Capacity Utilization for Securing Transformational Change

One of the major ways a company can secure capacity utilization for rapid change is to ask these key questions:

1.) Has the company's business become more complex as a result of recent M&A activity?
2.) Has the company introduced new standard business processes that are consistent across the organization (a good example is how good are your sales funnel and reporting practices)? *check out SalesChoice.com a new emerging company with simpler sales productivity tool(s),
3.) Has the company become leaner and flatter (reducing levels of hierarchy, increasing spans of control) to increase employee empowerment and engagement capabilities?

These three questions for large organizations can determine an organization's capacity for change success.

The more change that impacts an organization across multiple levels, the human capacity to absorb more change is affected. Too many companies have not stepped back and analyzed all the major change initiatives that they are launching across their different stakeholder channels and have an integrated view of the impact to field capacity to absorb the change.

Sending out mixed signals is endemic (like an infectious virus) in many of our organizations. Finding ways to plant healthy people viruses telling new stories and changing rituals with demonstratable leadership behaviors can help to change the folklore in a culture so the conversations really do change at the water coolers, or when new employees come into cultures and they are integrated new stories are told. Finding ways to unfreeze a culture long enough to subject it to new ways of thinking is not easy to do, but is critical if NA wants to improve its productivity ratios, as well as increase its innovation success.

Helix has innovative change capacity utilization assessment toolkits and relationships with strategy and change practitioners to help our clients take on big C level changes.

In 2010, we worked with IBM with a global mobile wireless carrier on its global collaboration intensification program. The launch was extremely successful in specific business areas across the organization. However with a collosal collapse in market shareholder confidence sustaining collaborative behaviors when an organization is under survival often does not happen. Change is often like an elastic band if you don't keep the tension in play, people revert to their old behaviors.

To mitigate risks to sustain the capacity for change, leaders need to make explicitely the importance of the change and cascade clearly into their performance objectives.

Typically when there is a lot of change underway, employees will benefit from understanding the major change programs and being clear of rationale for the change, as well as communicate, WIFME (what's in it for me.)

What have you learned about large scale transformational change? Tell us your story.... we can always learn from others.