Getting practical – a brief overview of phases and questions involved in a fundamental renewal

In our way of thinking about organizational renewal we help companies tap into a deeper Source of knowing within themselves and in their companies; this helps them be honest about how customers and markets are responding to their products and services.  We help companies learn and adapt before a crisis compels them change. When a company’s strategy formation process is geared toward anticipating and meeting the unspoken and unmet needs of customers and markets, it leads the company and its culture into knowledge-creation territory. Companies that set out to build new futures need to bring the whole community of employees along.

As we said earlier, the Helix transformation framework is organic and non-linear. The phases of renewal often are often organized by what is important to the company. We treat them like learning modules that eventually need to be woven together.

Establish a Business Case that Inspires Excellence

What is the essence of this company and what is this community trying to create?

We usually begin with a briefing by the CEO or Senior Executive in charge. We need to know what the company wants to accomplish. Excellence inspires human development. Human development, in turn, inspires innovation and the creation of new knowledge. We think of it as identifying business objectives worthy of full human capacity.

Conduct Assessment and Field Setting Process

Organizational, strategic, and cultural renewal requires leadership. We meet with a “strategic microcosm” of leaders with who help us identify what we do not want to change about the company, what we call its essence. We want to know what should not change into the future. We also ask for help identifying the organizational learning disabilities and cultural habits that inhibit adaptive thinking and cultural change. We begin to build a “social field” that sets the intent for the large-scale change to follow. We identify leaders that peers recognize as candid and direct about where the company is unproductive and what it needs to reach for.

Clarify the Enterprise Operating Philosophy

As community psychologists, we look to minimize the unnecessary stress and unproductive anxiety associated with strategic and culture change. Our client partners believe in the effectiveness and greatness of their employees. As transpersonal psychologists, we help redesign companies for high stages of human development and commensurate excellent performance. Our dual bottom line approach teaches companies to focus on growing their employees systematically, a process we call “scaffolding development.” This entails a communal examination of the worldview necessary to draw out the future rather than respond to it. From there we build Leadership, Operating, and Community-Formation Models.

This is a process of laying down deep roots through clarification of the company’s Operating Philosophy. We clarify the company’s purpose, vision, values, and principles as the underpinnings from which a “corporate curriculum,” or learning plan, is created. We emphasize the global nature and reach of the business in order to accommodate cultural and social norms and practices.

Build Capacity

How do we scale and lead the renewal process? Who will facilitate and lead the culture change? We help companies build the internal capacity to globally scale their new knowledge. We need to help leaders become educators and  therefore teach transformation skills to the executives and managers in line leadership positions. ‘Line leaders teach’ is our adage. Simultaneously, we reach out to our external network of providers to create this scale and to supplement it as outsource providers.

Align Strategy and Culture Renewal

Alignment is critical to organizational synergy and our treatment of organizations as communities assures we can bring alignment to strategy and culture. These need to co-arise and mutually re-enforce one another. We support the organization in creating seamless and inclusive communities that support the exchange and multiplication of knowledge through collective intelligence. We help business units become communities, aligned with the company’s operating philosophy and capable of operating inclusively. We work with executive teams to clarify and align their business unit strategy with their cultural renewal strategy.

Enterprise Redesign and Global Alignment

In our view, renewal calls for the enterprise and its various organizations to also undergo development and growth. For an organization to renew its strategy and culture so that it can create new market space and value propositions, it has to invite organic and aligned participation. We work with management teams to redesign their governance processes, organizational structure, global systems, and processes to enable knowledge creation, and high contribution from enabled communities. To accomplish this, financial performance measures, compensation plans, spending policies, and a host of operational processes invariably require alignment toward the future rather than the past. Organizational redesign enables companies to scale knowledge creation.

Communal Knowledge-Creation at Scale – Innovative Growth Platforms

We believe that the discovery of knowledge is everyone’s job. We believe that innovation is as important in Operations as it is in Finance, or as it is in a Product Development Group. In order for an organization to scale and absorb new knowledge quickly, we teach the principles of generative discovery to everyone. The organization must renew itself from every quarter in an organic manner for cultural transformation to take hold. We believe that organic growth in a company’s value proposition is the end product of an innovative culture. We teach business units to cultivate and lead knowledge-creating communities.

Dual Bottom Line Performance Management

As it progresses, a dual bottom line enterprise needs to invent the performance metrics that reflect its commitment to both human development and financial performance. In order to do so, new perspectives on the measurement of critical intangibles will require quantitative and qualitative treatment. In addition, the enterprise approach to performance needs to create the underpinnings for the individual, communal, and organizational growth plans. A performance dialogue system becomes a vital component in scheduling learning and growth. In dual bottom line companies, performance management requires tight coordination. Performance management is also the generative center of community formation. One on one and group performance feedback builds trust and rapport, which stems directly from the fulfillment of operating goals. A robust dialogue on performance builds the trust necessary to enable collective intelligence in organizations. It is a skeletal structure for sustaining the alignment between strategy, culture, governance, and organizational structure.