Over the last two decades, we have worked with scores of world-class organizations who, despite their differences in purpose, products, business models, entities, and ownership structures, share a foundational challenge: how to design their organization to fit the fast-changing world and the intense evolutionary pressures it brings. From FMCG giants to pioneering non-profits, from global banking behemoths to massive public service providers, every organization is facing the evolutionary imperative with unprecedented intensity: it is adapt or die on an unimaginable scale. One S&P company is being replaced, on average, every two weeks.
We believe that most, if not all, of your organization’s major problems, whether decreasing margins or a disrupted operating model, whether disengaged employees or a lack of agility, are actually symptoms of a much more profound issue: the blueprint upon which your organization was built is no longer entirely a fit for the environment you find yourself in. Because of this mismatch, Yale School of Management estimates that 50-75% of the Fortune 500 will be extinct by 20271.
In this powerful White Paper, we suggest that, because the very blueprint of the modern organization is maladapted to the future, the solution for how to ensure your organization can cope with the digital, disrupted, and damaged world cannot be another restructure or change program based on the same Industrial-Age blueprint that created the problems in the first place. Instead, every leader has to transform the source code of organization itself into one that fits the Digital Age. Until they lead the shift to a Transformational Organization, leaders will have to deal with inexhaustible crises that cannot be truly resolved, as opposed to temporarily fixed, using conventional management science.
We believe that every enterprise, from small start-ups to multinational giants, must become Transformational Organizations: elegantly able to change what they do and how they do it to stay relevant as the world changes around them. This shift requires a change in the blueprint from Command and Control into what we call “Create & Control”: which actively manages the dynamic tension between adaptability (creativity and innovation) and stability (control and efficiency).
There can be no one-size-fits-all consultancy answer to how to become a Transformational Organization built on a Create & Control blueprint. Agile software techniques, training programs, and even digital transformation projects alone will not do it. There is, however, a process and toolset—that we have curated over 20 years—for how to transform your organization systematically and strategically. This White Paper seeks to start you on the journey to unleash the agility, purpose and passion that lies latent in your people and which you need to safely harness right now in order to forge the future, rather than fail it.