The greatest challenge for today’s leaders is how to upgrade their organisation’s operating system.
Agility, adaptability and connected innovation are hard to achieve within divided structures.
In a software-driven world, organisations need to become more like software to evolve.
We help design, develop and run your organisational operating system.
We look at five key dimensions of the organisational operating system.
Our diagnostic health bot asks questions and gathers data to create a real-time picture of progress towards becoming an agile, adaptive organisation. We use this information to create custom learning journeys and suggest new management techniques to address weaknesses.
We map digital capabilities and talent, identifying gaps that are priorities for action, and help create distributed agile transformation systems to make change routine.
Shared digital leadership and strategy are key to making sure all stakeholders are aligned and helping build the connected capabilities the organisation needs.
Structure
What is getting in the way of connected, agile working? How can we create real-time co-ordination & communication structures that are faster and more reliable than hierarchy?
Culture
An agile organisation needs more openness, accountability and psychological safety for people to step up and own their work. How can we test for these attributes and what interventions can help?
Practice
Shifting from a process view of the world to a service-oriented approach is key to continuous improvement. How can we make operations more collaborative, data-driven and service-focused?
Technology
How can we better integrate our workplace technologies to connect, standardise and automate the boring bits, whilst freeing up people to focus on value-added activities?
Leadership
What does leadership look like in a digital, networked world? How can leaders not just drive incremental improvements, but create the conditions and the platform for exponential success?
At the leadership level
We work with digital leaders to map digital strategy, capability gaps, and cultivate a network of digital guides across the organisation; we also deliver in-depth digital leadership learning and development programmes.
At the platform level
We map the capabilities, services and skills of emerging agile teams, and help assemble them into a service platform that the whole firm can use. We also help design and implement key platform elements starting with a digital learning hub.
At the team level
We help switch from a process-centric work system to a more agile and service-centric approach, identify scope for automation or standardisation of these services, and then create the interfaces and connections with other teams to work better together.
Diversity-as-a-System
A 21st century organisation uses systems thinking to enable agility. Shipping working code is an example of a highly valuable system that most startups develop early. When startups scale, everything moves so fast that the sole focus is on shipping the product to specified deadlines. If diversity isn’t engrained into the system of shipping the product, it will be forgotten during scaling…
Trustfulness and professionalism
In a complex world where few of us have time to understand the intricate detail of data, accounting, law and perhaps even code, we will need trusted professionals to help us navigate complexity. So whilst automation and technology will probably reduce headcount in the profession overall, the prize for those who can use our new technology superpowers to create value for their clients will be ever greater. Algorithmic transparency and code standards can help us trust the underlying machinery, but I predict we will still place our trust in humans to make the final judgement.
The trap of user-centricity in the Digital Workplace
The aspect of the future of the digital workplace that most excites me is its data. The social and organisational network data produced by these tools provides a wealth of possibilities to explore. These can be as simple as a chatbot that replaces an IT help-desk, or as complex as being able to understand the behaviour patterns of your business.
Why throwing out job families is a good first step to creating a future-proof talent strategy.
In HR, the concept of job families is one example of a practice that needs revising to stay relevant. Clustering a set of roles into a ‘job family’ allowed for transparency in rewards, promotions and career paths, but today this can create artificial barriers to collaboration and personal development.
The Tell-tale Heart of Team Failure
At the end of a conference presentation, I was recently asked “how can I tell if an enterprise agile team is failing?”. A question for which I didn’t have an immediate satisfactory answer…
Change the system, change the culture
The challenge of transforming large, complex organisations that have grown up around calcified hierarchies and process management structures is a hard one, so we should not be surprised that people often have different areas of focus or emphasis about where to start and what matters. But at some point, we have to face up to and challenge the core system that sustains the old and holds back change…