17 January 2005	Monday	06 Zilhaj 1425

We are in a time of great change. While we can't control much of the world changing around us, we can determine how to respond. We can anticipate and embrace changes or resist them. Resisting change is like trying to push water upstream.

Generally, we are quick to criticise others who resist change. It's much harder to recognize or admit to our own change resistance. Some people call change "progress" and celebrate the improvements that it brings.

Others curse those same changes and wish for the good old days. Same changes, different responses. The choice is ours: We can be leaders, or we can be followers.

Today's business climate is entirely different. Social change, foreign competition, deregulation, environmental issues, global economic forces, and mind-boggling technology have turned the stability of forty years ago on its head, leaving a new world that is unpredictable, and sometimes terrifying.

Disruption, change, and chaos are inevitable facts of economic life, but within them there is valuable information. The challenge is to look turbulence in the eye and turn it into a positive force. What is needed instead is to see in new ways, come up with new approaches, and veer off into different directions.

Operating in a time of rapid and seemingly relentless change, today's healthiest organizations have the ability to continuously renew themselves and thrive in a challenging environment.

They are the ones who know how to harness the turbulence all organizations, encounter and use it as a catalyst for creativity and innovation. They are the organizations that will succeed in the long term.

When employees work in a creative environment, they are free to puzzle over new information and creative ideas and implement successful and innovative solutions, plans and projects.

Given the fast-changing world we live in today, companies need precisely this kind of supportive climate to adapt and thrive in the long term. The age of the knowledge worker has arrived.

This is a time when managers must lead, workers must innovate and organizations must grow organically. Not since the birth of the industrial age have the foundations of our management practices been so challenged and the opportunities so great.

The signs of the shifting bedrock of our economic structure appear in the daily challenges faced as we re-design, re-tool and re-invent ourselves to keep up with uncertain realities.

Over the past fifteen years, we have come to understand that there are three conceptual challenges of change. These challenges may manifest themselves under different names or other guises but are essentially the challenges of:

Leadership - changing the running of an organization from a command and control nature of management to the nurturing and motivational nature of leadership.

* Focus - making business choices to bring alignment and focus to the organization.

* Commitment - creating commitment to the future of the enterprise throughout the organization.

Each of these challenges is unique, yet they are simultaneously independent and interrelated. Overcoming any one independently is insufficient for realizing sustainable change.

For change to be successful in the knowledge economy, an organization has to overcome all three challenges. Traditional management practices have been built on the premise of a command and control structure with maximum utilization of capacity and capital as its goal.

However, the future growth of our economy is in the knowledge sector (technology, health care, entertainment, telecommunications and most other growing sectors).

In these sectors, the traditional management skills of controlling and directing workers run counter to the need for creativity and innovation. Today's knowledge workers do not want to be managed; they want to be led; they want to be trusted.

They need to be empowered with the right information to make sound decisions, to grow the business and to be part of a community that is contributing to something worthy of their time and energy.

In the context of the new economy, senior managers are still responsible for protecting, growing and ultimately leveraging the assets of the firm. However, the critical corporate assets are now in the minds of the people who work in the firm. New tactics for success are required.

Rather than control the activity of the enterprise, managers have, as their prime responsibility, the creation and nurturing of an environment that leverages the talent of its people by engaging them in the innovative and creative pursuit of clear and common goals.

We are in a world of ideas where the employee, asked to participate in a monotonous routine will contribute little, while the same employee engaged in creating the future will produce well beyond the expectations of management and significantly contribute to the creation of wealth.

FOCUS: The economic environment is one of constant and accelerating change. At the very heart of this new reality are rapid and ongoing changes in customer needs. These changes, although difficult to anticipate, generate new and exciting opportunities.

Consequently, our current reality is one of abundance, where the question is no longer where to find opportunities but rather how to select which opportunities to pursue. Today's leaders must rely less on the ability to identify new opportunities and more on the discipline to focus on the right opportunities.

This new reality has a significant impact on the cohesiveness of senior management teams. Without a consistent focus, it becomes incumbent on each member to interpret the environment and to make decisions on which opportunities to explore from his or her own perspective.

The likely result is a collection of highly skilled individuals, working extremely hard, and pulling the organization in a number of uncoordinated directions.

Senior people hold many strong opinions based on their own implicit understanding of the business, the environment, their beliefs and expectations. All of these ideas are expressed through the actions that they take.

For example, two managers working in the same organization may interpret a business trend towards a new technology very differently. The first may believe the new technology is first generation and is technically superior but that the current supplier is not going to last because of their small market share.

The second manager may believe that the superiority of the technology is sufficiently worthwhile to invest in. The same business trend, two different opinions and two very different responses. The result is different, incompatible technologies running separately in the same organization.

The process of building common understanding across the senior management team can be accomplished collaboratively by building simple, comprehensive models of the business, a process referred to as Collaborative Model-Based Planning.

These models reflect the essence of a business with direct illustrations of customers, their needs, the products and services that meet the needs, the forces impacting the enterprise and other very relevant information. These models allow you to compare competing opportunities and to identify new relationships amongst the various parts of a firm.

As the team works together in developing a common understanding and interpretation of these key elements and their impacts on the focus, direction and ambitions of the business, the individual members are freed to evaluate and identify strategic opportunities. This will ultimately lead to independent action that is aligned with and moves the organization towards the future.

COMMITMENT: Looking honestly and critically at your business and making choices about the direction to take are difficult tasks. However, they pale in comparison to the challenge of creating a genuine commitment across your knowledge work force to actively pursue the future in a meaningful and ambitious way.

The challenge of building organization-wide commitment to change is the third challenge faced by today's leaders. Today, leaders must entice and engage the members of their organizations through healthy debate to participate in creating their joint future. Merely putting a kinder, gentler facade on order giving will result in disengagement, low productivity, if not the departure of key performers.

As a leader builds understanding and generates commitment, the intense resistance to change, born out of fear of the unknown, is abandoned and replaced by the courage to take new directions and to actively pursue change.

Today's businesses are faced with new challenges as they continually try to position themselves for the future. This experience is like hitting a moving target with the added discomfort of seeing old ways fail time and again.

What is required is a new set of rules. If we really want a competitive advantage, make sure our organization can successfully respond to accelerating change. Survivors will have the ability to react, constantly improve, and continuously implement change. In the past, the "technology of organization" was used to resist change.

Now we must use the same and new technologies to do the opposite. You may only have one try at implementing a change. If you succeed and your competitor doesn't, he will be out of business. But it won't happen just once. You'll be challenged to implement change continuously.

The world has changed dramatically, and somehow business must figure out how to survive in the new political and economic realities. So while your competition depletes its resources and morale by bouncing between gurus and sampling every new fad and fashion, it would be more prudent for businesses to devote their organization's energy towards learning how to change.

Out-distance your competition by improving your firm's ability to implement change. The best place to start is to assess your organization's present capacity to change.

An accurate, objective measure can help you improve your organization's ability to change, pinpoint areas for improvement and quickly raise your employees' consciousness regarding the need to be able to change.

Then, when you decide what changes you want in order to survive the "chaos", you'll be able to implement those changes successfully. Inertia is common in organizations.

But today an overly-conservative attitude can kill a company. Frequently, low trust of management, previous failures at implementing change, and personal fear make employees unwilling to take the risk associated with any change.

Experience shows that many executives aren't aware of these feelings in their staff. Unless your organization's willingness to change is measured, you and your management team may remain oblivious to this potential impediment to organizational change and improvement.

The ability to implement change is determined by your formal organization, its structure, systems and procedures, and the skills of your employees, especially your management.

Since implementing change is a new focus for most organizations, these change requirements are often absent or underdeveloped. Only by pinpointing them can you develop or improve them, and increase your organization's ability to survive.