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Brain Circuits
Are you using disequilibrium to capture the value of digital tools?
Michael R Wade gets tips on driving transformation at scale from Hamilton Mann, a top executive at leading French aerospace, defense, and cybersecurity company Thales.
1. Take people out of their comfort zones
Creating objectives that take people out of their comfort zones is vital to drive transformation at scale.
2. Break down silos
Just as a team will only win the relay if they can pass the baton smoothly, successful transformation depends on breaking down silos between individual departments or business units.
3. Set challenging objectives
Giving responsibility and ownership to specific people across the organization for driving, maintaining, and updating the digital platform is another vital component of success.
4. Tolerate contradictory objectives…
Generally, organizations want to grow their revenues while keeping a lid on costs – but this objective might seem contradictory, since growing the topline often involves burning through resources; hence you need to allow for contradictory organizational objectives.
5. … while enabling collaboration between departments
Collaboration between departments isn’t just optional or beneficial: it’s essential for achieving the overall goal, so departmental objectives should “overlap” with those of other departments.
6. Give individual departments ownership of company-wide objectives
Because it is not possible (or, indeed, desirable) for one department to achieve these organizational objectives alone, you need to create “a common destiny” so that they all work towards the achievement of company-wide goals.
Key learning
To drive transformation at scale, you need to push departments outside of their traditional comfort zones. This helps create a form of disequilibrium, enabling them to transform the organization in a way that they can’t if everyone acts independently and in an autonomous way.
All views expressed herein are those of the authors and have been specifically developed and published in accordance with the principles of academic freedom. As such, such views are not necessarily held or endorsed by TONOMUS or its affiliates.
Authors
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