Insight in culture

Insight, Inspiration, Implementation and Integration

People Change works with the four I’s: Insight, Inspiration, Implementation and Integration.

Many change models are based on IST and SOLL, but these are only two of the four components of a successful change, regardless whether it is a transformation, a transition or a gradual change.

If you start right away with the question ‘where are we going?’ you embark on a journey before you even know where you are right now. People often think they know, but that is an unjust assumption. If you do not know where you are, you do not know which direction to take in order to reach your destination.

 

The other step that is missing is the last step: Integration. A change is not complete when all people have the program on their computer and have followed the training. The integration phase is the perpetuation of the new behaviour. Without integration, people simply continue with what they were doing before.

These two additional steps are essential in any change process for sustainable behavioural change, team change and organizational change. In the next four articles Daan Noordeloos discusses these four I’s using a case study.

 

Organization Transformation Programme – Insight Phase

A large organisation is confronted with major changes in the outside world, such as digitisation, changing legislation and price competition over competition for distinctiveness.

With our transformation programme, we want to ensure that employees develop themselves so that the organisation can deal with this changing outside world. The programme is assigned to a Core Team (CT), of which Daan is the supervisor.

Exemplary behaviour

People are part of the CT because of their expertise and affinity with the subject of organizational development and because they can make an impact in the organization. They can make that impact because of their hierarchical position, the department they represent, their substantive knowledge or their experience in working years. The CEO and COO are part of the CT and because they are really involved and show exemplary behaviour, they bring positive energy to the programme.

 

Where are we now?

A transformation does not start with being more agile, more results-oriented or more empowering. The first question of the transformation is: where are we now? That is the Insight Phase.

However, answers to this question come from the vocabulary that people are used to; structure and strategy. These are important, but the transformation is much more about behaviour.

 

Behaviour

Some things people implement very easily and others they find difficult to implement. Why is that? It is in the culture, but there was no language for it. Besides, people often find culture vague. To make it concrete, we started working with the People Change Scan. This also gave us a language to talk about culture in concrete terms.

 

Insight in people

The first insight we gained was that a number of assumptions turned out to be incorrect. For example, I personally thought that the managers in this organisation were very blue, structured people who prefer to control all day. But in practice and from the People Change Scan it appeared that there were two value systems present in the management team. On the one hand, we were dealing with a very green, people-oriented club. On the other hand, in this same management team there was also a group of red, more directive and steering managers. That led to some tension in practice and had quite a few implications for the approach.

We discovered that there are different needs: some people want to be more task- and result-oriented, others want more coaching. Moreover, there was more need for trust than for processes and structure.

These are all insights that determine where we are going and how we are going to develop the organisation. First we determine what is logically feasible and what people naturally have within them. Then we choose a structure that is in balance with what the company requires of them.

 

Insight into the process

The People Change Scan provided an insight into the process. The organization still believed that they had to involve everyone. It quickly became clear that the change process just does not get off the ground if you start with everyone at the same time. They had to experience this themselves. One of the success factors of the transformation programme is working with people in front of the cart, who go all the way.

 

Insight organisation: consciously incompetent

Organisational development requires people to break through their old behaviour. This occurs when they become consciously incompetent. This is a painful process and it touches their self-confidence.

Some people tend to want to discover everything themselves. Someone else can say in advance how things should be done, but apparently one has to experience that first. The people involved in the transformation also thought in the beginning, for example, that they could do the transformation next to their regular work. They really had to get stuck before they were open to the suggestion of really freeing up their agenda.

 

Remote involvement

A very persistent pattern in a green culture is that people like to help each other. But just as a surgeon can’t operate on her own child, every participant has to be above the matter to really help. If, for example, someone finds it difficult to reserve time, you can say ‘you really have to do that’, but it works better if you let your colleague get trapped a while and let him figure it out for himself.

Because they wanted to learn to execute the transformation themselves, people from the organisation guided the process. For example, they had to learn to coach with detached involvement, so that the participants had the space to make their own learning curve.

 

What do you do with colleagues outside the project?

In addition, there are colleagues who are not involved but hear about the project. They see that something is happening and they form an opinion. But theyhave to offer the participants space for their development.

For example, if a manager sees that something is happening in his department with the participants in the programme outside his sphere of influence, this creates unrest. It is then the task of the programme manager to sit down with that manager, to reassure him and create the confidence that things are going well. In this way, the programme manager takes away the unrest by making a connection, so that the participants can go through the process properly.

 

Participate or not

Finally, in the Insight phase, it is very important to agree internally what the programme expects from the participants. It is an intensive process to be serious about your development. We believe that if you do it right, it will ultimately deliver something for yourself and for the company. So you participate in the programme and then you also take part in the decision – or not.

 

Worldview

In the Insight phase you learn what the value system of the people in the organization is. Often a small group in the organisation has an idea of the direction in which the development should go, those are the yellow-green people. With the People Change Scan we come into contact with these people and with them we enter the Inspiration phase. More about this next month.