The Anecdote Blog has an interesting post discussing "The Three Journeys" that organisations take as they seek to transform and implement their strategy.
Leader who are striving to bring about change and who are seeking to implement their strategies would do well to consider structuring their approach as the following three journeys:
- The first journey is designed to help the organisation’s leaders develop a common understanding of what they would like to achieve and defining this end-state in broad terms, while knowing that detailed plans are unlikely to be achieved (the world is too unpredictable for a simple, linear view). We encourage the leadership group to develop a rough mud map of the journey from the current situation to this desired end state while resisting the urge to fill in the details. The staff fill in the details as part of the second journey.
- The second journey involves the rest of the organisation (or a representative subset) planning how they will get to the desired state. This involves understanding the current knowledge environment—who’s connected to whom, where are the important knowledge assets, where are the blockers, what are the enablers—and developing the best possible map based on current information and resources available that can be made to guide the third journey.
- The third journey is when the organisation actually embarks on implementing the ideas developed in the first two imaginary journeys. Most importantly in the third journey, the organisation implements an iterative process they designed in the second journey that embeds new knowledge-related behaviours and provides opportunities for new ideas to be injected in how things are done.
What I like about this approach is that it supports a key principle of collective learning, as discussed by Michael Watkins in his book “The First 90 Days”, that I discussed previously. This is to…
“…focus on setting up a collective learning process….. Rather than mount a frontal assault on the organisation’s defences, you should engage in something akin to guerrilla warfare, slowly chipping at their resistance and raising their awareness of the need for change…. The key, then is to figure out which parts of the change process can be best addressed through planning and which are best dealt with through collective learning.”
The first to journeys are about generating collective learning experiences, first with the organisation’s leadership and then with the broader organisation. The to follow-up on these learning experiences with concrete planning, the creation organisational alignment and focused execution.
Technorati Tags: Change, Leadership, Management, Business,OD, Learning, Transformation, Planning, Transition, Strategy
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