Organisational Prompts
The start of a series on organisational transformation and the ideas that shape how we 'practice' transformation.
If you lead change, or think you’re leading change, in large organisations, you’re drowning in frameworks. LinkedIn posts, Substack newsletters, Medium articles, TikTok explainers, ArXiv papers, the volume of new thinking on transformation is relentless. I’ve consumed a lot of it. Some has been genuinely useful. Much of it has not.
After years of scaling ideas inside complex organisations, sometimes successfully, often not, I’ve found myself returning to a smaller set of foundational thinkers. Not because they’re fashionable, but because their models actually work when you’re in the arena.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe: All organisational change starts with an idea and a few intrepid souls willing to champion it. Leading change in an organisation requires you to answer 4 key questions:
How does my organisation learn - how can I improve it and how I learn myself?
How clear are we (all) on what to do?
How should we build?
How do I lead - and what does this actually mean - as we learn and build?
This the start of a series exploring the thinkers I consider essential to answering these questions and working up to the release, in parts, of a new change leadership model based on real hard won experience - The IOTA change practice model.
Organisational Prompts: In each post I will end with what I call an organisational prompt; a question or action you can take to apply to your transformation or change initiative that uses the ideas introduced in the article. You can think of these as ‘Gestures’ in the sense that Ralph Stacey thinks of them; strategic nudges that sense the environment and provide lessons in how to proceed.
If you’re someone who shapes, guides, stewards how organisations operate and are interested in the practice of change itself, I hope you’ll find this useful.