wiens

International Association of Facilitators
1999 Annual Meeting
Williamsburg, Virginia, USA

January 14-17, 1999

Thread #2: Group Planning

Facilitating Business Renewal

Ron Wiens
HST Group
2 Beaverbrook Road
Kanata, ON, K1K 1L1 Canada
wiens@calian.ca

Business renewal involves changing or renewing the fundamentals of the organisation, redefining its purpose, focusing its products/services, and reshaping its delivery structure. In short, business renewal as discussed in this session, relates to helping the organisation find a visible and meaningful reason to exist. Using a case study, based on the presenter’s experience in using a small team of facilitators to drive organisational renewal, the principles of designing and implementing a facilitative based organisational change process will be shared with the session participants.

This session will explore the challenges of change that a facilitator has to address. These challenges include:

Helping the organisation through the sea of opportunities that surround it to find those particular opportunities that will take it towards its future;
Aligning divergent, implicit beliefs and understandings into an explicit picture of common understanding that enables the organisation’s management and staff to follow a common path to its desired future;
Building a deeply held belief in the desired future so that change becomes an adventure rather than a nightmare.

Meeting The Challenges

The process presented for meeting these challenges was based on the fundamental belief that the most valuable knowledge about the organisation lies in the minds of the people within the organisation. Thus the job of the facilitator was not to supply answers but rather, through a specific series of facilitative workshops and interventions, to take the organisation on a journey of discovery that allowed the organisation to find the answers that were right for it.

The first step in the renewal process started by making explicit all the implicit understanding and beliefs within the organisation. Once explicit, this knowledge was organized for understanding by those participating in the journey of discovery. As more of the organisation’s knowledge was structured, it in turn drew out more implicit knowledge relating to the organisation’s clients, their needs, the product and services for meeting those needs, the forces and trends at play, the functions and major processes required to deliver, the priorities for change, and so on. Two things happened as the members of the organisation interacted with this previously hidden knowledge; the individuals grew and changed; and the individual springboards for change became aligned as the attitudes, understanding, and priorities of the individuals became aligned. Real change, large step change, now became possible. The structuring of implicit corporate knowledge not only allowed people to see and understand their current reality, it also enabled them to see the future. With the two pictures clearly defined in the organisation’s mind the actions required to close the gap between the two perspectives, and achieve the desired future, revealed themselves.

The Three Phases of Change

Drawing upon the session leader’s experiences with facilitating organisational renewal, a three phase approach to business renewal was be presented as follows:

Phase 1 - Making it Up

This phase involves the entire organisation but is driven by senior management. It involves the delineation of the Desired Future, the creation of a plan to get there as well as the growth and transformation of the senior management group into a real team that has a collective commitment to its future.

Phase 2 - Making it Possible

This phase involves the entire organisation but is driven by middle and line management. It involves creating the environment that the organisation requires in order to achieve its Desired Future. This is where new organisational structures and processes are implemented.

Phase 3 - Making it Real

This phase involves the entire organisation but is driven by staff. This is where the real benefits of the renewal process are realized. Typically these benefits can consist of ongoing process improvement, continuous learning, closeness to the client, etc.

The case study made clear the facilitator’s role as the agent of change in each of these phases, however, particular attention was paid to Phase 1 - Making It Up as this is where the facilitator can make her or his greatest contribution to the change process.

In its most simple form, the first phase (Making It Up) of focusing and revitalizing an organisation’s future has six steps, encased in an overall Communications Program, as follows.

Engaging the Staff
Building the Senior Management Team
Building a Common Understanding
Bringing the Client Inside
Choosing the Future
Defining the Strategies to Achieve the Future

The above steps delivered a shared vision/plan for the future that weaved together both the structural and behavioral aspects of change. The purpose of this program was to deliver not only the plan for change, but also to create a Senior Management Team (SMT) with the will to work together to achieve their shared vision. The diagram below illustrates the inter-relationship between the six steps and the organisation’s client and staff perspectives that were collected and considered in the process.

The journey of discovery started with the SMT but involved the whole organisation. It started with the SMT not only because this team had responsibility for articulating the future but because this team needed to visibly transform itself in order to give credibility to the change process. The first step to the organisation as a whole having a deeply held belief in the future, was for its members to see that belief within the SMT.

Communication Program

It was critical to bring the voice and spirit of the staff and clients into the planning process. Not only did this build a better vision and plan of action, but it built the trust and commitment, as well as the willingness to allow the time required for the transformation. The Communication Program designed a process that facilitated the development of an open two-way communication style within and among the SMT, line management, and staff. The Communication Program itself was not carried out as a discreet step, but was interwoven throughout the whole planning process. The facilitator’s role was to structure and coordinate the various communication exercises, which was then carried out by the SMT.

As part of each major step, the SMT members met with direct reports and selected staff to obtain relevant input to the step. After each step the SMT reported the results of the step back to line management and staff. The exact form of the interaction with line management and staff was designed to be appropriate to the culture of the organisation and the nature of activity. Input activities were in the form of working sessions with groups or individuals, while reporting sessions were in the form of town hall meetings or group reviews. The facilitator supported the SMT in this effort by providing the design and preparation for the sessions and coaching of the SMT members.

Step 1: Engaging the Staff

Responsibility for defining the future and driving change rested with senior management. Responsibility for realizing change rested with the staff. To succeed in this change, the staff needed to support the initiative. Support came from involvement. This step was designed to engage the staff, to invite their involvement and to encourage them to participate in defining the organisation’s Future Path.

In this step, the staff were asked to provide two key types of information. Through a group exploration process, the staff made explicit their interpretations of the past and of the current situation. This process allowed the staff the opportunity to release their association with the past. It allowed them to be heard and to express their well grounded opinions. This process of exploring released the weight of issues that the staff had been carrying and freed up their minds to embrace a new perspective.

The second type of key information concerned the future. In this part of the step, the staff were invited to vision the future of their organisation. Using a structured group process, the staff had the opportunity to express their aspirations for their organisation and for themselves. They articulated ideas and strategies for the future and shared in the creation of expectations. The results of this session fueled the process in which the SMT searched for, and chose, their organisation’s Future Path.

In addition, this step also identified immediate "change" actions that not only resulted in improvement to the organisation’s current situation, but also removed hurdles to achieving the organisation’s Desired Future. These change actions, in turn, provided the SMT with a vehicle to demonstrate their commitment to change. It was this "early visibility" of the SMT commitment that initiated the transformation process.

Step 2: Building the Senior Management Team

For the team to achieve high performance, three questions had to be clearly answered:

What is the purpose of the team?
How are the team members going to work together?
What are the team’s immediate performance goals?

This step involved interviews with each member of the SMT plus a number of their direct reports. The information gathered in the interviews was used to design a process which started the building of a high performance, cohesive management team. The purpose of this process was to bring the SMT together to start fresh and articulate its reason for existing as a team, develop formal social processes (i.e. decision making, conflict resolution, etc.), and identify immediate team performance goals to guide it in the further development of the group as a high performance, highly motivated team. By making the team processes and work approach explicit, the organisation established the basis for creating a well-functioning and effective SMT that made better decisions, provided better direction and increased individual performance.

Step 3: Building a Common Understanding

Having a common understanding of the current business was critical to achieving orderly rationalization of the functions performed by the business and to identify opportunities for improvement. In this step, the implicit beliefs and understanding of the SMT and their staff were extracted and made explicit. This explicit knowledge was used as the basis for developing a common set of planning models around which to manage future changes in business focus, products and services, processes and systems. The three models, which provided the framework for further prioritization and linking of change initiatives, were: 1. Market Model - identified the clients and their needs

2. Enterprise Model - identified products/services provided to fill these needs, and

3. Functional Model - identified the functions required to plan for, produce, deliver and support the services

The models were verified by the SMT in a workshop setting. On the basis of the validated models, the workshop then explored in detail the strengths and weaknesses of the products/services provided to clients, as well as the internal functionality required to deliver and support the organisation in the delivery of these products/services. Now, equipped with a common understanding, the SMT produced a picture of their organisation’s future both in terms of the products/services it provided and the internal functionality that was required to support the products/services. The process allowed much of the preliminary work to be completed in the background with validation from the SMT. This approach ensured that high quality information was gathered, while maximizing the effectiveness of the SMT’s time.

Step 4: Bringing the Client Inside

In this step, based on the common understanding achieved by the models, the SMT, in cooperation with selected clients, validated the information in a joint SMT/Client Workshop. Bringing the Clients’ perspective into the heart of the organisation provided the basis for the development of a "client driven" organisation. In the workshop, the client participants:

identified trends that were affecting their operations and the implications in terms of the future services that they may and may not need;
reviewed the strengths and weaknesses of the organisation’s products/services in light of their future needs; and,
helped the SMT identify their key business drivers.

The results of this workshop were the basis for the visioning exercise.

Step 5: Choosing the Future

Based on the work that had been completed to-date, the SMT was able to chart a direction for the future of the organisation. This involved defining a common vision, mission and values, as well as identifying the opportunities for change that would achieve an organisation that was structured for client-driven delivery.

In preparation for the visioning process, the SMT conducted structured discussion sessions with the Department’s staff. These sessions started to consolidate the information provided by staff in Step 1 (Engaging the Staff). The Visioning process drew upon all of the information gathered to date, the staff and client input, and the planning models. The SMT used this information to build a variety of future scenarios that could be collapsed into a specific and explicit picture of the organisation’s Desired Future.

Based on this explicit picture of the future, the SMT identified which services would be introduced, which services would grow, which would remain as is, and which would be reduced or be eliminated. The shared vision was also used to target which of the supporting functions (internal services) would be the focus of investment for improvement.

In the past, organisational structure had been used almost exclusively for monitoring and control. In today’s environment, it is becoming a requirement to have a structure that leverages the organisation’s ability to change and improved. Armed with a common understanding of their desired future the SMT, in the second part of this step, examine the organisation’s structure in order to ensure that it was aligned with, and supported, that future. As well the SMT identified a set of metrics that enabled the team to measure the success of the organisation’s movement towards its Desired Future.

Step 6: Strategies for Achieving the Future

A critical element for success was getting the organisation, the SMT and staff, to understand and commit to a specific action plan for the realization of its desired future. For action to be effective, it has to be focused. The first five steps of Phase I identified more opportunities for change than the organisation has the resources or energy to carry out. This was where the SMT made the hard decisions and selected those specific projects and improvement opportunities in which it would invest in order to achieve its desired future.
In this step, the SMT worked with their direct reports, identified and committed to the specific suite of projects that they felt were critical to their organisation’s renewal. As well, for each of these projects they defined:

specific project objectives,
timelines,
project owners, and
project managers.

Using this new shared understanding of the steps to their Desired Future, the SMT also created the process/mechanism that was used for monitoring the implementation of the change initiatives.

The change initiatives had both an operational and people perspective. The operational side involved projects focused on structural and business process change. The people side involved the development and execution of a variety of initiatives aimed at institutionalizing the value, attitudes and behaviors that would help the organisation achieve its Desired Future.

Summary

The workshops embedded in the steps outlined above were designed to involve both the left and right side of the brain. The initial series of workshops focused primarily on the left brain exercises. This is where the analytical side of the organisation’s collective brain lays down a foundation of understanding. The middle set of workshops coupled this understanding with a set of right brain exercises to allow the organisation to have the "eureka" type breakthrough that comes from looking at the whole. Because these breakthroughs are intuitive (right brain solutions) they are not usually embraced by the organisation or at least not by the typical North American organisation. These insights were like having a math text with the answers at the back. The answers provided the clues required to solve the problem. Thus the final series of workshops reverted back to left brain exercises that allowed the organisation to provide the analytical basis required for it to embrace the insights revealed by its collective right brain.

Biography

Ron Wiens, Business Transformation Consultant

Mr. Wiens, a senior partner with HST, has been responsible for the creation and evolution of HST’s Organisational Transformation Program. He has served as a senior management consultant to private industry, governments, and post secondary institutions. He is co-author of ATLAS, HST’s Business Transformation Toolkit, which utilises a highly facilitative process for business renewal. Specifically, Ron has been involved over the last decade in organisational transformation and transition planning with a number of private and public sector organisations in Canada, U.S. and Mexico. In his role as Business Transformation Consultant, Ron has been responsible for the design and facilitation of change programs for small, mid-size, and large organisations. As well, Ron consults to Senior Executives, coaching them in the personal transformation that they seek in order to support and lead their organisation’s transformation.

HST is a Business Transformation Consulting Practice. We do not offer facilitators. Pure facilitation is not our business. However, our greatest competitive advantage is that all of our services are delivered in a facilitative way using a workshop forum. In order for us to successfully accomplish our business transformation, we must possess a world class facilitation capability within each member of our professional staff and in the organisation.

This required the training of all consultants in facilitation skills; the development of rich methodologies for the design and delivery of successful workshops; the construction of an electronic repository of facilitation tools and techniques; formal performance evaluation of each consultant’s ability as a facilitator; and, the adaptation of all of our business transformation methods from a business analysis to a participative workshop approach.

Over the last 10 years we have painstakingly developed a solid, effective and efficient competency in facilitation. Over that time we have tried many different approaches, had many failures and successes. Above all, we have learned! Our facilitation capability is our greatest competitive advantage and the largest source of our client satisfaction.