Digital Business Transformation

How to influence and co-ordinate agile, distributed business transformation

AGILE TRANSFORMATION

There are many new ideas and organisational models for modern companies to choose from, but any one example is unlikely to be a perfect match for your needs. We analyse each model in terms of the capabilities it can create, and we help organisations choose the best techniques and patterns to achieve their goals.

We like to work with small multi-disciplinary teams to coordinate a distributed transformation process involving a much wider network of people throughout the organisation. This approach, working through influence and networks against a common set of capability goals, is a great way to spread new ways of working and make the most of all the different groups and functions that are needed for transformation to succeed.

DISTRIBUTED CHANGE

In every organisation, outside of the formal project structures, there are many more enthusiastic individuals who want to help the organisation work in a more modern, connected way. Mobilising these ‘change agents’ is a great way to create a passionate network to spread new ideas, practices and behaviours.

Enterprise social networks provide access to the wider ‘human sensor network’ of the organisation, and our method involves these people in making sense of change and helping to assess its results in close to real-time. This makes transformation everybody’s responsibility and can provide a great boost to employee engagement.

 

A TYPICAL PROGRAMME

An agile framework to co-ordinate work on:

  • Coalition building: developing and working with change agent networks
  • Org models: a toolkit of new structures, techniques and new ways of working
  • Tech platforms: service-oriented approach for distributed work, sharing & connecting
  • Leadership: leadership guidelines (and future leaders) for the new world of work
  • Culture & practice: a conversation with the organisation about suitable methods
  • Process improvement: identifying and fixing processes that block new ways of working

SELECTED BLOG POSTS

TBM 318: Why Orgs Become Too Tall – by John Cutler

I am noticing a trend: many companies are discussing "excessive layers of management." Normally, this would excite me, as I’m a fan of flatter (but not overly flat) organizations.

But I worry that companies aren’t learning from past mistakes. They tend to focus on a narrow/biased set of explanations for why the organization got too tall and now needs to be "flatter" instead of taking a holistic view.

TBM 319: Surfing Inertia and Pendulum Swings

Recently, I have been thinking deeply about what it would take to "dampen" some of the harsh pendulum swings we are experiencing in the industry. Does inertia rule everything? Are we powerless against inertia?

It is ironic because if there was ever a time to use the word agility, it would be now. Yet the idea of organizational agility has seemingly been corrupted by the failure to transfer any of the ideas around team-level agility to organizations as a whole. We expect team-level agility to thrive within 1950s-esque operating systems. It’s like hundreds of speed boats tethered to the Titanic. This is not exclusive to "lagging" non-digital product companies. It’s happening everywhere.

Why Jamie Dimon is Sam Altman’s biggest competitor – SiliconANGLE

Why Jamie Dimon is Sam Altman’s biggest competitor – SiliconANGLE

In this Breaking Analysis, we dig deep into the economics of foundation models and we analyze an opportunity that few have fully assessed — specifically, what we’re calling Enterprise AGI and the untapped opportunities that exist within enterprises. While many firms discuss proprietary data as the linchpin of this opportunity, very few in our view have thought through the real missing pieces and gaps that we hope to describe for you today.

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