DELIVERING BUSINESS CHANGE IN A NEW WORLD Henley Business School April 2012.
Since 2008 – What is the challenge & what is needs changing to cope? The following extracts have been quoted from the report.
1. Judgement – to manage paradox we have to work
out what to do when nobody is telling us what to
do. Having a more system-thinking perspective
to drive our context. We need to make decisions
when we do not have all the data we would like to
have, trade off conflicting needs and do it as close
to source as possible.
2. Tolerance of ambiguity – we need to be
comfortable working with shades of grey and an
absence of certainty, to engage with macro data
and to act when needed, not when convenient.
3. Flexibility – we need to balance governance with
necessary uniqueness, consider exceptions in a
more directional way and understand and resolve
conflicting points of view from the standpoint of
the business rather than our own role.
4. Pragmatic commercialism – being less
perfectionistic, always using an impact-versuseffort mindset, managing risk where risk needs
to be managed most, and being comfortable that
achieving and evidencing a reasonable result
quickly may be better than driving for a perfect
result that never happens.
These capabilities are often in short supply and hard to
find quickly, and that we can find it hard to react to
some of the challenges outlined above. Even the use
of external contingent leadership cannot always deal
with the internal adaptation required.
Icebreaker comment; the underlying issue here is creating a proactive thinking culture. Most corporates over the years have tended to drum this thinking out of their employees, leaving people to wait to be told what to do, with the resulting lack of motivation, through diminished learning, interpersonal relationships along with the direction they need to operate at their best. This people side is exactly why icebreaker run our professional development program based on developing executive coaching skills in an interim change / turnaround scenario as these skills are not available off the shelf naturally or inherent in an executive interim either.
