The 1st step to organisational change is the abiliy of leaders to align their actions with their own honest intentions. Often, the installed culture they are part of don’t let them see the misalignment between their true intentions and how they are responding in day-to-day decision making.
In narrative theory it’s said that all story starts with heroe’s tension between the status quo and her aspirations. One day, a trigger event gets the story going: the hero decides to leave the status quo. Organisation’s Agile and the like transformation stories follow very much the same path. People (leaders, teams, etc.) decide to work differently. They want a better place to work. They want a better company for their customers. We want a better place of work , so that work becomes inspiring. We want a better companies, so we can be proud of what we deliver to our delighted customers. These wishes are genuine. When they meet the organisation current eco-system and culture, unpercieved misalignment between intentions and actions happens.
From Reason To Purpose
The trigger of any story, including a new organisational design one, is its “why”. Did you notice a tricky thing about “why”? Here’s how I see it: it’s based on a point in time called “now”. And it’s a question that can head both ways: it may search an answer backward to the root reasons of the tension:
“Why the current status quo is not for me/us?”
AND it may aim forward to the purpose of the story :
“Why (what for) should I/we change the status quo?”
I think both questions are valuable as long as they are loaded with good will, and answers provided helps people in the room (well, I mean organisation). What is the answer has its importance, but what is the most important is remembering to ask the question. To all the people in the room ( well, I mean organisation). If you are tempted to ask it only in some workshops with selected managers and a bunch of consultants, resist!
If ever you didn’t notice it yet, at this moment, I’m giving you the trivial advice, you’ve went through in another billion of blogs: “start with why”.
I hava had some very interesting conversations Sylvaine Pascual , who’s a professional coach, and says that we have different needs, therefore for each of us one of the questions might be more important : some people need to know the “why” to move forward, but others need the “what”, and others the “how”. She says that saying that “why” is the most important is considering only the needs of the “why” people. I’m absolutely fascinated by her approach, because it is inclusive, supports diversity and allows us to step-down from main stream thinking.
Nevertheless, I still recommend to start any transformation/new design of organisation… initiative with the why question. Regardless of our personal needs, making gathering some insights on the “purpose of (our organisation) life” is rich. Most important, every story starts with “why the hero has stepped into this particular story”. Regardless of our personal needs, our brain is story wired. We need a story to make sense of anything.
Our stories are the the genome of our culture. Our company stories are the genome of our organisation’s culture. How culture looks from the trenches and system thinking continues in the source post