scattered while information piles up,
then gathering it together when
the pile becomes unmanageable.
Now organizational leaders practice
scatter gather all the time.
Decentralized organizations tend to be more nimble,
but top management often gets nervous
that it can't exert enough control.
Centralized organizations tend to communicate
more rapidly but their stiff hierarchies mean
they can't move as quickly.
The truth is neither centralization
nor decentralization is perfect.
So organizations of any scale often cycle
constantly between being centralized and decentralized
in response to everything from changing
market conditions to company mergers
and acquisitions to changes in top managers.
In fact, it's common to associate
any big challenges with the organization structure
so new leaders will tend to shift
to the opposite approach, kicking off a series
of reorganizations which usually tend
to remind observers of something related
to deck chairs and the Titanic.
Now how would they do that?
They'd compare the current state,
let's say decentralized, to the desired state
of centralization.
The change management plan would probably include
consolidation of function, closing a number
of remote facilities, and layoffs of redundant employees.
But what is change is constant?
What if our rapidly accelerating world is
never going to give us the time to stop
and compare two static states for the organization?
And what if that ideal future state
of the organization is literally never attainable
because we simply are never going to completely get
to that destination?
In that context, change management that functions
like reorganization looks pretty useless.
In fact, Lou Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM,
has a great quote, "Reorganization to me is
"shuffling boxes, moving boxes around.
"Transformation means that you're really
"fundamentally changing the way the organization thinks,
"the way it responds, and the way it leads."
Ah, so now we have it.
Strategic agility isn't about reorganization.
It's about transformation.
We need to completely revamp our thinking
about change management and instead think
of the core organizational process
as managing ongoing change as you perpetually engineer
the transformation of the organization.
We need to stop thinking there's some mythical future state
or destination that's achievable in our lifetimes.
Instead we need to develop the set of practices
that will allow us to treat that process
as a lifelong journey where the organization has
the kind of strategic empowerment
to constantly change and grow.