Leading Exponential Change
Page 1
Published by Innova1st Publishing 2018
Copyright © 2018 Erich R. BÜhler
en.innova1st.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission from the publisher.
Disclaimer
Every effort has been made to ensure that this book is free from error or omissions. Information provided is of general nature only and should not be considered legal or financial advice. The intent is to offer a variety of information to the reader. However, the author, publisher, editor or their agents or representatives shall not accept responsibility for any loss or inconvenience caused to a person or organization relying on this information.
Copyediting for English-language edition performed by James Gallagher, Castle Walls Editing LLC (www.castlewallsediting.com)
Copyediting for Spanish-language edition performed by Carol Libenson (Carol.libenson@gmail.com)
Spanish-English translation by Michelle Masella (masella.translation@gmail.com)
Book cover design and formatting services by Victor Marcos
ISBN: 978-1527222083 (pbk)
LEADING
EXPONENTIAL
CHANGE
ERICH R. BÜHLER
Contents
Acknowledgmentsix
Introductionxi
How to Use This Book?xv
Chapter 1 From Zero to a Million in Two Seconds
The Decade of Moore’s Law
Change in the Era of Exponential Acceleration
Focusing on a Healthy Organization
Empirical Learning
From the Linear to the Exponential Mindset
How to Rally Organizational Health by Changing Just One Habit
What You Have Learned
Chapter 2 Finding a Suitable Solution in a Complex World
Change is Complex
The Formula for an Exponential Organization
The Complication of Being Complex
The Trap of Tools in a Complex World
The Non-linear Cause-Effect Relationship of an Action
From a Bird’s Eye View to Low-Level Flight
From the Good Idea to the Change Plan
Are You Tasked with Driving Organizational Change?
What You Have Learned
Chapter 3 Learning to Change your Company
The First Steps Towards Change
Creating a Powerful Vision of Change
Setting Up the Transformation Team
Understanding the Importance of Commitment in Employees
The Story of Peter
Reaching Sustainable Change
What You Have Learned
Chapter 4 Preparing Your Mind for the Change
Overcoming Confirmation Bias
Change and Learning in Traditional Companies
The Science Behind the Change
Small Changes, Great Impact: Micro-Habits
An Individual Transformation to Achieve a Collective Transformation
What You Have Learned
Chapter 5 The Five Patterns to make change Contagious
Conflict resolution
Reframing
Exponential Strategy
Expectations and Alignment
Psychological Ownership
CREEP. The Five Areas to Consider
What You Have Learned
Chapter 6 Preparing the Transformation Team
Establishing an Initial Alignment
Feeding on Constant Experimentation
Using a Transformation Team
Measuring the Results of the Transformation Team
Liftoff. Shaping a High-Performing Team in Record Time
What You Have Learned
Chapter 7 Discover the Power within your Company with Enterprise Social Systems
Differences Between Agile and Business Agility
The Seduction of Tools
The First Steps in Enterprise Social Systems
Enterprise Blocking Collaboration
Enterprise Social Density
The Permission-to-learn Pattern
Enterprise Social Visibility
The Complexity and Complication Pattern
Enterprise Social Systems in Action
What You Have Learned
Chapter 8 Enterprise Social Systems (II): The ELSA and DeLTA Frameworks
The ELSA Change Framework
The DeLTA Change Framework
What You Have Learned
Thank You for Taking the Journey
The initial drafts of this book, in both Spanish and English, have passed through multiple hands and undergone several revisions. Each revision provided me with invaluable feedback from the following collaborators. Their contributions enabled me to include additional concepts, refine ideas, increase my focus, and add clarity.
Without their support, this work wouldn’t have evolved into the book you are now reading.
Stefan Sohnchen (New Zealand), Business Agile consultant. I thank Stefan for his keenly critical eye on every word written in this book. His questions about the ideas shared in this book, along with his professional insight and recommendations, led to many improvements.
Carol Libenson (Venezuela), proofreader and editor. Carol worked on the Spanish version, making it easier to read. She also provided excellent suggestions and ideas for enhancing the content.
Michelle Masella (USA), Spanish–English translator. In addition to putting together the initial English draft, Michelle offered suggestions that helped improve both versions of the book.
Adeyinka Adesanya (New Zealand). Thank you, Yinka, for fine-tuning the work.
Victor Marcos (Philippines), book cover designer and typesetter. I thank Victor for his dedication and the time spent away from his family to ensure this book was ready in record time.
James Gallagher (USA), copy editor. James worked on the final draft of the English version, polishing the manuscript and helping to connect readers with the author’s vision.
My thanks, as well, to those who contributed their real stories: Carlton Nettleton (USA), Claudia Patricia Salas (Spain), Sebastian Vetter (Germany), Stefan Sohnchen (New Zealand).
Last but not least, thank you, Amparo Sánchez, for your unconditional support during the year I invested in making this achievement a reality.
Why did I choose NOT to write a book about Agile, Lean, or Scrum and choose instead to write about the rules that govern change—and about how these rules can be used for the transition to better, more flexible companies?
Historically, we have thought that evolution is linear and cumulative, that one idea leads to another, and that this next idea will lead to a new discovery. Following this pattern, advances are predictable, and people have time to adapt.
Current technology, though, has changed how evolution takes place, and we are now witnessing exponential change. Companies are facing markets in an accelerated process of change. There is more information available. Consumers are connecting with each other via technology and developing ever more advanced ideas. Computers are increasing in capacity and artificial intelligence. All of this results in greater innovation, but also, in a future that isn’t as easy to anticipate as it once was.
Products, especially software, have altered day-to-day activities and changed consumer habits, even in people’s private lives. If you look around, you’ll notice that many of these prod
ucts were provided by companies that did not exist a few years ago. Although they may seem to have appeared from out of nowhere, these new companies have succeeded by offering exceptional ideas and services while employing innovative methods for managing employees.
You might think that these companies got lucky, that they were “in the right place, at the right time,” or that they simply hired some very smart people. But even if all this was true, it would only account for a minor fraction of their success.
These new companies have taken advantage of new market opportunities. They have made use of new technologies, and they’ve helped their people feel more comfortable working collaboratively in places with highly varying tasks.
Many of the leaders I’ve helped have been paying special attention to these organizations. These leaders realize that change is now a mandatory requirement for facing new challenges.
Just as cloud computing, artificial intelligence and Big Data are essential components in the digital company, so are new ways of thinking, methodologies and frameworks.
Lean, Agile, Scrum, SAFe, LeSS, and Scrum at Scale have helped organizations to grow and improve more quickly, increasing learning and giving clients new possibilities.
With the exception of Lean, these techniques, or mindsets, have been created to improve the development of software products. They are, therefore, difficult to adapt when we want to transform an entire company.
It is no longer enough to understand framework functionalities, principles, or techniques, or new ways to manage people. We must also understand deeper factors of organizational change and learn how these can help entire companies to improve.
Most consultants and leaders agree that changing an organization is an emotional roller coaster. There’s sheer satisfaction when individuals learn and believe the trip was worthwhile, but conflict arises when individuals or teams do not want to change.
On many occasions, people stop supporting the business-transformation initiative, or it loses traction for no apparent reason, making the plan more complex. This happens because human beings are not biologically prepared for constant change. In fact, having to adapt quickly to highly volatile environments increases a person’s resistance to change.
Knowing why this happens and having the tricks and techniques to accelerate transformation without a substantial loss of traction—or putting your company’s stability at risk—is part of what I will convey in this book.
In the following pages, I provide the fundamentals for understanding what happens in highly volatile environments. Relying on psychology and neuroscience applied to organizational change, I have included ideas, techniques, and activities for accelerating your company’s transformation.
You will find innovative techniques for coping with resistance to change, recommendations on how to make difficult decisions, and effective ways to prepare the organization for exponential growth.
I also explain how to help teams with low motivation levels, and I describe the differences between traditional, contagious, and exponential change, so that you can distinguish between them and implement your ideas more easily.
I’ve tried to make this book enjoyable and useful for any executive, manager, change agent, business consultant, Agile Coach, Scrum Master, or anyone else wanting to reinvent their company.
Throughout the book, you will find real stories by consultants from different countries and cultures, and these stories will allow you to gain a wide variety of perspectives.
I recommend reading Chapters 1 through 6 in order, but if you wish to jump ahead, reading Chapter 1 will give you the background for understanding Chapters 7 and 8 (Enterprise Social Systems).
The first two chapters explain the situation in which companies currently find themselves. These chapters describe an exponential company, what differentiates it from traditional organizations, and why it’s necessary to have an exponential company.
Chapters 3 and 4 expand on the techniques of business transformation and show how the brain acts in each case. I also present activities for facing resistance to change and offer suggestions on how to work with teams that have lost motivation.
Chapters 5 and 6 present methods for accelerating the transformation of the company and offer suggestions so that any change is easy to scale.
Finally, Chapters 7 and 8 focus on Enterprise Social Systems, providing solid foundations for creating new processes and frameworks that support the rapid evolution of your company.
Chapter 8, in particular, explains the ELSA and DeLTA change frameworks. While the first framework can be used when the company’s leaders actively support the transformation of the company, the second can be used when they are not yet involved.
As you progress, you will see that I have tried to stay away from subjects for which there is already plenty of information, such as Agile, Scrum, Lean, or Lean Startup. This has been a challenge, because there’s a close link between these and many of the points in this book.
I believe a good balance has been achieved, though, and references for additional information are indicated by the following icons:
Additional information on a specific topic.
Recommendations for specific, ready-to-use techniques or activities.
At the end of each chapter, you will find a summary and guided self-reflection questions to help confirm and strengthen your learning.
I also refer to other authors and research for digging deeper. My belief is that this book will provide you with the knowledge to accelerate the transformation of your company. Good luck!
Erich R. Bühler
“It is a mistake to think that moving fast is the same as actually going somewhere.”
Steve Goodier, Writer
How is it possible that no more than a few electoral polls correctly predicted the presidency of Donald Trump? Why did Brexit take so many by surprise?
For many, these surprises came like a bolt from the blue. Some may have recognized the possibility of such events, but they were remote possibilities, and even the most established prediction techniques showed them to be unlikely.
I would never have imagined that a simple search engine like Google would dominate the world of information, that we would stop using SMS, or that Apple would resurface as an industry front-runner. The world is more complex than ever before, moving and changing at an incredible rate. No one is immune, not even the most successful leaders of today’s best-known companies.
Shocking events and surprises are part of daily life. We can access more information in a week than a president two decades ago could access during an entire term in office. Unfortunately, all this input makes it harder to foresee and adapt to what’s coming next.
Thanks to social media, information travels instantly, without borders. People from different cultures and corners of the world can collaborate using software tools, and they can reach conclusions that are more thought-out and elaborate than previously possible. Watching the world premiere of a film while sitting comfortably on your sofa is no longer a problem. You can play video games online with someone on the other side of the planet or acquire specific, high-quality knowledge without having to attend university. And yet, when it comes to knowing what’s going to happen in the next few weeks, we’re at a loss, and it’s only getting worse. But foreseeing the near future is something companies need to do to establish effective change and adaptation tactics that will position them strategically within the market.
Perhaps, like me, you lived through the nineties, when creating a new product meant using well-established practices and methods. Everything was standardized. It was a culture of cumulative progress. Innovation occurred naturally, following processes that involved sharing opinions on known and controlled subjects. You had an idea, I built on it, someone else built on my idea, and so on in a linear and predictable way. Back then, we knew what our next product updates would look like. We could eve
n create prototypes that gave us a rough idea of where we were heading in the next five years. The future seemed relatively stable. Taking firm steps to create a new service and run with it was something that required only well-known business skills. Knowing our client base and following the steps laid down by standard methodologies helped solve most day-to-day problems.
It was always the same story: There was an initial idea. The product was created and produced as cheaply as possible. Finally, the product was launched through distribution channels or intermediaries. At its core, the process involved hiring a large number of employees and accessing extensive space to develop the idea.
Distributors were a key part of the equation, because they got our products to the people who’d buy them. Success and return on investment were virtually guaranteed—as long as the competition didn’t get ahead of us. Then we’d begin working on the next version, and the cycle would repeat, over and over again.
As you’ve probably noticed, the evolution of the Internet has changed the story dramatically. A company with a couple of employees can now create a service or product that alters the rules of the market—and can be delivered in a matter of weeks.
Today, it’s possible for a world-class business to suddenly dissolve for no apparent reason. It isn’t just the relationship between the size of a company and its impact that has changed. Artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and robotics are also affecting companies, the speed with which they need to adapt, and their methods for obtaining and analyzing market feedback.