How I Empower Organisational Transformation
By: Dr Michael Heng
Tags: Strategy, Change Management, Leadership, Organisational Design, Organisational Culture

Transforming your Organisation

Organisational transformation is the process of reshaping and recreating an organization. Change is implicit in transformation, but transformation goes beyond the usual notions of changing to embrace a often radical re-conceptualisation and re-contextualisation of the worldview as well as the core driving values of an organization. The ultimate goal of organisational transformation is to assure its own viability and survival in the face of the permanently changing internal and external environments.

A mindset change is critical for successful organizational transformation. Survival is not compulsory. Organisations have to be motivated to change. Under ordinary conditions, change is often resisted politically in the organization since it always involves some degree of uncertainty and requires risk-taking responses from organisational members. The need for change is often better understood, though not necessarily automatically agreed to by members, when the motivation to change is linked to the performance deficiency of the organization, as seen by its stakeholders. The organisation could also be motivated to change in response to shifts or revisions in its basic strategic orientation.

Much has been written on organisational change. They mostly consider change as both a fact of organisational life and challenge which threaten its growth, survival and progress. Many change strategies therefore address the motivations to initiate and/or response to change, and the change process itself. While the speed of organisational change remains a bone of contention, and one that is really an empirical issue, there is increasing recognition of corresponding periods of stability in between waves of change; that is, organisational stability or equilibrium is often punctuated by episodic change events, or that changes, no matter how frequent their imminence, are always interrupted by necessary pauses of stability.

Discontinuous changes in organisations are in fact necessary for organisations to consolidate and institutionalize new adaptations, work processes and new technologies. The key question is how new adaptations, processes and technologies in organisations could be managed by arranging them in a logical structure of self-sustaining momentum in preparation for the next imminent wave of change events.

Specifically, what are the issues and solutions associated with the development and installation of an organisational culture that could thrive on changes so as to maintain a constant social order of change and stability in a concurrent, simultaneous and continuous manner, rather than sequentially and episodically as described by punctuated equilibrium change models?

Understanding Organisations

An organisation is a rational entity, in that its behaviorial pattern should suggest the conscious pursuit of a particular purpose or goal. Every organisation therefore has an envisioned end state, and it would think and act in an adaptive manner to embark on actions to attain it within the parameters of its environmental constraints. The ultimate goal of the organisation is developed from its central areas of concern, its mission, as defined by its vision. When the goals are articulated, they would in fact be socially constructed and enacted based on the visionary inspirations and missionary expectations of the organisation.

Similarly, organisational members’ perceptions of their reality are also socially constructed, and their behavior culturally patterned. While the members would retain some degree of individual discretion of actions, the latitude and limits of such discretion would be constrained by the constructed paradigm of the organisational ideology. Decision-making processes in organisations are correspondingly rational and logical according to a cognitive framework of its members, which they would use as the standard for legitimacy and validity. Decisions therefore have to “make sense” to them by being consistent with the logical framework of the organisational worldview.

However, the organisation is not sustained simply by the collective actions of individual acts of behavior. The perceptions and cognition of organisational members are molded by the culturally patterned behavior of their groups and socially constructed through their interaction with each other and with organisational leaders. Leaders inspire, develop and shape their followers’ cognitive framework at the level of vision, beliefs and values with the conscious intent to structure their field of possible decisions and behavior.

Leadership Drives Organisational Change

Leaders in organisation have the critical task of assuring the legitimacy of their decision-making processes. To this end, they have to manage the processes of shared value creation effectively so as to establish a sustaining cultural structure of core values, beliefs, rituals and institutional procedures that could operate systematically and consistently to produce beneficial results. Managerial leaders in the organisation communicate regularly with their members so as to manage “meaning” in such a way as to shape their perceptions and cognition to the extent of radically transforming what they had previously considered to be of the utmost importance.

The key to change in organisation involves understanding the processes of how change “make sense” and is understood by its members, how the need for change is constructed, and what events and/or who have the greatest influence on their acceptance of the change directions and the final envisioned state of the proposed change.

The organisational culture is not a tightly bounded system. Insofar as the organisation is an “open system” interacting with the environment and other organisations, its organisational boundaries are in fact like porous and permeable cellular membranes, which is constantly subjected to frequent problematic incursions by alien elements of the external technological, cultural, material and business environments. The organisation is better conceived as a “loosely coupled” social system. Organisational culture, at both the evaluative and cognitive levels, therefore initiates a continuous reflexive stream of narratives, or discourse, with such alien elements seeking to “argue” its shared orientation as it defines the issues of differences and controversies. Perceiving culture as an “argument”, that responses to proposed changes in the format of “because” statements, opens the door to the opportunities in using ideology to effect organisational transformation to a total quality organisation.

Creating a Change Culture

To produce sustainable change, organisational transformation would require effecting changes on the interpretative schemes of organisational members to evoke a new “common sense” through new processes of and new approaches to “sense-making”. Sense-making processes refer to how organisational members construct the meaning of things based on a reasonable explanation of what might be happening rather than through the discovery of the scientific, objective reality. In short, transformational changes are accepted by organisational members only because they make “better sense” when evaluated against what they thought were “good” currently or previously.

Successful organizational transformation results from an ideological framework which can provide an adequate alternative, coherent and logical discipline structure that effectively challenges and overwhelms the existing organisational culture that has become less persuasive.

The new organizational ideology in practice would establish its decisive legitimacy through the quality of its benefits and impact to its members when driven by the passionate desire to meet and exceed the expectations of all its stakeholders.