In modern management nothing is created, everything is transformed
By: Flavia Oliveira
Tags: Kanban, Organizational Behavior, Organizational Culture, Management, Scrum

When I first started my post-graduation in Organizational Psychology in 2017, one of my professors said something that caught my attention: “most of theories and practices in organizations nowadays are a repetition or inspired by the first theories of administration and organizational behavior”. Maybe because this professor was open-minded kind of crazy, maybe because she was right, but that statement made a lot of sense to me.

By the time I changed my career from Human Resources to Technology and Digital products, I realized that most of the content I was studying and reading had their core in the same foundations. It doesn’t matter if it is Scrum, Kanban, PDCA, Design Thinking, Change Management or others. The more I read about this digital concepts, methodologies and frameworks, the more I realized they are rooted in the same concepts.

In this article, I highlight which I consider to be common aspects between some of the methodologies and frameworks that are commonly used to to build a culture of continuous transformation, innovation and significant results within organizations. The main purpose is to create a reflection and debates amongst people who consider themselves as change agents in organizations.

Transformation and innovation are deeply related to Culture. Consider Culture as “a set of attitudes and beliefs in ways of working or behaviors”. For organizations to adapt, change and generate value for customers, business and workforce, having a strong culture is a key factor for success. And, a fundamental part of building this culture, is communication.

The foundation of every change or transformation is communication. In my experience, communication is also the biggest challenge. Whether you are changing or transforming something in your work or personal life, communicating your intentions, plans and listen to the other part, is the first and most important step to successfully engage your audience.

Communicating with assertiveness is hard. Not being assertive, means you’re either aggressive or passive in communication. The lack of assertiveness in corporate work might be interpreted by employees as a deliberated action to keep business strategies only to top management level or that your leadership has no clue of which strategies the organization is adopting to make the change happen. Both ways will make people feel resistant to change and embrace the culture of continuous transformation and innovation, once they don’t feel they are part of the process.

As Patty Maccord puts in her book “Powerful — building a culture of freedom and responsibility”, by making sure employees understand your business model and strategies you give transparency, so individuals become more accountable for their actions and are more open to embrace the changes and opportunities the company is going to face. Communication creates transparency. And you can see transparency as a value of Scrum and in Kanban in its values “make the process visual” and expressed policies. You can also see communication as part of the first step in the change management model ADKAR, an acronym to guide the process of change management.

Communication also means to make it clear the purpose of why things are being done. Which, if you think, is the very basis of the Agile Manifesto for Software Development, as described in its values “individuals and interactions over processes and tools” and my favorite one “Responding to change over following a plan”. So, communicate, communicate, communicate! Follow Simon Sinek’s golden circle strategy and start with “why” things are being done, give things a purpose. This can be a good way to start. Giving a purpose to what will be done and communicating it at the very beginning of the change will surely reduce the resistance within the organization or at least, enhance the engagement of people in the transformation.

In order to have a successful communication and to decide what to change and transform, organizations also need to understand what problems and dissatisfactions are preventing the organization to move forward. Dissatisfactions can be seen as the gap between where the company is at the moment and where it wants to be. Keep in mind Pareto’s theory, start putting efforts in 20% of the things that probably impact 80% of your problems. Researching and understanding dissatisfactions don’t mean that your changes and transformations are only going to attend to problems and put innovation and the creation of new things in danger. It means that you can cross over opportunities through the lens of known problems. In many cases, it will be possible to see that many of the complaints and problems will be solved or at least softened, by the changes the organization plans to implement. By doing this, leaders will have the purpose of changing and transformation clear for themselves and then it will be easier to communicate with assertiveness and concreteness to all stakeholders.

Mapping problems and dissatisfactions are one of the key concepts in design thinking. Empathize, understand your audience, define what your problem is. In my opinion and experience, there is no better way of doing that than by understanding the issues that are problems for customers, employees or even the organization as a whole. We can see this rationale at Kanban’s implementation methodology STATIK (System thinking approach to introduce Kanban). The method approaches defining what is success for your clients and with that in mind you define your purpose, so you are more likely to do the right things. Like Peter Drucker said: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently something that should not have been done at all.” Communication and understanding of problems and dissatisfactions are powerful ways to make organizations find purpose for the things that will be prioritized to be done.

To fulfill the foundation of a Culture of change and transformation, we need data and we need feedback.

In the Harvard Business Review Analytics Survey, run in 2019, “93% of executives reported significant levels of business volatility in their markets, and 85% said that to step up this volatility, businesses require a more agile culture that would be continuously innovative and organizationally flexible”.

Data. This is the age of data. It has become a competitive advantage to work as a data driven company. And to be a data driven company, is to have a strong data driven culture. The more you measure the results of what was implemented, the better you get feedback of the changes and transformation implemented. It’s through data that you check the progress and can decide with better precision what to do next. It’s through data that organizations ripen to define good metrics, that lead to significant results. Again, it is important to be sure that the right thing is being done, there is no other way to have a high level of certainty than driven by data.

Finally, organizations must acknowledge the power of feedback. Honest, continuous and brave feedback. Here, once again we see transparency as a principle to face the problems and attitudes that have an impact and need to be reinforced or changed. Build strong and genuine relations between people, so that people continuously improve, thus the organization can continuously change and innovate. This type of feedback is about people. People can see the problems of the organization and must be able to talk about it. The people who most likely understand how business works are those who make the business work. These people are at all levels and in all positions, from customers’ feedback to evaluate its products or services — Net Promote Score (NPS) is commonly used as a data to follow up — to teams retrospectives and checking of results, problems and learnings. A culture that reinforces continuous feedback, opens a door to flexibility and to embrace and see changes as a natural part of the process.

Through data and feedback, we complete PDCA’s cycle. We plan considering communication and purpose, we do what is most valuable for customers, business and workforce considering problems and dissatisfactions we want to solve, we check through data and we act — act here means, learn what went right and wrong, than adapt and change — through data and feedback. PDCA is a known method since 1950 , Kanban and Design Thinking since 1970 and Scrum since the 90’s. I am sure that reading this article, you can think about other theories, frameworks, methods and methodologies, such as lean thinking and Kaizen, that follows this same rationale and guidelines. This is a process to keep in mind to guide continuous transformation and change in organizations. Whether it’s small changes or more radical transformations, the foundations are pretty much the same. It’s like Lavoisier’s aphorism from the 18th century “ in nature, nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed”, so it is in management.