A CRITICAL READ ABOUT YOUR ORGANIZATION’S FUTURE IN THREE PARTS
It’s Time to Upgrade Your SWOT! — Part Three
A Robust Solution
by Rob Brodnick with Larry Goldstein and Don Norris
If you missed parts one and two, you can find them here (part one) and here (part two).
As organizational leaders, something has been percolating for a while, an intuition that we were doing something wrong. That our lenses were producing a worldview that was incomplete. That our tools didn’t match the jobs we had before us. That our investments to strengthen our organizations weren’t making us any better. Some have been oblivious to the change, like a frog slowly dying as the water boils around it. Yet our experts were delivering to us the same mindsets for strategy and organizational change that they had for the last fifty years. And honestly, we had to do something about it. Over the past several years we have been working to reformulate the lens we use to understand organizations, where their strengths and weaknesses lie in terms of their capabilities, and how a serious assessment of our organizations can help lead to actions to make us stronger.
We would like to offer up a new framework for organizational assessment, design, and intervention that upgrades the SWOT with a deeper granularity, enhanced collective engagement, and a new vocabulary to better match what we need for the future.
We call the approach Transformational Lens Theory (TLT). It is a view of organizations that both gives a deep look into what exists now as well as what can be done to specifically build the capabilities to make us stronger and to change more easily to adapt to a complex and sometimes ambiguous future. TLT articulates dimensions that enable leaders to view their organization through nine unique yet interdependent lenses. Like the SWOT, this viewpoint highlights areas of strength and potential, yet unlike the SWOT, exposes specific opportunities for intervention and improvement. To support assessment and analysis, the complementary diagnostic tool further delineates each dimension into a developmental scale which can be combined with surveys and interviews from internal organizational individuals and teams. Coupled with analysis provided by organizational leadership experts, leaders come away with an indisputable, honest look at the current state of their organization, as well as a clear sense of next steps to move forward. When leaders have a precise representation of their teams’ gaps and blind spots, only then can they be assured that their organizational analysis is accurate and useful for planning future endeavors.
Recall the four new realities:
- we are using an old vocabulary that increasingly fails to describe our organizations;
- it is getting very personal;
- the world is moving toward outcomes and value and away from inputs and reputation; and
- organizations are not machines, yet our management behaviors assume they are.
And the three SWOT upgrades:
- a more robust framework with granularity to help organizations transform and strengthen;
- to create change through collective effort; and
- new vocabulary to improve our organizations.
A Framework that Recognizes a More Complex World and Leads to Transformation. Transformational Lens Theory (TLT) offers new insights for leaders looking to change their organizations’ futures.
TLT is a framework that helps leaders evaluate the levels of development their organization has attained in three impact areas: 1) Insight to Action; 2) Collective Effort; and 3) Transform and Strengthen. Imagine each impact area as a separate lens through which a leadership team can participate in meaningful discourse regarding the current state of their enterprise. The first impact area, Insight to Action, recognizes that organizational openness and flexibility are key for processing new data and information and keeps the organization poised to adapt to its changing environment. The second impact area, Collective Effort, stresses the need for collaboration across the organization that motivates teams, thus creating the necessary synergy to manage change. The third impact area, Transform and Strengthen, illuminates the importance of growing capacities and resources within an organization and the need for innovative design to elevate the processes, products, services, and experiences it provides — all realized through how an organizational can lead.
The entire Insight to Action system needs to be flexible and open to new data and information, thus allowing the organization to successfully adapt to, and manage change. Thinking Strategically is the ability to understand the various future-oriented time horizons in which strategy can unfold, to continually scan the environment for signals of change and new ideas, and to adapt to these changes in the external environment. The thinking strategically dimension is composed of three characteristics — how well an organization considers and acts on their horizons, scans for and applies signals from the environment, and responds flexibly with agility. Analyzing is the ability to track, store, manipulate, make sense of, and employ robust, complex data from the past, present, and future to support actions and decisions. The analyzing dimension is composed of three characteristics — how well an organization employs technical analytic capabilities, developmental analytic capabilities, and transformative analytic capabilities. Planning is the capacity to generate plans on a variety of levels, achieve alignment across the organization, and manage the plans and activities. It is a process of organizational learning resulting in insights and eventually action. The planning dimension is composed of three characteristics — how well an organization generates plans, achieves alignment, and manages the process.
Collective effort eschews silos while encouraging collaboration across teams, jobs, and other boundaries. It seeks balanced communication using multiple channels to elevate shared knowledge across the organization. It favors the ability to get things done with a focus on what matters most while at the same time responding to changing conditions that arise. Finally, collective effort has a bias toward organizational learning. Engaging is the capacity for collaborative, social, and collective action measured by the fullness of engagement, social continuity, and evidence of influenced effort toward learning and transformation. Communicating is the ability to create shared awareness and understanding by sharing information through frequent, accurate, and transparent communication. The communicating dimension is composed of three characteristics — frequency and accuracy of communication, truth and transparency, and shared awareness. Executing is implementing plans or decisions, pursuing priorities, taking action, altering and correcting course when appropriate, and ensuring accountability and tracking of outcomes. It is synonymous with implementing. The executing dimension is composed of three characteristics — taking action to pursue priorities, altering and correcting course, and measurement, accountability, and decision making.
The degree to which any organization has success in strengthening and transforming depends on three critical abilities: the ability to be innovative, the ability to gather and employ resources, and the abilities of the leaders to develop a picture of the future and guide others toward realizing it. Innovating, most concisely defined as “ideas to valuable action” is the ability to generate new ideas, put them into action, and create value through the activities. The innovating dimension is composed of three characteristics — how well an organization generates ideas, moves to action, and creates value. Resourcing is the capacity to manage and leverage resources to help achieve strategic goals by freeing up and reallocating existing resources, acquiring new resources and generating new funds, and directing resources to fund priorities. The resourcing dimension is composed of three characteristics — how well an organization can free up and reallocate existing resources, acquire and generate new resources, and fund priorities. Leading is the broad organizational ability to guide an organization into the future by managing people and results, driving change and individual and organizational development, and employing a transformative mindset. Leading is a blend of good management and collective activity. The leading dimension is composed of three related characteristics.
TLT provides a potent lens to uncover and illuminate key dimensions of an organization’s potential.
Granular Assessment Features. Imagine a prism. What we believe to be simple white light when passed through this special kind of lens gets broken into its component parts. As a result, each wavelength becomes visible. The lens has the power to create a new way of seeing things by making the invisible, visible. In order to obtain this multidimensional perspective, leadership teams engage in a diagnostic protocol that includes organizational experts surveying and interviewing key members of the organization. The assessment includes an evaluation of the three impact areas across nine distinct dimensions, all supported by a deep rubric. Trained and calibrated evaluators compare the results from surveys and interviews to the TLT rubrics that describe stages of development for all nine dimensions. The granularity is complete enough to allow for any one of the nine dimensions to be assessed independently, if required. Evaluators also use their unique expertise in various dimensions to bring additional insight to the process. This assessment provides a critical analysis of each dimension from the unique perspectives of those within the organization, thus providing leaders with an internal vantage point as well as external expertise. Leaders identify areas for potential transformation, and a direction for implementing interventions and managing sustainable change.
Like Alice through the looking glass, change and transformation require us to see things differently.
More Adaptable Organizational Design. They allow us to make the necessary shifts in mindsets, perspectives, and habits to create sustainable change. TLT identifies numerous levers for change and unpacks the characteristics of each into observable and manageable development pathways, or vectors, for transformation. When we are serious about change, we hope to pass through the looking glass and return more capable than before. The results of the evaluation are presented in part in a visual format that is easy to understand and communicate to stakeholders. A (spider) web diagram includes scores from each of the nine dimensions plotted to depict areas of strength and opportunities for improvement. Unlike SWOT, which relies on the perspectives of individual contributors’ experience in the organization, TLT provides an objective and validated evaluation of the many facets of an organization. This includes the viewpoints of multiple stakeholders so that the results are representative of the organization’s vertical and horizontal realities. With reliable results in hand and assistance from organizational experts, leaders can more easily determine interventions that have the greatest potential for transformational success and can recognize those areas that are of highest priority for change.
Interventions in organizational systems require yet a third lens to peer into the dynamics of the forces that hold us in old and less desirable patterns.
Close Gaps in Core Capabilities. The TLT framework illuminates core organizational functions in such a way that the need for intervention becomes clear. Using proven tools for organizational development and change, organizations and their members can be guided along a developmental pathway to achieve enhanced performance and outcomes as well as longer-term impacts toward an improved culture. If we upgrade our SWOT analysis and replace it with the transformational lenses, we begin to see the capacities our organization must possess in order to successfully transform. In order to design and build upon a recognized brand of proven value an organization must be competent at scanning the horizon to envision the future (Thinking Strategically; Analyzing) while influencing the message to communicate impact (Engaging; Communicating). To meet current and future demands for personalized experiences and value, organizations need to create new programs, products, and services to create new value (Innovating; Planning) and implement those successfully (Resourcing; Executing). Organizations in the 21st Century will require new business models and additional revenue streams (Thinking Strategically; Innovating) and creative partnerships to attract expertise and increase value (Engaging, Communicating), thus requiring distinct skill sets from their members. And to mobilize these efforts toward core values and a defined purpose executives must align the team toward a united vision (Leading; Communicating) and rely on select indicators to measure impact over time (Analyzing).
CONCLUSION
Over the three parts of this article, we reviewed the history of the SWOT, described its components and functions, then discussed its usage in planning and organizational change efforts. We exposed the limitations of the traditional approach and built a case for improving the tool. In response, we offered up a new tool, a provocative new framework for organizational diagnosis, along with methodologies for assessment, organizational design, and intervention to transform and strengthen organizational capabilities. Our goal is to help executives and planners to take actions to better position their organization for the future.
