Business Improvement and Social media

Anyone attempting to lead change in an organization knows to expect some resistance. Change is not a rational process; no matter how positive the future you are creating, it’s natural for humans to struggle with it.

Such resistance is no less frustrating for being predictable. At times, it can seem that all that stands between you and your goals are a few naysayers and whiners. And to those on a mission, such reactions can seem like putting one’s head in the sand. “The old business is not coming back,” one CEO told me. “We have to innovate or we will die.” Faced with negative remarks, critical questions, or stony silence, change champions naturally begin to interact more with those already on board, consciously or unconsciously distancing themselves from those who “don’t get it.

Gradually, a wall begins to form between “us” and “them” — champions who support the change, and resisters who openly or quietly oppose it. Unfortunately, approaching change with an “us versus them” mind-set actually increases pushback. When we think of people as resisters, we don’t truly engage with them. We tend to discount their perspective, assuming that if we are right, they must be wrong.

Leaders of courage inspire their teams to achieve more than they may have thought possible.

A Wake-Up Call For Business

Steve Denning: In 2011, I wrote that the Shift Index was the most important business study ever. It’s great to have it updated, although disappointing to see that there has been continuing decline.

John Hagel: Hopefully, it’s a wake-up call. The core message is that technology is creating this mounting pressure to do things differently. It’s creating a world that is very different from the world that businesses have operated in the past. So until they figure out how to reconfigure their businesses and their operations, they are going to face mounting pressure and the deteriorating performance. The positive side is that the situation creates virtually unlimited opportunities if they can figure it out and adapt to the new world.

Denning: That’s a paradox: unlimited opportunities limited exploitation of them.

Hagel. Unfortunately the reaction of many companies when faced with mounting pressure is to do what they have always done, that is to squeeze harder on what they are currently doing, and try to squeeze more out of everybody. One of the most striking contrasts is the metric around labor productivity, which has been steadily increasing, versus the return on assets which has been plummeting.

Today’s organizations and institutions are suffering from a severe case of responsiveness lag, where their internal structures, operating procedures and time signatures are increasingly out of sync with the external pace and scale of change. As Jack Welch, the legendary chief executive of General Electric, famously quipped: “If the rate of change outside exceeds the rate of change inside, the end is near.”

Today, organizations and institutions are disappearing at increasing rates because they are failing to adapt to the increasing complexity of the economic ecosystem. To survive digital Darwinism, organizations and institutions must evolve into ‘instant enterprises’ that maintain a perpetual state of readiness to respond to the unexpected.

“Acknowledge the impediments to change and tackle them with cultural change from the top. Make sure those people you challenge to be the catalyst for change have the necessary knowledge of the business at hand, competencies, and respect from others. And empower them to win the battle.”

Human experiences are still craved by us and important to us. Perhaps those who wish to automate more need to slow down for a while?