Emergent

Ignite Purpose, Transform Culture, Make Change Stick

Stephen Scott Johnson

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780730336815
• eBook ISBN:
  9780730336839
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Liderazgo

Traditional hierarchical structures are falling – is your organisation ready?

Emergent provides a handbook for navigating – and thriving in – the new cultural paradigm. More than a simple DIY for change, this book empowers organisations to diagnose change risk, address current shortcomings and adapt to the increasing current away from hierarchies to autonomous and interdependent networks. Unguided, most fail in their attempt; this shift exposes huge skills deficits, a lack of engagement, lack of value and meaning, market reach, penetration and more. Here, a twenty-year veteran of brand and culture transformation outlines a unique governance framework and blueprint for implementing and co-creating your own cultural shift. Methodologies from crowdsourcing and social movements are adopted as tools for initiating change and creating cultural cohesion around a higher purpose, and essential skills and tools help equip organisations and individuals for the emergent future.

Today's workplace demands are creating extraordinary challenges for organisations; power is shifting, and the spotlight has forced businesses to engage with stakeholders in more meaningful ways, and to acknowledge a need for radical 'humanization' of the workplace. To drive successful change you need to spark a movement. This book provides a way forward through the transition, with expert guidance and a clear, actionable framework for implementation.

• Adopt a unique governance framework for culture transformation
• Energise, mobilise and catalyse change, innovation and growth
• Address skills deficits, values misalignment, failed engagement and more
• Ignite your organisation's purpose and forge sustainability for the future

The demand for greater values alignment, autonomy and individual empowerment – fuelled by technology and increasing interdependencies – is bringing down the traditional power structure. The question is: what moves into its place? A strong organisational culture is the difference between surviving and thriving in the marketplace. Emergent provides a practical blueprint for transformation to help your organisation navigate the shift successfully.

Part I
Innovation

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Cultures and the modern nature of work have become increasingly flatter, more decentralised and autonomous. Today, organisations on the verge of flatlining are having the fight-or-flight realisation that forging strong culture has less to do with data-centric engagement and ‘casting the net’ wider, and everything to do with going deeper into people’s lives.

Too many workplaces are devoid of humanity and creativity, and are in desperate need of revitalisation. Bizarrely, many organisations still approach culture change as a clinical process that is ‘done’ to people, often because they don’t know any different.

Typically, the results are lacklustre or worse, create fear, stress and inertia. Sometimes they can be catastrophic. One thing is certain: people want to know that their contribution is making a difference and that they belong to something of significance that is bigger than them.

Is the solution a more experimental environment where employees and stakeholders can realise progress faster? What if I told you no quick fix or formula exists to getting change right?

What we do know is that cultural transformation in any measure requires deep courage, tenacity and ongoing commitment to empowering employees and stakeholders with confidence and capability to own and lead change.

Overcoming the fear and fatigue of change is a long game that is directly proportional to how human an organisation is prepared to be. This humanisation requires no less than radical transparency and collaboration at all levels, and commitment of leadership to welcoming the full expression of the human condition, both shadow and light. Stakeholders must be authentically engaged and part of the process — to feel a legitimate connection and sense of ownership in the design of culture and its success.

No silver bullet exists. If you’re a leader who wants to start being recognised as someone who makes a difference, however, start by calling BS on the soul-sucking practices that are so prevalent in the workplace. Find out what lights your people up and amplify this. Have honest conversations. Be real. Be compassionate. Anything less is subscribing to a manufactured ideal of culture that isn’t real or sustainable.

Change is a messy business that involves risk, experimentation and real accountability. If the literal billions of dollars in failed culture and innovation programs tell us one thing, it’s this: something is systemically wrong with the way organisations approach change. Notwithstanding this huge failure, human beings are creatures of habit and unless something diabolical happens, we keep going round in circles chasing our tails, making the same mistakes over and over.

Companies such as zappos and Apple, however, established their businesses around empathising with customer feeling, and are now beacons of innovation and inspiration in the truest sense. Importantly, these brands didn’t just happen upon success.

What did they do differently? How do they sustain deity-like status in the marketplace? Their success all stems from a commitment to listening and collaborating, and from continuously learning to build around empathising with how customers feel. They made countless mistakes along the way. They failed repeatedly and were almost buried in the process before something magical happened — they learned that it wasn’t all about them. They started to connect, serve and inspire. They enabled people to see these brands as extensions of themselves, their own dreams and aspirations — as partners in life, so to speak.

So what are you waiting for?

Let’s look at how you, too, can transform.

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Chapter 1
Challenging the fear and fatigue of change

ACCORDING TO LEWIS E PLATT, CHAMPION of innovation culture and Hewlett-Packard chairman and CEO, ‘You must anticipate that whatever made you successful in the past won’t in the future.’ Platt’s 1994 speech gave business leaders everywhere inspiration for guiding their organisations in uncertain times. Such basic advice could have been interpreted as flippant were it not for the potent industrial context of HP’s major competitors at the time undermining their own competitive vitality by clinging to outmoded strategies long past their use-by date.

Change was once a cyclical process that occurred inside organisa-tions every one to two years, based on a top-down directive from leadership in response to social and economic evolution. It was then rolled out by change professionals tasked with overseeing carefully crafted linear plans with clearly defined entry points, middles and conclusions. ‘Successful change’ was measured as adherence to and fulfilment of a particular set of benchmarks, often with the intent of improving operational efficiencies and people function. Change was rigid, highly controlled, and ‘done’ to people — a process that lacked transparency and vital human connection.

Despite encouragement from leaders to ‘embrace change’ as a ‘for the best’ solution, this change process was often met with fear and resistance. Not surprisingly, according to Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2015: Leading in the new world of work report, 87 per cent of managers agree that culture and engagement is ‘critical or urgent’ — a sign of prevalent fatigue and the growing realisation that even the most carefully planned change agenda will become a shipwreck without radical intervention and a new approach.

Sounds exhausting, right? However, as noted by world-class gymnast Dan Millman in his fictionalised memoir Way of the Peaceful Warrior, ‘The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.’

Today, change is a continuous, non-linear and complex reality — no longer a ‘thing organisations do’ but rather a ‘way of being’. This means the notion that we can confine change to a pre-determined set of ideals or outcomes in a cultural context where the lines increasingly blur between work and life is naïve and avoidant of our responsibility to embrace a co-designed and inclusive business model. Survival demands that we adopt an outside-in view, and invest in new and accelerated leadership and learning models that prioritise engagement with employees and stakeholders above shareholder returns.

Meanwhile, a quietly influential conscious paradigm is rising — a vibrant and emergent collective that challenges the ruthless pursuit of profit and strategies to maximise shareholder returns, and mobilises as an empathic interdependent force for social consciousness, authenticity and mutual benefit. I call this collective groundswell the ‘Emergent’, and it highlights that the future of enterprise innovation will be largely dependent on organisations learning to co-design solutions to complex problems. The Emergent comprises conscious leaders, innovators, provocateurs and disruptors who exist to create every form of value and alignment possible — social, emotional and financial. They are a force for positive social impact, and they have put the status quo on notice.

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The Emergent comprises conscious leaders, innovators, provocateurs and disruptors who exist to create every form of value and alignment possible — social, emotional and financial.

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Changing capitalism

A great example of the Emergent is the B Corp movement, which brings together a community of incredible people doing extraordinary work. B Corp groups for-profit companies certified by the non-profit B Lab to meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, legal accountability and public transparency. At the time of writing, more than 2000 certified B Corps from 42 countries and over 120 industries were working together toward a single unifying goal: to drive systemic change and redefine success in business. They want to mobilise as a force for good.

At the 2016 Net Impact Conference in Philadelphia, Jay Coen Gilbert, co-founder of B Lab, presented a potent exposé about the evolution of capital, saying:

If we can harness the latent power of markets … of business, of capitalism — to a higher purpose than maximising shareholder value, we can unleash one of the most powerful manmade forces ever created … jobs with dignity and purpose, restore the environment, create pathways out of poverty, and reduce inequality....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Epigraph
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the author
• Gratitudes
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Innovation
• Part II: Transformation
• Part III: Evolution
• Conclusion ... or is it really the beginning?
• Appendix
• Index
• EULA