CULTURE AND CHANGE KEN BROPHY
Top-ten themes for change Ken Brophy, Director at K3 Consulting, shares his insights into what he believes are the emerging themes of evolving organisations.
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or many organisations outside of New Zealand, things have been far from business as usual. They have needed to disrupt their own business models, more readily adopt technology and innovate more broadly than people thought possible. So, is New Zealand being left behind?
Announcing the new structure is only the first step if that is your ‘go to’ solution. For some business leaders in New Zealand, the COVID-19 pandemic has been extremely disruptive and driven a fight for survival – think tourism, retail – however, I think, as a country, we cannot be complacent in challenging how we do business. A recent McKinsey article I read, referencing their CEO research, discovered that, across their representative survey population, only 11 per cent of
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CEOs believe their current business models will be economically viable through 2023. That is scary if you are in the ‘she’ll be right, it’s business as usual’ mode. Given I work in the growth and transformation space, it is really encouraging to see many businesses tackling this challenge head on. With a significant number of meaningful design changes under way, I think this will make these organisations far more competitive. With these efforts always comes challenges. Here, I have detailed 10 themes for the first six months of the year that I think are important for people to watch out for as they continue to evolve their organisations. These are important as you face into the challenge of ensuring you are ‘fit for purpose’, especially if your organisation competes offshore or you have to match fit international competitors looking at your space in New Zealand (ie, here come Amazon and Ikea). The 10 themes to date are as follows. 1. Adopting a new model – eg, Agile – that your business isn’t ready for or doesn’t fully understand
It’s fantastic people are exploring the application of ‘agile’ to their ways of doing business, but people need to be conscious of where they fall on the continuum of ‘agile ways of working’ versus ‘true agile organisational design’. For most businesses, the former is an excellent way of reinvigorating communications and connections, the latter a fundamental change that for many is not needed and certainly not right across the whole business.
Too many people are not thinking strategically about their workforce planning, which is leaving massive capability gaps. 2. Force fitting existing people into a new model and expecting different results When the labour market is tight, as has been the case realistically for the past 15 years either side of the global financial crisis and COVID-19, it can be easy to retain the existing team, drop them into a new structure and expect them to be successful. Now, with the right training and support, this might work out fine, but, equally, sometimes we may have to make
