By: Sarah Saint-Laurent, Sr. Director Digital Consulting – People and Change Advisory LTIMindtree.

Why Speed of Change May Require a Reinvention Intervention

According to Gartner’s research, the average number of planned enterprise change initiatives an employee will experience in a year has escalated by 400% since 2016.

Change can no longer be considered on a project-by-project basis. Instead, cultivating a mindset shift where change is permanent and constant is required. With a 200% increase in disruption since 2017, it is incumbent upon professional consultants to usher in this new era of ceaseless reinvention as trusted strategic advisors. Our support with data-driven insights is a critical enabler for enterprises. It helps them identify trends, anticipate market shifts, and make informed strategic choices designed to meet and even exceed desired business outcomes.

Organizations can benefit greatly from a nimble and collaboratively produced roadmap for successful growth and sustainability. This can be achieved through anticipatory threat detection, prioritized design of relentless change, and agile and emergent strategic actions.

Following the 2023 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, an important report emerged. It emphasizes the prioritization of digital transformation, customer-centricity, organizational agility, data-driven decision-making, embedded ecosystem collaboration, and talent transformation for sustainable growth.

The report urges the integration of cutting-edge technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT), to scale and navigate this new digital era.

The report cites customer-centricity as vital, revealing that organizations that prioritize customer-centric approaches achieve higher customer satisfaction, loyalty, and, ultimately, better business outcomes.

In today’s dynamic landscape, building a collaborative ecosystem by forming strategic alliances, partnerships, and co-creation initiatives leveraging external expertise, is essential. There is also a significant need for upskilling and reskilling the workforce of the future.

Interestingly, the report emerging from the 2023 World Economic Forum replaces the term transformation with the term reinvention. In fact, reinvention is referred to as an imperative and referenced 186 times.

Reinvention prompts a cultural shift within organizations. Transformation may focus primarily on processes and systems with a known start-and-finish schedule. Reinvention, however, emphasizes the importance of engaging employees and cultivating a mindset of continuous learning and adaptability. The report reveals that organizations that prioritize reinvention create a workforce that embraces change, driving innovation and contributing to overall business success. Reinvention may be considered less timebound and iterative in nature. It allows organizations the time to prototype and experiment, remain responsive to customer needs, adapt to emerging technologies, and drive sustainable growth.

Terminology is fluid. I don’t think it matters which term is used, as many other terms will likely crop up in short order. Next week we might be using the term enterprise transmutation. Of course, globally, we’re not all native English speakers, so culturally, a term should fit the sentiment of constant and permanent reimagining, rejuvenation, and reassessing.

What is essential to understand is that organizations will be required to establish a culture willing to develop a scalable capacity to design change on purpose and forever. There is no going back. Yet, how will organizations do this when Gartner reports 57% of employees are unwilling to support more change? That is an increase of 31% since 2016. Gartner calls this condition a ‘transformation deficit.’ It is a ‘gap between the required change effort and employee change willingness.’

How do we remedy employee change burnout?

The Gartner article recommends several ways. Here are three:

1. Leaders will benefit by prioritizing change initiatives. Communicating priorities will help employees manage their emotional, mental, and physical bandwidth. This will also assist leadership in reassessing if a particular change is genuinely warranted, and if it is, when is the best time to implement it?

• I recommend that both business and technology leaders consider conducting a facilitated strategic alignment workshop. A workshop is designed to assess the full scope of the organization’s total transformation needs. It permits collaborative evaluation aligning reality with the necessity to better imagine the future state based on critical business outcomes. A workshop, or sprint of workshops, is held in a pre-planning and discovery phase, helping organizations articulate and clarify priority business outcomes. Organizations can identify challenges, ideate solutions, prioritize initiatives, create actions, and develop a broad-stroke agile roadmap. Beginning with high-impact, low-effort actions can help gain early momentum in their reinvention journey.

2. The Gartner research finds ‘rest that is available, accessible, and appropriate contributes to a 26% increase in employee performance and a tenfold reduction in the number of employees experiencing burnout.’

• As a coach, I’m curious whether organizations routinely observe and assess their change habits. Is it always ‘all hands on deck?’ If so, might it be possible to plan change purposefully to avoid this scenario? Are you consistently calling on the same managers to drive change? Is it possible to consciously ensure that staff just coming off a deployment of change be sheltered from more change for a minimum of three months? Having cross-functional capabilities can ensure that no lack of brain trust or experience is missing from the initiative.

3. The article suggests that reimagining the role of managers during change can help. As much as 43% of managers lack enough capacity in their day to support their teams through change. Suppose organizations adopt an open-source and autonomous philosophy in their ecosystem; teams will ‘self-navigate through change,’ increasing sustainable performance by 29% while benefiting the manager’s sustainable performance.

• I recommend adopting a Connector Management Style may be a win-win alternative. Unlike Teacher (grooming), Cheerleader (hands-off), and Always-On (doing it all) Manager types, a Connector Manager is skilled at providing targeted feedback in their area of expertise and connecting team members to other subject matter experts in the organization for coaching and guidance.
• Gartner defines a Connector Manager as one who ‘fosters meaningful connections among employees, teams, and the organization to develop specific capabilities.’ These managers triple the likelihood of high performance and increase employee engagement by 40%. This type of management style may be the answer needed in times of escalating change fatigue.

What will organizations need to future-proof and embrace the reality that change is now constant and permanent?

• Adopt frameworks for anticipatory detection of threats, trends, and opportunities and consider utilizing independent third-party experts with unbiased and fresh vantage points.
• Implement new ways of being by co-creating a shared and valued heritage of cross-functional, cross-disciplinary ways of working and doing.
• Adopt an emergent strategic philosophy blending sophisticated models of change, design thinking, appreciative inquiry, agile methodologies, strength-based ecosystems, and embracing neuroplasticity science. The philosophy can be coupled with coaching to reframe thinking patterns and dismantle embedded biases and blind spots.

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Employees Are Losing Patience with Change Initiatives, Cian O Morain and Peter Aykens, Harvard Business Review, May 09, 2023

Total Enterprise Reinvention, Julie Sweet, Jack Azagury, et al, World Economics Forum 2023

One Type of Manager Triples Employee Performance: Which Type are You? Jamie Roca and Sari Wilde, Connector Manager, September 17, 2019