The Leadership and Organization Transformation Program
The organization of the future is the team-based self-managed network, which is better designed to provide the most important sustainable competitive advantage for a digitally transformed world: the ability to rapidly adapt to fast-changing markets. Rather than leveraging the individual intelligence of an elite few using command-and-control practices, self-managed networks leverage the collective intelligence of the whole organization using collaborative decision-making tools to build speed and adaptability into the DNA of the organization. The program has three parts.
1. Leading Self-Managed Networks
The 4 ½ day workshop equips leaders with the innovative skills, tools, and competencies they need to become a highly effective team in leading highly resilient organizations in digitally disruptive times.
Through a series of interactive activities and engaging presentations, the participants will become familiar with the revolutionary new approaches to strategy and execution used by a new breed of leaders to disrupt existing industries and create new markets. These include:
- Strategic Discovery: Learn the innovative approach to business strategy used by the technology companies to identify new opportunities for creating customer value.
- Collective Intelligence: Learn how to rapidly access this powerful resource for identifying ways to improve current business processes and grow the business.
- Team Self-Management: Discover how the proven tools and practices of agile work teams can be applied to improve productivity.
- Innovative Work Cultures: Learn how to promote the free flow of ideas across the organization to identify innovation opportunities and maintain continual business success.
- Power Metrics: Learn new ways to construct metrics that provide early warning indicators of business performance and timely insight into changing markets.
2. Facilitator Training
In self-managed networks, there are no roles whose primary job is to direct the work of others. Middle managers are replaced with facilitators trained in advanced collaboration tools to accomplish the effective coordination of interdependent operational processes.
These new tools include:
- Collective Intelligence Workshops
- Design Thinking sessions
- Lean methodologies
- Agile management tools
- Open Space sessions
3. Organization Redesign Workshop
With the leadership team fully transformed and staff facilitators sufficiently trained, the final activity to complete the transformation of the organization into a self-managed network is to design the new organization. This is accomplished in a series of two 2-day workshops that are separated by several weeks.
In the first workshop, the members of the organization are oriented to the tools and practices used in self-managed networks to make decisions, coordinate work, and measure results. In addition, during the first workshop, the leaders and the staff co-create the team-based structure that will replace the traditional departmental structure.
During the break between the two workshops, people continue to work under the old organization, but schedule regular time to meet with their new teams to discuss and simulate how they will work under the new organization, making note of any questions or concerns about how to work effectively in a self-managed network.
The second workshop is focused on addressing the questions and concerns that emerged during the weeks-long break and orienting the members of the organization in the advanced skills and practices of highly effective teams. After the completion of the second workshop, the new organization is fully launched.