TURNING THE TIDE ON TRANSFORMATION All too often, organisational transformation struggles to maintain momentum. Drawing on research with Saïd Business School and EY, Andrew White outlines three areas of focus that have the potential to underscore processes of change that energise, engage and succeed
C ompany metaphors are a focal point of Gareth Morgan’s seminal work Images of Organisation . In one of them, Morgan imagines the organisation as a machine, thriving in a steady‑state environment of predictability, routines and hierarchical command and control. In total contrast, another metaphor posits the organisation as an organism, a living thing that is constantly evolving and responding to changes in its environment. If the machine represents a 20th‑century organisation, the organism typifies companies of the 21st century. Amid ever-increasing and normalised disruption, traditional business models and ways of working are breaking down. Instead, there is a demand for continual transformation that is unlikely to go away. The transformational challenges companies face, such as climate change, rapid digital advances and political instability, are enormous and piling pressure on leaders. They also require a different form of both organisation and leadership. This was a key takeaway when I co-led research on organisational transformation with the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School and EY. Across papers published in 2022 and 2024, we surveyed nearly 4,000 leaders and employees across multiple industries
and geographies, as well as in-depth interviews with dozens of senior leaders. Here, I reflect on three things I learned about transformations in the process. THE RIGHT CONDITIONS Organisational transformations are famously difficult to get right. It has been a pervading narrative for decades, with 70 per cent of transformations found to fail according to major research from John Kotter in the 1990s. Our more recent analysis suggested little had changed: among 900 senior leaders surveyed, 67 per cent said they had experienced an underperforming transformation in the past five years. Most transformations start with positive momentum but tend to become more challenging once reality hits, with the realisation that although the old world is no longer relevant, the new world hasn’t yet been established. To “67 per cent of senior leaders surveyed said they had experienced an underperforming transformation in the past five years”
get past this and reach a successful endpoint, leaders must set the right conditions for success. This may seem like an obvious point, but our research demonstrated that it can have a disproportionately positive impact on an overall programme of change. Specifically, we identified six conditions that can increase the likelihood of success by 2.6 times, bringing it up from 28 to 73 per cent. Those conditions are adapting leadership skills; creating a purposeful vision; embracing the workforce’s opinions; setting clear responsibilities; applying technology with purpose; and encouraging collaboration. Our research also addressed turning points, the specific moments when transformations begin to veer off course. In so doing, it identified a dynamic process of sensing (identifying when issues are emerging), sense-making (bringing people together to understand what the issues are) and acting to fix the problem. When followed by leaders, this process can increase the likelihood of a turning point improving transformation performance by 12 times, boosting the success rate from six to 72 per cent. LISTENING TO THE UNSAID Listening doesn’t come naturally to many leaders. Amid the day-to-day demands, stress and complexities of running an organisation, there is a lot of noise to contend with. In a
36 Business Impact • ISSUE 4 • 2025
Made with FlippingBook - Share PDF online