Humane organisational change
Organisations restructure too frequently, for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way. Here are some experiences that suggest a more humane way to evolve how you are organised.
Many people with a few years of experience in the corporate world have experienced one or more restructures. Enterprises tend to apply these styles of changes too large, too often, for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way. The experience is often quite bad even when so-called ‘best practice’ change management approaches are being applied.
I’ve experienced many restructures and have led quite a number as well. I’ve experienced the anxiety and the uncertainty. I’ve also made changes that I later discovered inflicted those same feelings on others at a point in my career when I didn’t know any other ways.
Fortunately, I’ve discovered a number of approaches that have been more humane in how they support this type of change. I share these as the starting point for ideas of what could work in your context and to give hope to those who like me didn’t know any other way.
Share what you know and what you are uncertain about
Organisations are cautious about what they share, and rightfully so - any structural changes can affect people’s livelihoods, their feeling of stability, their status and a range of other nerve-wracking aspects.
This caution can lead to leadership failing to share information when it could help address the uncertainty people are feeling. The consequences of getting such a communication too badly wrong create friction, making it less likely to communicate, even when it’s the best option.
Once there is a reasonable degree of confidence in the shape of the organisation needed to meet its objectives, there are ways you can approach sharing this information, which provides a degree of safety. This is, of course, more difficult when there are changes so severe they may lead to redundancies. I won’t make the case that all redundancies are avoidable but I will make the point that organisation’s inability to evolve and failure to actively address shifts in strategy lead to far more redundancies than need be necessary. Change is often when forced rather than when the early signs that a course adjustment is required.
One of my experiences involved bringing together two similar-sized product development teams of two similarly-sized companies that had been acquired by another. The two companies were fierce competitors and due to this competition, they had duplication of nearly every technology and service. We had our work cut out for us as everyone working for either company had a strong affinity to the brand they were working for at the point of acquisition.
We shared a visual model of what we thought the organisation may look like in roughly two years time. This was supported by what we believed we needed to achieve competitively over that period of time. We shared openly that this was based on what we knew at that time and we would adjust the plan as we learned. We used the visual model as a living document showing it at almost every town hall along with any updates or adjustments.
Many organisations pair the reveal of what the target organising model is to be with the sudden announcement of how the change is affecting where people will be in the new structure. We had made this mistake in the past like many organisation have, so on this occasion we chose a different path.
Invest in a rich model of the new organisation
When we defined the model, we used a domain model instead of a functional approach. We also shared our thoughts on how the model was intended to work.
The domain and team definitions started with defining the outcomes they were responsible for - i.e. their purpose for existing. We paired this with thinking about what skills and capabilities would be required for the team to succeed. We were large enough for the teams to be further organised into domains which also had a clear purpose, a clear idea on how they would measure success, what capabilities would be required and what interactions were critical for the domain’s success.
Use an internal recruitment approach
We encouraged members of the team to volunteer to take leadership roles in defining and refining the purpose of teams. Sometimes this was a shoulder tap, sometimes a proactive team member who saw the need for change had a vision for how it could work and the requisite experience to be successful.
They would shape this information into a pitch. In the beginning, we would pitch one team or maybe a couple of teams. Based on this pitch, anyone could express interest and then engage in a discussion with the new leaders of that team. Later on our journey, we might pitch a whole domain at once (3-4 teams). We progressively recruited from the two companies as they were into the new consolidated organisation we needed to become to have enough concentrated ability to fend off global competitors who were entering our markets.
We wouldn’t start a new establishment of new teams until we were confident the previous round had reached a level of stability. We had a range of dimensions we monitored teams on to assess whether we as leaders were providing adequate support. For instance, were they fully staffed for the responsibilities they had? Did they have adequate support from the internal coaches? Was the morale of the team positive? Did they have clear goals and alignment with the organisational direction?
One nice side-effect of this approach is that you naturally support early adopters of a change to move first and those who were unsure could wait and see what the experience was like for the early adopters. As more of the organisation made the change as we recruited new teams into the model, the comfort levels rose in terms of later adopters of the change.
Invest heavily in embedding a new culture and capabilities in new teams
For each new team established we invested in a boot camp. It was typically 3-5 days in length and featured a full agenda of activities. Training on relevant concepts and practices, team building activities, identity and brand building activities, planning, design, hackathons and more. We believed strongly in the power of starting together and establishing new habits.
Even when there were cases where the members who recruited into a team were largely the same members of a previous team (but now with a purpose aligned to a unified organisation) we found that on most measures teams performed better after the boot camps.
There were of course exceptions - at least a couple of times newly formed teams lost their way. Sometimes this was due to situations where the team ended up understaffed or lack of adequate support from leadership. These were in the early days and we quickly learned what the risks were and the early warning signs and what was required from leaders to adequately support teams.
Approach change with agility in the right places
One conclusion I’ve drawn having experienced many restructures over my career and has led a fair number; you can be iterative in some aspects and not in others.
I’ve observed a few times, that people fall into the ‘agile everywhere’ trap. Agile practices work well for them in many software development contexts and so they apply similar thinking to organisational change. The result is inhumane.
For instance, I’ve witnessed organisations embark on a restructure where they decide to iteratively try to discover the future organisational structure. It seems to make sense to them - it works for product development why not the organisational structure? The issue is people have a lot more at stake. The amount of uncertainty is prolonged and maximised.
The approach we took may sound similar because we were willing to update the model we had conceived but it was very different in the sense that we were able to define and communicate a cohesive model. A clear view of what the organisation was striving to achieve and the risks it faced helped guide what responsibilities needed teams to take on.
Using what we knew about our customer journey’s, our architectures, how we delivered value helped us form a view of what the model needed to be. We knew it was as right as we could make it with what we knew and also knew it was also wrong because we couldn’t know everything. We couldn’t avoid uncertainty but we could ensure there was acknowledgement of what we knew and what we didn’t and an openness to change as we learned.
Rightfully, most did not believe this on day one. We earned that trust over time as we remained committed to the approach and transparent about what was happening and what we were learning and how that was translating into adjustments.
It was so interesting to contrast that you couldn’t iterate the model by discovering it piece by piece as you went. You had to have a theory about how the whole was intended to work. It was inevitably wrong but as right as it could be based on what could be learned without trying it.
If people could know how the model was conceived to work and the process that would be applied such that they could get involved when they were comfortable their anxiety levels, whilst raised because any change brings some uncertainty, anxiety would never be at the levels people experience when an organisation changes through ‘shock and awe’, i.e. announcing a new structure and everyone’s new place in it or the other scenario of slow, ‘agile’ meandering discovery without a communicated target model.
What was interesting is we could be agile in how we iterated the shift of people into the model and do so using approaches that put the people experiencing the change in as much control of the change as we could offer. A lesson in applying the right ideas in the right context.
There are of course aspects of this experience that may be hard to exactly replicate because of the specific situation we were in. You are not always in a position where you are still on a growth trajectory, and there isn’t an expectation of cost efficiencies - especially with a merger the size I am describing. There may be more dramatic skills and capabilities required which makes the approach of reskilling that we took less possible (but again that is often a function of other issues left unattended for many years).
What I can say is that these practices can work and are guided by principles that so often get paid lip service when it comes to organisations restructuring. If you care, in the way so many organisations values say they do, you will find the path that is right for your context.
You must :
attend to human needs such as knowing a direction and feeling in control,
provide safety,
acknowledge uncertainty,
share the direction (in this case the target model of the organisation) and the theory of how it should work,
provide each team purpose,
have means to understand your progress and to course correct.
communicate frequently with a real 2-way connection
actively listen with humility
What has been your experience of organisations restructuring? How did you feel? What approach was taken? What was positive? What wasn’t? Share your experiences in the comments.