Jun 15, 2021
Organisation & Progress
Move from talking to acting
Organisations change, and most of them advertise how open they are, how modern their approach is and how quickly they can act in case of need.
The reality often is not congruent with the picture portrayed in marketing campaigns. Change usually happens too slowly, too late and too little. We did not need a global pandemic to see that many business models only work correctly when most circumstances are within good to excellent boundaries.
When you want to be an organisation which truly is open for progress, what do you need to do?
Words
You most likely heard about the term Mindset. It is the new term which seems to be chosen to explain everything. Change Mindset, Success Mindset, Project Mindset. In an attempt to break down what this content-free utterance means, you often find an explanation that comes close to a confident attitude about a specific topic. Unfortunately, often people seem to mix up confidence with substance about a subject matter. It reminds many of the time when management only threw the word agile in the room, and anything seemed to be okay no matter how chaotic the organisation was running.
You need to set up your organisation with a more substantiated approach to change towards a truly progressive organisation. Using nice trend words is not helpful, especially not when you neither know how to use them nor understand that there might be a substantiation behind them that was deliberately ignored.
Forum
A good starting point may be an innovation forum. You can, of course, choose the way how to deliver it. May it be online, on-site, or in a hybrid format. Still, this mustn’t be something that happens as a side note during the daily business routine. Too often, these innovation forums end up taking place outside working hours during the evening, during which your employees enjoy their well-deserved time off.
Make your innovation forum an event. Invite people who have influence and the right to decide. Senior leadership and management must be present during these events to communicate which relevance these events have.
Always end with specific steps which you will now take on from here. Never end with non-specific promises. Innovation and progress will only become institutionalised when your employees see that senior leadership has a vested interest in it.
Act
The most crucial aspect of your approaches to change, innovation and progress are if employees see that you act on your promises. Many industries saw suggestions for improvement passing management and board levels without any implementation on the operational level. Once the disruptive change happened, often initiated by a small start-up company, suddenly the organisations were caught off-guard. UBER and the taxi industry, AirBnB and the hotel industry, travel bureaus and vacation search engines. Countless examples exist. Still, countless organisations think that their industry will not be affected.
Realistically, your industry will be affected by a disruptive change in the future. When you prepare yourself for it now, when you become a truly progressive organisation, you will be able to act on any challenge immediately. As long as you keep on doing business as usual, you will need months to realise how much market share you already lost, and the struggle begins.
Your organisation will benefit from your implementing proactive measures for change and innovation. The time to start was years ago. However, it is never too late to arrive at the party, as long as you now begin the journey.
More about thinking and acting progress in
this week’s podcast: click here to listen and learn.
Implementing progress is important for your organisation?
Let’s talk: NB@NB-Networks.com
