This is about creating conditions that support adaptability and innovative thinking in an organisation. It ensures that once you have identified the barriers to adaptability in your organisation and decide what you are going to do about it, you create the best environment to support the changes to take effect.
Valuing the behaviours that lead to adaptability is about making it easier for people to take risks, to challenge and to offer alternatives to the status quo. If you want to change the way an organisation operates, you need the drivers for change and the aims to be clear, but you also need to make it safe for people to be creative, to try out new ideas, to fail, to really push what is possible in order to get truly transformation change.
The following behaviours may be key to doing that -
- Increased autonomy - empowerment relies on a connection to the organisation strategy and an understanding of your role in delivering to that. You can't expect people to take more responsibility if they can't see the context they are operating in.
- Give permission to try (and to fail) - trusting that people to have good judgement and want to be responsible; and trust that they see the overall strategy and what needs to be achieved, and let them do it in their own way.
- Have mechanisms in the organisation to reflect on success and failure. Model what works, talk about what didn't work - let people in the organisation learn from each other. Being more comfortable with failure is a big challenge for a lot of organisations - communicating the boundaries clearly around this is essential in encouraging people to put ideas into action.
- Give people regular time out of their day to day to be creative, to think, to be inspired by other people's ideas. Let them decide what they need in order to do things differently, to adapt, to change. Agree what needs to stop to make room for the new.
In my view HR and people practitioners should start to become the change it and they want the organisation to be, and I reckon the key area would be around the systems thinking as espoused and demonstrated both academically and eminently practically by Deming, John Seddon in Vanguard, Senge, Ackoff, Scholtes, and countless others.
All change beings at the thinking level and not the doing level, yet the result of the change in thinking then delivers change at the doing level. Great intentions, motivation and competencies underpinned by the wrong thinking changes little.
Managers need to recognise the organisation as a system, it’s their job to remove the obstacles within the organisation. They also need to understand human motivation (Dan Pink, Alfie Kohn, etc.). Design of the work from the outside in, and focus on what is the real purpose what matters to the customer. Then, analyse the demand, design measures for what matters, then when you understand the systems thinking that determines the current way of doing things, you simply get the people who do the work to re-design the work in order to achieve purpose and what really matters, and what happens is almost magical! Service improves, costs reduce, morale increases, and the culture change happens for free. At no time do we do anything to the people, we simply get the people to work on the work. That's the systems thinking at the practical and yet quite profound level that I believe HR could help to make organisations more adaptable and adept.
If you want to work more on the Systems Thinking hack, please join the team on page 2!
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