Business Transformation is a given in the lifecycle of organizations.  If an organization or business desires to continue growing gainfully, it has to keep Restructuring and Innovating with time.  Successful Restructuring can be achieved by pursuing a robust 4-phase approach.  Each incremental phase paves the way for shaping the next phase:

1. Strategic Analysis
2. Structural Redesign
3. Redeployment
4. Renewal

Redeployment is the most critical phase in the Restructuring process.  It presents an opportunity to progress towards strategically directed performance goals and establish the foundation for a new Organizational Culture.

Carrying out an efficacious Redeployment, however, necessitates navigating around the pitfalls that threaten the process.  These snags include:

• Lack of detailed planning on how Redeployment will be handled

“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail” is an oft repeated adage that has wisdom based on experience of many failures throughout history.  The Redeployment plan should be thoroughly discussed and developed at the Redesign stage, giving out details of all aspects of Redeployment.

• Restricted access to information approach

Organizational leadership often try to avoid sharing information due the fear of losing control.  During the tumultuous phase of Redeployment, leadership should be communicating with the employees quite frequently to alleviate any concerns and build their trust.

• Failure in immediate and full disclosure of information

Timely and full disclosure of information is absolutely essential for the process to run smoothly.

A robust communications system has to be put in place for dissemination of timely information predominantly in the Redeployment phase as employee apprehensions are at the highest level in this stage.

You can learn more about the pitfalls during Redeployment here in the editable PowerPoint on Redeployment after Restructuring.

Redeployment, in order to be successful, has to go through 7 steps that need careful planning and execution with precise timing.  These 7 steps include:

1. Continuously maintaining a robust Communications Plan.
2. Developing an employee assessment system based on the newly-defined business needs and goals.
3. Creating a system of reviews and appeals.
4. Deploying an internal placement group.
5. Launching a severance plan for those who decide to leave the organization.
6. Providing training to employees at all levels for them to be able to develop competencies required to assume the responsibilities in a transformed organization.
7. Planning for the renewal phase following redeployment.

Let us delve a little deeper into this second step:

2. Develop an Employee Assessment System based on the newly defined business needs and goals.

The system should assess potential employees against required competencies for the position.  A matrix should be created to serve as an assessment tool to structure the selectors’ thinking. Each competency should be assigned a weight and the cumulative score should be the sum of weighted scores of each competency.  Input should be based on interviews with candidates, feedback from managers and supervisors.  The matrix should be used as a tool only and selection decision should not be predetermined rather based on all aspects, i.e. qualitative as well as quantitative.

The selectors should be trained to ask targeted questions to assess competencies and document them properly.  Assessment should be divided into 3 sections:

• Go/No-Go section to assess the candidates’ ability to meet the minimum requirements.
• Evaluation of each candidate against the competencies mentioned for each position.
• Document modification in decision due to absenteeism, affirmative action concerns, etc.

Interested in learning more about the Redeployment Steps?  You can download an editable PowerPoint on Redeployment after Restructuring here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

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Product managers, marketers, and designers are often confused as to what they should do to increase the chances of customers’ engagement and uptake of their offering.  Changing individuals’ behavior to enhance engagement, productivity, innovation, and happiness isn’t straightforward.

It takes a lot of effort, time, and resources to execute initiatives aimed at transforming behaviors and Organizational Culture.  However, most people aren’t interested in changing and like the status quo to prevail.  This is where Behavioral Economics can help to know how customers behave, interpret their decision-making methods, and create solutions targeting those behaviors.

Product designers and marketers aspiring to drive acceptance of their products can make use of the 3 Bs of Behavioral Change to change understand consumer behavior. The 3 Bs of Behavioral Change classify the 3 elements essential to change behaviors, i.e.:

1. Behavior
2. Barriers
3. Benefits

Understanding and employing these 3 Bs helps the designers and product managers instill change, inspire design and strategy-related decisions, increase the acceptance of new products / features and product engagement levels, and build new behaviors in people.

Let’s discuss the first 2 elements in detail.

Behavior

People have an inherent tendency to maintain the status quo.  Behavioral change necessitates:

• Identifying individuals’ existing attitudes.
• Assessing and tackling psychological biases affecting individuals’ decisions.
• Carefully tracking behaviors that need to be changed.
• Ascertaining the most important desired behavior and exact action that is imperative to drive results.
• Getting the buy-in from all stakeholders on the key behavior.
• Deciding if the behavior should be permanent or transient.

Examples of key actions to change behaviors include spending 30 minutes thrice weekly doing cardio exercises and consuming salad at lunch daily to stay healthy.

Barriers

Understanding the barriers in behavior adoption assists in creating effective solutions to improve uptake of key behavior.  The second step to induce behavioral change is to reduce barriers in its adoption.

• Every decision that a product user has to make, no matter how negligible, increases resistance in the likelihood of completing a specific behavior.
• These actions and decisions, that an individual has to take in order to achieve the desired behavior, create points of friction in embracing key behaviors.  For instance, people often find it difficult to decide when presented with complex choices. They tend to procrastinate or become a victim of decision paralysis.
• Removing the points of friction and resistance from any key behavior necessitates documenting and streamlining all decisions. The path of least resistance leads to desired key behaviors.

Examples of barriers include the thought process involved in the decision to select where to have dinner.  This thought process is, in fact, a psychological barrier in actually going out and having dinner.  Likewise, the decision to walk or drive to a restaurant is a logistical barrier and a point of friction that warrants making a decision.

To eliminate these barriers, we can either remove barriers entirely or just simplify the decision.  For instance, elimination of a non-critical, open text field from a sign-up form—that probed the users about their business, which requires significant time to think and answer—can increase page-over-page conversion.  In case choices are helpful for the users and cannot be eliminated, then it is best to simplify the decision process by giving fewer options instead of many, or by suggesting “recommended option” to the users.

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Transformation of an organization into a Next-generation Learning Organization (NLO) is a challenging endeavor.  The main hurdles include convoluted hierarchies, bureaucratic red tape, delayed decision making, and complicated organizational systems and processes.

To develop a learning organization, leadership needs to trim down bureaucracy and complexities.  They should make the best use of technology to gather holistic real-time data, deploy Artificial Intelligence at scale, and develop data-driven decision-making systems.

Five Core Pillars of Learning are essential for the creation of a Next-generation Learning Organization, including:

1. Digital Transformation
2. Human Cognition Improvement
3. Man and Machine Relationship
4. Expanded Ecosystems
5. Management Innovation

Let’s take a deep dive into the first 3 Core Pillars.

1. Digital Transformation

The first pillar is Digital Transformation.  Next-generation Learning Organizations (NLOs) are characterized by their speed of learning and their adeptness to take action based on new insights.  They use emerging technologies to automate as well as “autonomize” their businesses, without relying too much on human intervention and decision-making.

By autonomizing, the NLOs enable machines to learn, take action, and evolve on their own based on continuous feedback.  They create integrated learning loops where information flows automatically from digital platforms into AI algorithms where it is mined in run-time to gather new insights.  The insights are passed to action systems for necessary action that create more data, which is again mined by AI, and the cycle continues, facilitating learning at fast pace.

2. Human Cognition Improvement

Next-generation Learning Organizations (NLOs) schedule time for their people to have unstructured reflection on their work.  While most organizations fear disruption of human work in future by AI and machines, NLOs assign unique roles to their people based on human cognition strengths—e.g., understanding relationships, drawing causal judgment, counterfactual thinking, and creativity.  These organizations are aware of AI’s advantage—in analyzing correlations in complex data promptly—as well as its shortcomings in terms of reasoning abilities and interpretation of social / economic trends.  NLOs make design the center of their attention and utilize human creativity and imagination to generate new ideas and produce novel products.  They assign roles accordingly, inspire imagination in people by exposing them to unfamiliar information, and inculcate dynamic collaboration.

3. Man and Machine Relationship

NLOs foster innovative ways to promote collaboration between people and machines.  They recognize that this helps them in better utilization of resources, maximize synergies, and learn dynamically.

To create effective collaboration between people and machines, NLOs develop robust human-machine interfaces.  The existing AI systems lack the ability to decipher everything, which is an area where humans excel.  NLOs supplement these shortcomings by setting up human-machine interfaces, where humans assist the AI by corroborating its actions and suggesting sound recommendations.  These learning organizations bifurcate responsibilities based on the risks involved, assign humans and machines appropriately against each job, and select a suitable level of generalization and sophistication between humans and machines.

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Enterprises invest in Analytics to improve Decision Making and outcomes across the business. This is from Product Strategy and Innovation to Supply Chain Management, Customer Experience, and Risk Management. Yet, many executives are not yet seeing the results of their Analytics initiatives and investments.

Every organization putting on investment in Analytics has experienced several stumbling blocks. This differentiates the leaders from the laggards. Analytics-driven Organizations have clearly established processes, practices, and organizational conditions to achieve Operational Excellence. Their commitment to Analytics is creating a major payoff from their investments and a competitive edge.

What It Takes to Be Analytics-driven

The Harvard Business Review Analytic Services conducted a survey of 744 business executives around the world and across a variety of industries. Their focus was on the performance gap between companies that have struggled to get a return on their Analytics investment and those that have effectively leveraged their investment.

The survey showed that Analytics-driven Organizations get sufficient return on investment in Analytics. In fact, they have been highly successful in gaining a return on Analytics investment. This is gainfully achieved as organizations use Analytics consistently in strategic decision making. Executives of Analytics-driven Organizations rely on Analytics insights when it contradicted their gut feel.

Essentially, Analytics-driven Organizations have reduced costs and risks, increased Productivity, Revenue, and Innovation, and have successfully executed their Strategy. Yet, in evolving the organization’s Analytics approach, there can be 4 core obstacles that can affect their drive to getting a greater return on investment in Analytics.

The Core Obstacles to Finding Return on Analytics Investment

There are 4 core obstacles to being an Analytics-driven Organization.

Let’s briefly take a look at the first 2 obstacles:

1. Communication and Decision-making Integration. The lack of Communication and Decision-making Integration limits the integration of Analytics into workflows and decision processes do not reach decision-makers. As a result of these core obstacles, the use of Analytics is limited in specific areas.
2.  Skills to Interpret and Apply Analytics. A second core obstacle is the inadequate skills of business staff to interpret and use Analytics. In fact, the survey showed that only one-quarter of frontline employees use Analytics with only 7% using Analytics regularly.

The other two core obstacles are siloed and fragmented Analytics and time delay. These are two equally important core obstacles that can hinder the use of Analytics to maximize return on investment. Further, the 4 core obstacles are barriers to analytic success.

Are You Ready to Be an Analytics Leader?

Leaders use Analytics consistently in decision making. In fact, based on the survey, 83% of executives use it in business planning and forecasting. On the other hand, laggards only use it 67% of the time. Even in various aspects of the organization such as Marketing, Operations, Strategy Development, Sales, Supply Chain, Pricing and Revenue Management, and Information Technology, laggards use Analytics only half the time compared to Analytics Leaders.

Analytics Leaders always ensure that they establish the processes and organizational conditions to allow them to successfully deploy Analytics. In fact, to increase return on Analytics, organizations must undertake the use of four interrelated initiatives that will drive greater return on investment Analytics. These are four initiatives essential to building an Analytics-driven Organization.

One is building an organizational culture around Analytics. To achieve this the organization must have clear, strategic, and operational objectives that are set for Analytics. Second is deploying Analytics throughout all core functions of the business.

Starting with an Analytics-driven Culture can greatly facilitate cross-functional deployment of Analytics.

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Gordon Moore, Intel co-founder, observed that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years.  He projected that this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade.

His observation, termed the “Moore’s Law,” has correctly predicted the pace of innovation for several decades and guided strategic planning and research and development in the semiconductor industry.  Moore’s law is based on observation and projection of historical trends.

In 2015, Gordon Moore foresaw that the rate of progress would reach saturation.  In fact, semiconductor advancement has declined industry-wide since 2010, much lower than the pace predicted by Moore’s law.  The doubling time and semi-conductor performance has changed, but it has not impacted the nature of the law much.

Although many people predict the demise of Moore’s law, exponential growth in computing power persists with the emergence of innovative technologies.  Moore’s law is only part of the equation for effective Digital Transformation—there are other contributing factors including the role of leadership.

First Law of Digital Transformation

George Westerman—a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management—proposes a new law, which states that, “Technology changes quickly, but organizations change much more slowly.”  The law known as the “First Law of Digital Transformation” or “George’s Law” is a pretty straightforward observation, but is often ignored by the senior leadership.  This is why Digital Transformation is considered more of a leadership—than technical—issue.

Just announcing an organization-wide Transformation program does not change the enterprise.  According to George’s Law, successful Digital Transformation hinges on the abilities of senior leadership to effectively manage the so many contrasting mindsets of its workforce, identify and take care of the idiosyncrasies associated with these mindsets, interpret their desires, and focus attention on encouraging people to change.

Above all, the leadership should focus on converting Digital Transformation from a project to a critical capability.  This can be done by shifting emphasis from making a limited investment to establishing a sustainable culture of Digital Innovation Factory that concentrates on 3 core elements:

1. Provide People with a Clear and Compelling Vision
2. Invest in Upgrading or Replacing Legacy Technology Infrastructure
3. Change the Way the Organization Collaborates

Let’s now discuss the first 2 elements of the First Law of Digital Transformation.

Provide People with a Clear and Compelling Vision

Without a clear and compelling transformative vision, organizations cannot gather people to support the change agenda.  People can be either change resisters, bystanders, or change enablers.  However, most people typically tend to like maintaining the status quo, ignore change, or choose to openly or covertly engage in a battle against it.

For the employees to embrace change, leadership needs to make them understand what’s in it for them during the transition and the future organizational state.  This necessitates the leaders to develop and share a compelling vision to help the people understand the rationale for change, make people visualize the positive outcomes they can achieve through Transformation, and what they can do to enable change.  A compelling vision even urges the people to recommend methods to turn the vision into reality.

Invest in Upgrading or Replacing Legacy Technology Infrastructure

Problems and shortcomings in the legacy platforms is an important area to focus on during Digital Transformation.  The legacy technology infrastructure, outdated systems, unorganized processes, and messy data are the main reasons for organizational lethargy.  These issues hinder the availability of a unified view of the customer, implementing data analytics, and add to significant costs in the way of executing Digital Transformation.

Successful Digital Innovation necessitates the organizations to invest in streamlining the legacy systems and setting up new technology platforms that are able to enable digital and link the legacy systems.  Fixing legacy platforms engenders leaner and faster business processes and helps in maintaining a steady momentum of Innovation.

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The use of the Internet and other online tools have turned consumers to be more empowered and are now shopping differently. Customers are becoming more demanding and accustomed to getting what they want.

With greater access to reviews and online rating, customers are better equipped to switch to new products and services. Consumers now want to buy products and services when, where, and however they like. They expect companies to interact with them seamlessly, in an easy, integrated fashion with very little friction across channels.

As customer expectation continues to evolve–accelerated by the amplifying forces of interconnectivity and technology–markets are becoming increasingly fragmented with demand for greater product variety, more price points, and numerous purchasing and distribution channels.

Companies should be able to adapt to these increasingly disparate demands quickly and at scale. Staying close to the Customer Experience across an increasingly diverse customer base changing over time is no longer a matter of choice. It is a business imperative and a matter of corporate survival.

The Age of the Customer now calls for companies to be a Customer-centric Organization. Successful ones have discovered that driving customer-centricity depends, first and foremost, on building a Customer-centric Culture.

The Case for Customer-centricity

In the Age of the Customer, business as usual is not enough. Customers expect companies to interact with them seamlessly. Customers want companies to anticipate their needs and technology must have lowered barriers to entry to allow unorthodox competitors to disrupt markets.

The Age of the Customer has made it imperative for companies to have a customer-centric culture. A Customer-centric Culture can empower and control employee behavior. It is a culture that prioritizes the common understanding, sense of purpose, emotional commitment, and resilience. It is a culture where leaders and employees understand the company’s brand promise. Finally, and most importantly, a customer-centric culture is a culture that is committed to delivering exceptional customer experience.

Companies with a customer-centric culture must integrate, within its core, primary and secondary cultural attributes essential to complete its customer-centric culture framework.

The Corporate Culture Framework: Its Primary and Secondary Cultural Attributes

In a customer-centric Corporate Culture framework, the primary cultural attributes are critical in building a customer-centric culture. It also has 4 Secondary Cultural Attributes to complete that transformation.

The 4 Primary Cultural Attributes

1. Collective Focus
   This is a shared vision articulated on what it means to deliver great customer service. Significant resources are devoted to communicating the customer value and all employees understand their role in delivering value.
2. External Orientation
   External Orientation is having a full understanding of the company through the customer’s eyes. Outside-in perspectives are taken, seeing themselves as customers see them.
3. Change and Innovation
   In Organizational Change and Innovation, the corporate value system is in place that values failing fast and learning quickly. The notion that mistakes are learning opportunities is embedded in the organization.
4. Shared Beliefs
   Shared Beliefs is an attribute where employees share a common ideology and commitment to core values. The company strongly encourage strong service mentality and the desire to help others.

The 4 Secondary Cultural Attributes

1. Risk and Governance
   In Risk Management and Governance, the company must have a strong collective focus and shared beliefs about the boundaries of acceptable risk and appropriate behavior.
2. Courage
   A Customer-centric Culture with this secondary attribute has the resilience to bounce back when things don’t go as planned.
3. Commitment
   Commitment is the third secondary attribute where employees show dedication to the customer-centric ethos.
4. Inclusion
   Inclusion, the fourth secondary attribute, is one attribute that reinforces values diversity, authenticity, and uniqueness.

Inculcating these attributes has become imperative to achieve a successful transformation towards a Customer-centric Culture. Organizations just need to master the necessary practices to instill these attributes and the essential reinforcement to ensure that it is sustained.

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