Changing The Way To Change Towards Setting Strategy

It was a refreshing read to see Malcolm Ryder recent piece that looks at change, titled,Change How You Change, that provides steps to consider on the way to creating change within the organization with the end objective to setting strategy. He argues that while much data and information is evidently critical to the ability to formulate and describe the strategy, the more important issue is the perspectives in which such data or information are found and used. Real change hasn't occurred until the party that must sustain the change has become an agent of the change. For this to happen, that party's consciousness has to be altered. When the party is an entire group, the timing might be more difficult to anticipate, but the rule remains the same. Strategy accounts for the mandate "change how you change." The most significant transformation that the organization has to go through is not the difference between new directives versus old ones, or between certain new processes versus old ones, but instead between being routinely strategic versus not being routinely strategic. The key challenge for most organizations now is to generally and continuously behave strategically, instead of simply executing approvingly. While setting strategy, we need to ask, "What is our purpose", but it is insufficient; we must also ask "Why is that purpose ours?". Identifying the right problem to solve & choosing the pain area that needs to be alleviated becomes an important element in the process. Changing how we change does not necessarily produce a different outcome - instead, the point of it is to be able to produce the needed outcomes in a different way. Developing a strategy is creating a way of being; and changing a strategy is changing a way of being. Being strategic is a competency, not an event.

Jack Vinson sees a correlation between this approach and the five focusing steps of TOC while obviously at first pass it would appear to raise concerns centered around the the global optima vs local optima equation. A good read – too often organisations abandon change efforts for want of a solidified approach, waiting for effective interventions and a course to take it logical conclusions. A complete framework and a good read indeed.