On Becoming a Change Agent

I am a Leadership and Organisational Development practitioner who has, for years, been trying to figure out a better answer to the following question:

“How can organisations do a better job of developing solutions that people truly own and that make a positive difference to how they do their work?”

Earlier this year my co-founders and I launched a firm that applies a unique approach to answering this question. In fact, we’ve come to find a more helpful way of framing the question. More on that later.

First, I want to share a little of our story with you.

Becoming a Change Agency

“Once every few years a great new agency is born.”

David Ogilvy captures the essence of one of the motivating forces for our journey. He continues:

It is ambitious, hard working, full of dynamite. It gets accounts from soft old agencies. It does great work.

The years pass. The founders get rich, and tired. Their creative fires go out. They become extinct volcanoes.

The agency may continue to prosper. Its original momentum is not yet spent. It has powerful contacts. But it has grown too big. It produces dull, routine campaigns, based on the echo of old victories. Dry rot sets in.

I can’t say that the idea of launching an agency was solely, or even largely, drawn from the example of Madison Avenue’s advertising and PR agencies. Mad Men was certainly des temps when the germ of the idea for this business was planted. But the image of client-obsessed creatives developing bespoke solutions in a rapid timeframe was certainly an inspiration.

Our vision, of course, wasn’t to enter the advertising industry but to continue our journey to find different, and better, ways of helping organisations unleash their potential to innovate, adapt and improve.

When we happened upon the phrase “A Change Agency”, we smiled. It captured the cheeky double meaning of being an adaptive, boutique-style professional services firm while also describing the essential function of a catalyst in making a difference to how work gets done. It aligned with our belief (backed up by our collective experience) that change leadership, or change agency, occurs in many different parts of an organisation.

This, ultimately, defined our purpose:

To create a boutique professional services firm, a Change Agency, focused on catalyzing the capacity within organisations to become more agile, adaptive, innovative and continuously improving.

Certainly we were (and are) motivated by avoiding the “dry rot” that Ogilvy referred to and felt that there had to be a dynamic quality to our firm to keep it from becoming rigid and stale. We felt that we needed to reflect the very culture we wanted to build with our clients.

Becoming Human Centred

Most improvement programs focus on the implementation of new processes, systems and behavioural norms (i.e., “ways of working”) as if a boiler (or water heater) was being installed in someone’s basement. Boiler installation is not something that happens often for a homeowner. It is an expensive and intrusive ordeal, one that needs to be carefully managed. Fortunately, while the homeowner may not have a large number of experiences of the installation, the process is well known to the service company performing the work. It is a linear process, one that involves a site visit, price quote, asset procurement, scheduling, installation and aftercare — all of which can be planned to a high degree of accuracy.

The problem is that this linear, engineering-based metaphor of installation, so prevalent in companies, particularly those focused on building cultures of Business, or Operational, Excellence, neglects the fact that boilers lack a personality, a sense of agency and a “mind of their own” (leaving aside our angry allegations of boiler behaviour when confronted with a sudden temperature change in the shower).

People may be an organisation’s greatest asset, but they are an asset unlike any other in a company, if only because they have free will, moving in the world along unique paths, developing beliefs based on those experiences and taking action based on those beliefs in ways that effect the overall culture of an organisation. The paradigm of installing new ways of working and behaving differently involves doing things to people and, therefore, begets the perennial concern for “buy in”, if not a constant obsession with “compliance”, performing “audits” and the issuing of “consequences”.

As an influential general once said:

“It’s a trap.”

Our experience suggests that there is a way out.

What if, instead of trying to get (mere) buy-in from the organisation we sought at the outset to engage them and generate ownership through a process of co-creation?

We would focus on designing an experiential process, one that connects people with some higher purpose (i.e., a larger “why”, an “adaptive challenge”, a meaningful outcome, etc.). The change journey would also involve experiences that facilitate joint discovery, exploration and contextual inquiry, asking questions such as:

• What do customers/employees/leaders actually do? What are they trying to do? What do they want and why? What is the gap? Why does that gap exist?
• How do they see the adaptive challenge/innovation challenge as currently framed? What meaning and/or value do they personally see in it?
• What are the possibilities that exist to do things differently to achieve better, more positive outcomes for customers and other stakeholders?

Attention would be paid to interactive problem solving and solution finding, using a process that was iterative, participative and based on experiments to “see what works” (and what doesn’t) and rapidly learn from those experiences so that, over time, the people involved begin to see the practical evidence of their interventions — their change agency — in realising positive outcomes and results.

Becoming Interdisciplinary

LittleBits Founder, and CEO, Ayah Bdeir captured the sentiment rather nicely when she said that “the most interesting things happen at the intersection of disciplines.” The world of organisations, the world of work, is rife with silos and the associated fragmentation of knowledge that serves so well to inhibit collaboration and innovation. When it comes to helping organisations improve their ability to learn, adapt and improve — to become more customer-, or client-, centric in their staging of experiences and delivery of products and services — efforts that operate at the intersection of a handful of specific disciplines are likely to be more effective than other, singularly-oriented approaches to building high-performance organisations. It’s never just “the enterprise system …”, “the business process …”, “the leader behaviour …”, “the meeting effectiveness …”, or “the product complexity …” … stupid!

My colleagues and I identified four disciplines around which a successful change agency could be built:

Design Thinking is a creative, engaging and collaborative approach to understanding human experiences, generating insight into challenges and opportunities and envisioning new possibilities. It includes such things as:

• Human-centred approaches to participative design (of products, services and experiences)
• A focus on discovery, prototyping and experimenting in order to learn about what works (and doesn’t)
• Engaging stakeholders through (as the LUMA Institute frames it) looking, understanding and making … together

Change Theory includes research-based tools, theories and approaches regarding how and why people and organisations move from one state, or set of patterns, to another. It focuses on sensemaking, behaviour change, building learning organisations and developing organisational cultures through the ways in which work gets done.

Agile Delivery encapsulates an iterative methodology for realizing value, one which is characterized by incremental delivery of end-products, short time-based phases of work (i.e., Sprints). This discipline speaks very much to the “ways in which work gets done”, leveraging methods that are typically used in software development such as:

• Roadmapping
• ~4–6 week Sprints
• Daily stand-up meetings (i.e., Scrum Meetings)
• “Continual Delivery” mindset

Lastly, Leadership (or, Leadership Development) leverages the experience, capability and insight necessary to build broad-based change agency in the organisation. It is very much focused on generating the wide-spread capability to:

• Build a culture of trust, built on a platform of transparency (around performance, decisions, structure, roles and direction)
• Foster a pattern of “real-time strategy implementation” and continual business model innovation
• Systematically develop others in the organisation

BridgeOne

And so we launched our company ...

… a strategy and implementation firm — a human-centered change agency — that helps clients build agile, innovative and high-performing organizations that are better able to meet their adaptive challenges.

We are working with leaders and change agents across a variety of sectors to explore the practical implications from working at the intersection of Design Thinking, Change Theory, Agile Delivery and Leadership in meeting their biggest challenges.

In fact, as a result of our initial conversations with executives about this “concept” I have decided to reframe the question introduced at the beginning of this piece:

What if we could deliberately design and build organisations that people (employees, customers, etc.) actually love?

That is a journey certainly worth pursuing.