Resistance to change can doom large-scale organizational transformation. One way to help make success more likely is through a series of smaller moves, smartly made—following Pragmatic Pathways to fundamental, long-term change.
In today’s business environment, there is enormous pressure on executives to continually “right the ship.” But with pressure for short-term performance, lack of consensus from leadership, and institutional inertia working against them, this task is harder than ever.
Pragmatic Pathways are a set of practical change methodologies to help leaders radically transform their organizations though a series of small moves, smartly made. They are designed to maximize impact while minimizing investment and risk.
They will help answer questions throughout the organization such as how to:
o Promote large scale, disruptive technology change within your organization to position it for the fundamental shifts in the economy. Find out how your organization can shape your entire industry to your advantage.
o Find and help support those within your organization that are passionate about changing the status quo.
o Implement new, disruptive technologies (Cloud, social, big data, mobility) quickly and effectively to maximize returns.
o Leverage disruptive technologies like social media to access information and insights both within your firm as well as from those outside your firm in your broader market ecosystem.
Here is an excerpt from a report co-authored by John Hagel II, John Seely Brown, Christopher Gong, Stacey Wang, and Travis Lehman for The Deloitte Center for the Edge, sponsored by Deloitte University Press.
Image Credit: Jessica McCourt
To read and/or download the complete report, please click here.
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For executives, it is the best of times and it is the worst of times. In the past few decades, we have seen an unparalleled and exponential rate of technological progress that has created opportunities to run businesses better, faster, and more cost effectively. However, the increasing pace of progress has also led to unprecedented levels of disruption and uncertainty. Squeezed between increasingly powerful consumers and employees, companies face all-time high levels of competitive pressure. In the Deloitte Center for the Edge’s annual Shift Index report, we show that since 1965, return on assets across all publicly held US companies has declined by 75 percent, indicating these pressures are not part of a short-term recession, but are permanent fixtures in the business landscape.
Faced with these pressures, investors, stakeholders, and executives all agree that something needs to be done. However, from our experience, there is rarely alignment on what to do or how to do it. When confronted with the imperative for change in times of uncertainty, many companies fall victim to either the paralysis of short-term, incremental improvements or the hubris of risky, bet-the-farm strategies that have no guarantees of success. To make matters worse, companies struggling most face what we call the Change Paradox: The companies in most dire circumstances often have the fewest resources to make requisite changes.
This paper seeks to show how organizations can achieve large-scale transformations in a series of smaller, pragmatic steps. Through new technologies, practices, and other parties in their business ecosystem, organizations can make success more likely by decreasing initial investments and increasing their initiatives’ velocity. We propose that through small moves smartly made, organizations can address their short-term tactical needs as well as create the fundamental, long-term changes needed to survive in a world of constant disruption. We call this new change methodology “Pragmatic Pathways,” and have defined three separate approaches that can be deployed depending on circumstances and organizational cultures:
o Metrics that matter is a pathway to focus deployment of a disruptive tool or practice in order to trigger cascades of adoption and rapid performance improvement.
o Scaling edges is a pathway to transform the core of the business by focusing on low-investment, high-growth-potential opportunities—“edges”—with fundamentally different business practices.
o Shaping strategies is a pathway to restructure markets and industries using platforms to bring people together and mobilize large ecosystems with positive incentives by creating a compelling view of the future.
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To read and/or download the complete report, please click here.