Innatechangeacceleration

When the organization has put a stronger emphasis on empowering people, catalyzing innovation, and improving people-centricity, it is reaching the inflection point to achieve the next level of organizational maturity.

Running a business is a thorny journey full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity, with many curves and bumps on the way. How successful organizations can handle “VUCA'' reality depends on how fast and capable they can adapt to the ever-changing environment, as well as how proactively and creatively they can drive change. 

Change is inevitable, the organization can reach the “inflection point” of change when the business is able to generate new opportunity for growth; hit the point for transformation, as well as reach the moment to be “paranoid” – either disrupting or being disrupted.

Strategic alignment: Change is the new reality, with increasing paces. When reaching the inflection point of change, organizations can stretch out in every business dimension for driving radical business transformation with all essential dimensions. It requires all functions of the company to move in the right direction, make strategic alignment to ensure all organizational actions are directed to achieving common strategic goals and objectives of the business, and driving changes at the synchronized speed. This is characterized as an important step to reach the inflection point of driving transformative changes and improving business maturity.

In order to make smooth transformation, the change management needs to check up: Are your people acting in a way that is consistent with the strategy? Are your processes and people integrated to ensure a consistent ability to change? The inflection point of change is reached when strategic alignment occurs when all parts of the company sing their respective pieces of symphony in harmony to achieve high purpose. As strategic alignment occurs on multiple levels, it presupposes the ability of each link to articulate strategic intent, build changing competencies and deliver results consistent with the strategic goals.

Structural flexibility: The degree of business responsiveness depends on how business systems and functional subsystems interact with each other, and those interactions can be structural, technical, informational, or human. Traditional companies are often inflexible, slow to change due to overly restrictive hierarchy, rigid structures or processes, redundant procedures, or outdated rules, etc. When the organization gets stagnated, the top management feels frustrated and the bottom feels the pains, it’s time to speed up the pace of change by fine tuning the organizational structure for reaching the inflection point of business transformation.

From a people management perspective, the goal of improving structural flexibility is to enforce mutual trust, harness cross-functional collaboration, to respond to change fast and get things done smoothly. The company can approach the flow zone and reach the inflection point of change when the positions in its hierarchy have clear and accountable tasks and an optimized organizational structure that helps to empower people, build up agility for both creating changes and adapt to changes to deliver better business performance at higher speed.

Culture agility: Inflection is a bend, a fold, a curve, a turn, a twist; such change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights, or a risk to hit the uncertainty. Behind the scene, there is often underlying cultural, value, leadership changes needed to get ready, set to go. Daily business change may be mechanical, but the large transformation is more radical and culture agility is a prerequisite condition for reaching the change inflection point. Business transformation arises when the scale of the interrelations, interactions, or interrelational interactions amplifies the collective capability to achieve multifaceted values for the organization.

Corporate management needs to ponder whether there is a burning platform or a burning ambition (or both) that compels your business to become much faster, better and mature at delivering change. Make sure there is dissatisfaction with the current situation. The people that make up the organization must see a compelling need to change from risky practices, obsolete ideas, outdated processes; and do so proactively before issues get worse. Otherwise, companies may begin a decline from their previous good performance. It also helps when people believe things will improve by changing, innovating, or transforming, etc. Companies can reach the inflection point of changes if the top management has a sense of urgency, people can get out of their comfort zone, and the organization has developed a culture of inclusiveness, innovation, learning agile, etc, to reach the next level of business growth cycle and agility.

The rate of change has accelerated, indicating that business must learn how to strike a balance between managing complex issues today and predicting the emerging events of tomorrow. When the organization has put a stronger emphasis on empowering people, catalyzing innovation, and improving people-centricity, it is reaching the inflection point to achieve the next level of organizational maturity.

Posted in: Change Management,Digital Agility,Digital Master