Consulting 31 July Picking up the pace of change. Deloitte presents Change Accelerators

Transcription

1 Consulting 31 July 2015 Picking up the pace of change Deloitte presents Change Accelerators

2 How organisations can drive impactful change in disrupted business ecosystems Keynote speech transcript David Brown, Human Capital Lead, Deloitte On behalf of the Deloitte team I would like to welcome everyone and trust you have been having a good time so far. It is great to see so many people here, particularly on a Friday afternoon. To our clients, partners, media, members of the broader Deloitte family, welcome. My name is David Brown and I am one of the team within the HC business. Within the HC team we bounce out of bed every day to make Australia a better place to work. We are noticing with many of our clients they are all under significant strain and we are increasingly hearing, how can we do more with less, move faster with less risk etc. Last year in our global HC trends report we identified the overwhelmed employee as a top 10 issue. Perhaps we are starting to see the overwhelmed organisation! So we thought it helpful to have a session where we showcase some of the tools we are using to accelerate change and to talk about what we are seeing as the conditions that need to be in place to enable the pace of change to increase in an effective manner. We hope that you have already got some nuggets and ideas from visiting the change accelerators being showcased. Tools that are not used in the right way can be at best ineffective and at worst harmful. So I want to take some time to talk about how we create the conditions within which these tools can be used and made more effective. I want to start by saying that they are thought starters. I am not going to provide a formula. I don t think it is that simple. I would love to come up with the equivalent of Kotter s 8 steps but still working on that. Consider these lessons from the trenches that I encourage you to work with and build on. So as we go through this, I am going to pose some questions that I would like you to reflect on and at the end you can do some self-reflection on how you think you re doing as an agent of change in your organisational context. Our goal is to give you something to increase your capacity to act. I am conscious that some of you are feeling a little overwhelmed in the change challenges you have so just focus on one small nugget that might help.

3 The nature of change is evolving, our role as change facilitators must evolve as well in order to be successful. I am very interested in your thoughts around a few statements related to change. If you agree with the following statement raise your hand: Change is getting from A to B Change is rarely successful Change is an outcome Change is done to us Change is slow Change is changing With the mix of responses I suspect we could spend all night debating them. The point I want to make is that whilst our views on change are changing it makes it a very challenging space and as we are required to pick up the pace of change we need to be clear in our thinking so we can shape the debate in the work environments we are all in. We want to share some of our learnings over the past few years in managing different types of change projects from a range of industries. Here are a few things that we know to be true about the environment that we are operating in today: Cycle times are reducing. Tenure of CEO s is reducing. Positional power is giving way to personal power. Traditional approaches to transforming businesses are being replaced by agile approaches Expectations have changed from end users to internal stakeholders and senior executives we are all used to immediacy of response and having information to hand Disruption is inhibiting our ability to be able to plan long term It is hard to define the end state It is about adapting to survive and thrive The Implications: Change has changed It has gotten faster, more data driven, in some cases more mechanical and less about understand the human elements So, we as change leaders, need to adapt too Enough of the context, I know I am talking to the converted. You re sitting (or standing) here saying to yourself (if you are like me) so how as a change agent do I deal with this?. To do this, I want to use the metaphor of sailing. Do we have any sailors in the room? Great. I am also a passionate sailor. Like any metaphor it has its weaknesses, but I hope you will bear with me and very happy at the end of this session over a drink to unpack it further.

4 Do I have the right mindset? So my first question on creating the conditions for accelerated change is around mindset. What is the mindset of those leading the change, being impacted by the change and you as an agent of change? If you had asked me two years ago if it was possible for a 26 metre (86 feet) long boat to sail twice as fast as the wind speed and fly above the water I would have said you are dreaming. In my boat I am happy if I can go half as fast as the wind speed. It has fundamentally changed the way people think about what is possible in sailing design. When Ben Lexcen came up with the winged keel everyone thought that was cutting edge but nothing compared to these changes. I used to hold the view that culture change in an organisation can only happen 1 layer per year. I confess that it has shaped the way I think about transformation journeys. Over the last 3 years I have been challenged to rethink that mindset as I have watched organisations transforming and making significant behaviour and cultural changes faster than that. I have watched and been pushed by my colleagues. When I was first introduced to design thinking, I found it frustrating and difficult to go through the process. I am an outcome oriented person and being able to hang in the grey was difficult for me. But gradually I started to see the power of different way of thinking/a new mindset started to emerge. There is a saying that the hardest box to get out of is the one you put yourself in. What box have you put yourself in when it comes to change and how are you clarifying your POV? If you wrestled with the statements I had up earlier, perhaps these ones resonate more strongly. I won t ask for a show of hands but my experience is that when I am talking to people with this type of mindset it is associated with change that is accelerating and sustaining. Change is continuous - changes all the time, so it is not about going from A to B, but about adapting on your way to the end state, whatever it might be. We see too many people claiming victory too early, only to find things unravel Change is what you make it -- the perception is that change is a reaction to an existing or upcoming disruption rather than an opportunity to proactively pursue market opportunities Change is the journey We are changing all the time. Has our view of change evolved? Key success factor is to be open for changes, and to grow the capacity of the organisation to adapt to a constant changing environment Change is up to each of us -- if we are conscious of the changing environment and the pace of change we can be prepared for the change

5 Change is getting faster change can be slow if it is not approached on the right way. Change approaches from the past waterfall approach are not applicable anymore to all types of changes we are facing. The required pace of change is changing, our approaches need to change as well Change is an energiser is it an energy giver not a taker I suspect there are some of these statements which would still get some debate. My point is how has our mindset changed around change. Just like the shift in boat speed has doubled, the speed of change in our organisations has picked up and our mindset needs to be ahead of the curve. With respect to the change accelerators, we have found the transition labs, innovation hubs and visualisation and storytelling are excellent interventions for helping to change mindsets. Taking the time at the beginning of a change journey to explore hopes, fears and legacy and to spend time in creative environments on exploring the possible and creating narratives that inspire very powerful. Am I managing the conditions? The second condition for picking up the pace of change is how we manage the conditions. And I am not just talking about generalities here. When I am heading out for a sail I can check the forecast and know whether there is a storm coming; it may then mean I have to change course, tactics and possibly even the destination. No it is much more sophisticated than that. And made more so by the pace we now have to go at. If we are not constantly checking and tuning, we can be way off course in the blink of an eye. The modern Americas Cup boats have real time analytics that are capturing information ahead of them, making predictions, providing real time feedback loops to adjust at a micro level. Feedback loops are by the second. Change accelerators like Impact assessment visualisation, As One, real time behaviour pulsing, use of Tableau. Am I balancing the formulaic and the organic Whilst the machinery and systems on a modern boat are pretty impressive and precision analytics provides all the intel and feedback loops you could possibly want, there is always an organic dimension to picking up the pace of change. You can have the best frameworks and tools in the world, but if the people involved are not gelling, things slow down. In the case of the America s Cup it is a best of 17 races and the Kiwis were leading 8 to 1. They just had to win one more race. The American boat won the next 8 races to take the Cup. You can imagine the mind games going on both boats and working the organics of the team was part of the secret to this success.

6 My observation is Change Management as a craft has evolved to become heavily technique driven; the emphasis has been toolkits and models. In Consulting we train our people to think in frameworks and models. We can create a 2 by 2 for most situations. Over the last few years we have moved to a much more human-centred design approach taking into account the organic energy of the people involved. We have learned, that the more mechanistic you become in your change approach, the less impact you ultimately have. There needs to be a human lens applied in almost any change context. Change programs often start with a tool or a method and often fail to understand the underlying need that drives it. I am sure you can think of your own examples of this one but here are a couple of examples. Org Vue: is a product that allows us to come up with new organisation structures in about half the time. But if we don t take the time to understand the emotional system, implementing the new structure will not work. Using Org Vue, we were able to model a range of design scenarios within weeks; an activity that would ordinarily have taken several months and extensive executive time. There are traditional ways of getting input from people; surveys, focus groups. More based on a push strategy. However by using new techniques such as crowdsourcing (Yammer/chatter) we move to a pull strategy and can get twice the input in half the amount of time. Am I balancing the 3 B s I want to introduce you the 3 B s Belong, Believe, Behave. We researched over 70 different strategy executions where the common feature was they were successful. Faster and more sustainable than others. They all had the 3 B s. Belong - We know that a sense of belonging is critical we tend to move with our tribes that is the teams with whom we identify within an organisation Believe - We know we need to believe in the strategy or the purpose of the change and by believe we know we need to commit to the strategy of the change Behave - Lastly, we know that our behaviour can be informed by our leadership styles We use the three B s to quickly understand levels of organisational commitment to a change and design suitable interventions to accelerate the delivery of sustainable change. America s Cup racing historically was heavily nationalistic. The sense of belonging was established from your country of birth. Some of you might remember the power of nationalistic spirit when Australia won the Americas Cup and the boxing kangaroo. Nowadays it is about corporate brands. Oracle, Prada, Emirates and so creating the sense of belonging needs to be more sophisticated.

7 Behave. On a boat going at the speeds that are generated it is split second timing and everyone needs to have a shared understanding of how we behave in every situation. Our work settings are increasingly complex with a talent eco system of FTE s and contingent workforce and alliance partners. Knowing how to quickly create the 3 B s is a key factor in picking up the pace. Accelerators here are As One, our behaviour pulsing app and making moments that matter. In our own organisation we have been using 3 B s extensively. We used a combination of the As One framework as well as the Moments That Matter framework to understand where we need to improve levels of commitment to the Deloitte strategy and how we can use a number of Moves to build awareness and engagement with the strategy. We found the combination of the data driven As One insights and the softer, more human centred interventions from the Moments to be the ideal combination for our people. Our behaviour pulsing tool. Habi is based on the power of the habit loop and providing real time measurement, feedback and reward to improve, personal, team and organisational behavior. Do I manage the right rhythm I am a big believer in managing the rhythm of change. I suspect we have all seen change that only knows one speed. Full speed. Why do we do it?? Inevitably people fall overboard and in some cases get seriously hurt. If we have a mindset that change is constant and there is no end state, then it is about how to work the series of sprints. The Americas Cup works on four year cycles and throughout that time there are periods of high intensity where they work around the clock and times where there is downtime. My observation is that those organisations and those change agents that are ultimately moving the fastest are those who adapt to the changing conditions. We know that all organisations move at different speeds. Internal and external drivers can determine where and when we need to move faster to achieve our change goals. This presents a challenge for change leaders because, as we know, not all of our customers and stakeholders move at the same pace. This typically means that we have to adapt out approaches and realign our timing with the organisational realities. Often, we need to manage the rhythm of our change programs in sync with the rhythm of our business stakeholders.

8 A couple of observations within this point: Be fanatical about fast starts. Getting the upper hand at the start of a race is often an advantage. Use the concept of sprints Build in time to celebrate Don t stop and claim victory too early. I have seen many change initiatives stop well before the tipping point has been reached and all the effort is wasted Change accelerators here that we have found effective are the use of the change canvas and transition labs and moments that matter. Who is leading I think this last is one of the areas where the metaphor of sailing breaks down. It is an area that I am thinking hard about at the moment and an area that I think holds the opportunity for the next quantum shift in picking up the pace of change. On these big boats sailing at the speeds they do pushing the limits everyone has to have very clear roles and sure they need to have the agility to respond to the shifting conditions but basically everyone is executing on the same job. I think leadership of the future will be much more shared. For example, one of my competitors that I race against changes the person skippering depending on the wind conditions. One of his crew is an outstanding light wind sailor and the other heavy. Depending on the wind conditions a different leader takes over. I understand in some military units, the person who leads a particular mission is based on the best equipped and not on rank. Positional power is giving way to personal power. Where I am seeing faster paced change is where the leadership is shared. Egos are put to one side for the collective benefit of the team. Diversity and inclusion are key. Whilst change is personal it is a team sport as well and ultimately the team wins every time. I don t think we have the answer to this one but perhaps the use of visualisation and storytelling is a good place to start. Would love to hear your ideas on this one. Our challenge to you So how about you. What are the implications for you as a change agent in your organisational context? We wanted to give you something that increases your capacity to act. To be a more effective navigator and catalyst for change.

9 In your role as the change navigator: what will you do that is different from what you are doing already? When we ran this session internally for some of our change team I asked them the same question. Their unequivocal response was not a love of sailing stories They did call out some useful takeaways: Never losing sight of the human element of what we do Embracing data to inform our insights Using the different tools and techniques to connect the dots A key lesson for me at the moment is getting the right balance between context and content. We can be the smartest person in the room when it comes to the tools but if we don t know how to use them in the right context they are useless. We can also know how to read the context but if we are not across what tools to use when and where then we are not adding value as change practitioners. So as you leave today, can I encourage you to reflect on these questions. Our hope is that they will help you to pick up the pace of change both for your organisations and personally. Thank you again for your time today. Please feel free to stick around for a drink and talk together about your thoughts on what you have seen and what I have had to say. We thank you for your support of Deloitte and we look forward to working with you to continue to make Australia a better place to work. About the author David Brown is a partner of Consulting and leads the Human Capital practice nationally. David is a member of the global HC leadership team and has over 30 years experience in the Human Capital space in both corporate HR and advisory roles. David has considerable international experience in HR management across North America, Europe and Asia. He specialises in strategic change, HR strategy and execution, workforce productivity/engagement and talent management/development.

10 Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited Grosvenor Place 225 George Street Sydney NSW 2000 Australia Deloitte refers to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, a UK private company limited by guarantee, and its network of member firms, each of which is a legally separate and independent entity. Please see for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited and its member firms. About Deloitte Deloitte provides audit, tax, consulting, and financial advisory services to public and private clients spanning multiple industries. With a globally connected network of member firms in more than 150 countries, Deloitte brings world-class capabilities and high-quality service to clients, delivering the insights they need to address their most complex business challenges. Deloitte's approximately 210,000 professionals are committed to becoming the standard of excellence. About Deloitte Australia In Australia, the member firm is the Australian partnership of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. As one of Australia s leading professional services firms. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and its affiliates provide audit, tax, consulting, and financial advisory services through approximately 5,360 people across the country. Focused on the creation of value and growth, and known as an employer of choice for innovative human resources programs, we are dedicated to helping our clients and our people excel. For more information, please visit our web site at Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards Legislation. Member of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited This publication contains general information only, and none of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, its member firms, or their related entities (collectively the Deloitte Network ) is, by means of this publication, rendering professional advice or services. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your finances or your business, you should consult a qualified professional adviser. No entity in the Deloitte Network shall be responsible for any loss whatsoever sustained by any person who relies on this 2015 Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu