The growth of new innovation and transformation should be enabled by the dismantling of the old
The idea that in order to transform, we have to remove the old — the old ways of working, structures, behaviours and norms that support the old. If we think about it, this is an obvious concept to understand. But how often are those in an organisation prepared to take the initiative and courage needed, and undergo such a series of actions?
If we look at innovation and transformation in the private and public sector, we see that almost all of the efforts to innovate come to very little, and the reasons are several. However, one of those reasons is the fact that we are trying to innovate and keep the old at the same time. And that will not work — its a clash, and in a clash the strongest usually wins . This removal of the old is actually difficult to achieve so we need ways of making sure this occurs. One successful approach that I use is to create a separate operational team that is allowed to safely experiment with new ways of working, and that team are not connected to the old. These experiments are often small, and rapid. When I lead n them, I find a physical room helps, with lot sof work in progress on the walls, where people focus on two things:
- Applying alternative principles and concepts that focus the innovation.
- As the team work together, I help them with innovative approaches, systems thinking, understanding complexity, etc. They begin to develop new ways of seeing and understanding, They begin to work differently and end up agile, perceptive, and proficient in design and change. They become a remarkable team that can then be a model for others in the organisation!
The results from this team can then inform decisions that then allow for the structured dismantling of the old, whilst the new is created. The second is to plan what and how to approach dismantling of the old and give that responsibility to the leaders in that organisation to lead and undertake.
One of the aspects is that this not just about design, it is introducing intervention concepts and methods into our design and change approaches. This recognises that an organisation is far more of a complex adaptive system, rather than a reductionist mechanical model.
The concepts
The science behind this is solid. In particular from Argyris and Schon, where they showed that to change our perceptions and paradigms that we work with, we have to first do something that challenges our preconceived ideas that we believe. We need to allow ourselves the space to allow new ideas to be considered, without us immediately arguing against them, and that is about unlearning what we currently know. Our egos, power in the hierarchy, etc get in the way.
