emergence THE JOURNAL OF BUSINESS AGILITY
JUNE 2021 VOL 02 / ISSUE 02
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emergence THE JOURNAL OF BUSINESS AGILITY
Roche Sweden’s Agile Transformation - Realizing Human Potential Dawna Jones with Christian Feinberg
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weak or transform? That’s one of many questions Christian Feinberg and the transformation team at Roche Sweden asked themselves when tasked by Roche HQ to transform the company worldwide. Christian stated: We have operations in every corner of the globe, focusing on innovative solutions for patients, yet we knew very little about what others do. We try to be an innovative company where we bring additional value for our medicines and solutions, so we have this constant drive to see improvements.
Though the initiative came from Roche HQ in Zurich, the regional office in Stockholm had carte blanche to design the change to fit. A multinational pharma company headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Roche International was founded in 1896 and now has over a hundred thousand employees worldwide. Divided into pharma and diagnostics, Roche’s purpose is “Doing now what is needed next.” The natural way would be to tweak because that’s easier… Let’s fix or remove few things and see what happens. But I think we all felt, when we started this transformation, that there is so much more we can do. There’s so much happening
But were improvements enough? Or was a more comprehensive shift in perspective required? 48
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in the world that just doing a tweak won’t make it. The whole healthcare sector, all of humanity, has information fully available everywhere. Innovation is happening at a speed that we couldn’t even imagine 10 years ago. There were so many signs out there that more than a tweak was needed. Roche Sweden’s decision to transform was driven by the need to move past the limitations of controlling employees. When I joined Roche 10 years ago from another pharmaceutical company, I felt that people liked what they were doing but also felt a bit suboptimally used. Personal capacities were not being fully used. People were excited about the kinds of innovation we were doing but also, in many ways, feeling I can do more than this. I’m controlled. My middle manager tells me what to do. That manager tells that person what to do. Without a reason to evolve thinking around how things get done, organizational transformation doesn’t really have a solid foundation or a compass to guide toward achieving wider benefit for employees and customers. Vision or a 10X aspirational purpose is key. The common vision for the whole organization is to deliver three to five times more medical innovation to society at half the cost. We wanted to have much more of a value-driven organization so we could provide a higher set of innovations. We wanted to do that at much less cost, so we needed to find ways of working differently while asking ourselves, What don’t we need to do today? The guiding principle is really, How can we constantly improve and do better? That ambition is really close to our hearts. Organizations are complex networks of relationships. Approaching transformation linearly—using a roadmap—does not allow for the kind of feedback and responsiveness that restores healthy communication across the organization. Nature manages a JUNE 2021
complex adaptive system using nine core principles.1 It makes sense that managing a complex transformation in an organization with many interdependencies is also principle-driven. Every person can be their best self is the core principle that we agreed on, which led to two questions: 1) How can we allow our people to really deliver and engage in what they are able to do? What limitations in the organization can we remove? 2) How can we support and enable them to use all their capabilities? It called for a bit of reflection and honest yet bold introspection. When we looked at Sweden, we were very successful; business was almost running by itself. We said that’s not being our best selves. That’s not delivering three to five times more innovation by sitting in meetings and discussing the customer’s needs. Secondly, we were very internally focused. Roughly 70% internally focused and 30% externally. That needed to flip if there was to be balanced capacity for using all our capabilities internally. That’s very well aligned to what agile organizations do. You listen to your customers, and they work with you on how you can improve. Zooming out perceptually to observe where mental focus is going allows decision makers to see where internal energy is being expended. Processes can drive what people pay attention to in both a productive and unproductive way. In climates of uncertainty and volatility, responsiveness is accelerated by everyone engaged in a future focus to see what is emerging. Some processes keep you looking to the past, such as best practices and budgeting. To stay alert and nimble, process isn’t the key to productivity. Speed is made of engagement. The second core principle was speed over structured process. Our success was made of a lot of controlling processes, many that were unnecessary. We just stopped—to take a closer look. When I looked 49
on back on a week, I probably spent 50%–60% of the time asking colleagues to present what they were doing. That can’t be the role of the manager. And then, as we went through other roles, we realized there were many processes we created, unnecessary shit we dealt with every day, that were created to fill in communication vertically and horizontally and to please the managers. We knew that we would still be required to follow some processes, laws, and regulations. Obviously, we should keep that clinical trial. You can’t just do as you want. But we needed new ways, so we took a conscious decision to release some of the processes to get speed. Speed is a competitive advantage. We want to be quick. We want to learn quickly and change quickly. The idea that the role of managers is not to control performance but enable may sound strange. But practically speaking, in volatile decision-making environments, control limits the value people can contribute. Speed and productivity are both compromised, and performance is confined to the mentality of the person in authority. Adapting the role to enable creates a more fulfilling and less ego-driven approach to getting things done while also reducing the stress associated by one person attempting to hold the answers to what amounts to a complex interaction.
The third observation and principle came from the recognition that Roche Sweden, like many companies, had become addicted to perfection. We spent months to prepare for internal reviews. Externally, customers told us, “This is too much. We only wanted this, and you’ve come with all of this.” It was another balance we had to restore. From perfection to 80%-goodenough mentality. Roche Sweden used principles to guide their transformation, which is completely consistent with how complex systems of interactions transform. First of all, people want to be their best self, so we should allow for that. Anything we can do to make it happen should happen. Secondly, these three key balances formed the guiding principles. Shift from internal to external focus. Speed over structured process. Replace perfection with a goodenough-to-go mentality. To begin, Roche Sweden started with a “choose your coach” internally with the aim to instil a learning mentality, a beginner’s mind, while creating safety to disagree, raise problems, and make and share mistakes. People chose someone who inspired them outside their function and role. Eventually, the question came back: Why can’t we choose our manager? The idea of stretching autonomy into the freedom to choose your manager shocked Roche Sweden’s transformation team. “It wasn’t part of the original plan, but it stuck.” Bit by bit, employees began to speak more directly to what was holding them back from being their best selves.
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Then our people said, “The structure that we have is holding us back. The structure we have is not promoting us to be our best selves because we are sitting in silos. We have leaders that control or deliver what they have as accountability, and that needs to stop.” That launched the restructuring of the operating model and the organization. Enabling people to be their best selves meant removing or reducing the layers that kept them from realizing their potential. The whole need for line authority to approve or control upward or downward communication and collaboration blocked potential contribution. If we want people to be their best selves, we need to trust them—guide and help, but trust and empower them to make it happen. Before the redesign, we had about six senior managers, 21 middle managers and 115 colleagues. The recommended design that came back from the design team was to skip the middle managers. The majority of managers, when presented with the idea, agreed, saying, “We don’t need us.” They had been there to control and be part of defining the task of the people. They recognized that there were better roles with higher value that they could play.
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Originally I had 35 people in my control; now I have 10. But I would say I was controlling, and I didn’t really like what I did. Christian’s role switched to removing barriers, triggering discussions where tensions surfaced, finding external resources, introducing people to new worlds of thought, and coaching when asked. The management team became an enabling team. We killed a lot of planning processes. The yearly planning originally covered from April to August, with a lot of internal meetings, presentations, reviews, and discussions that didn’t really add value. Planning switched to being event-driven, to adapt and respond as situations emerge. We iterate, it is totally transparent, and we update it constantly. Just this change alone saved hours that are now applied to implementation. This achieved the change in focus from looking back to looking forward. It’s widely known that senior management and leadership in organizations is the bottleneck for progress, largely attributed to being overly attached, possibly addicted, to controlling people. Roche Sweden responded to the shift in role by presenting their expectations and what was needed for organizational trust, sharing the information people needed to either opt in or opt out.
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We were very keen to say this is not us telling people to change; this is us changing. Controlling managers left, but I’d say the majority of [those who were] middle managers are still with us. A few moved to the senior level, but the rest contribute a more valuable role to the company. It’s been 10 months, and it is working. To achieve speed and enable people to be their best selves, decision making had to devolve. Without being under someone’s control, individuals needed to know what was expected in leading themselves and making decisions to achieve some coherent stability to the company’s implementation. Devolving decision making accelerates speed, while the use of principles facilitates a consistent level of due diligence. Both of which raise decision making to a conscious (versus automatic reflex)
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level. Companies gain speed and faster response while providing an anchor to bring the whole organization into decision-making alignment and coherence—a serious advantage in volatile and unpredictable conditions. Roche Sweden’s solution came in the form of the Five Finger Assessment—a tool to determine readiness for implementation. The principles that guided Roche Sweden’s agile transformation unified effort while bringing alignment and an innovation spirit to the work: 1. transparency (which generates trust); 2. openness to learning from every tension; 3. balance; 4. future focused; 5. engaging trust; 6. self-reflective; 7. beginners mind; and 8. pragmatism.
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COVID-19 presented an interruption to daily patterns that allowed for a whole new level of innovation rooted in how individuals and companies creatively responded to events. The rush back to Business as Usual or “normal” has, in some instances at least, resulted in missed opportunities to optimize adaptive capacity internally to strengthen resilience and responsiveness. This rush backwards to familiar territory is measured by engagement levels that have returned to pre-COVID-19 levels in the US,2 a Gallop survey reported. Engagement is essential for successful implementation of company goals, agile responses to unexpected events, and inspired innovation. The journey Roche Sweden experienced shows what is achievable when leaders are bold enough to exercise deep listening and rigorous learning. Sensing and deeper listening cultivate organizational intuition, a strong ally in climates of complex ambiguity and volatility.
REFERENCES: 1 Janine Benyus: 9 Basic Principles of Biomimicry 1. Nature runs on sunlight. 2. Nature uses only the energy it needs. 3. Nature fits form to function. 4. Nature recycles everything. 5. Nature rewards cooperation. 6. Nature banks on diversity. 7. Nature demands local expertise. 8. Nature curbs excesses from within. 9. Nature taps the power of limits.
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/321965/employee-engagement-reverts-back-pre-covid-levels.aspx
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Roche Sweden’s journey is easier to map in hindsight than in predictable milestone roadmaps for implementation. Working with what shows up through the many feedback loops the Roche Transformation team put in place allowed for optimizing the transformation, making each step purposeful, practical, and transparent. By sharing what Roche Sweden has learned, it is sincerely hoped that more companies will be inspired to lead regenerative practices within the workplace, society, and ecologically.
Christian Feinberg is the Transformation Lead, Non-Oncology Portfolio for Roche Sweden, an agnostic coach, and a big fan of learning and working together to achieve more than we could ever do by working alone. He is based in Stockholm, Sweden.
Are you meeting the speed and volatility of complex change?
This article draws from a podcast episode Dawna did with Christian for the Inspirational Insights podcast and from a webinar hosted by Mathias Holmgren of CRISP, one of the external partners working with Roche Sweden. Dawna has been podcasting on leadership innovation since 2008. Listen to the episode of the Inspirational Insights podcast with Christian Feinberg. Watch the webinar hosted by Mathias Holmgren of CRISP. JUNE 2021
Dawna Jones co-creates adaptive strategies for addressing complex, perplexing issues, leading organizations past resistance to reach for 10X inspiring goals. A serial podcaster, she is also the author of Decision Making for Dummies, a contributor to From Hierarchy to High Performance and two other books, plus she hosts the Inspirational Insights podcast. Original thinker. Future design. 53
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