Those who know me know that I am obsessed with experimenting with new digital collaboration platforms and technologies. These days I’m especially intrigued with those that can help build trust, reduce loneliness and strengthen social connectivity; and, in so doing improve employee engagement, cross-functional collaboration, and organizational culture health. These topics are on everyone’s minds as companies envision much more remote or hybrid remote work becoming much more permanent due to the pandemic. 
Last December I had the honor of participating in an immersive gathering of organizational culture trailblazers organized by Share Ventures, (an LA based venture studio committed to reimagining start-up building) and Instill (a start-up building solutions for a new software category, ‘Culture Management as a Service'). The objective of the conference was to bring together people from sports, the military, business, academia, and the venture capital worlds that are committed to building positive organizational cultures. The panel of speakers and their innovative approach to virtual conference participant engagement was inspirational.  The conference introduced me to two innovative solutions that I believe could be very useful for building trust and  improving employee experience. For more details on this article, which is on LinkedIn  Click Here.

There’s been lots of talk recently, by pundits and thought-leaders about business transformational change being very different than more traditional types of change. After nearly three years as a business transformation orchestrator, I concur with Michael Wade, James Macauley, Andy Noronha and Joel Barbier and said in their recent book, Orchestrating Transformation: How to Deliver Winning
Performance with a Connected Approach to Change, “the current environment and organization are too complex and fast moving” for traditional change management approaches to work. My experience is that what does work and takes a PMO to a higher plane is proactive orchestration supported by a visible orchestrator role. This makes transformation stickier and builds far more adaptive teams able to more easily 'bob and weave' in response to disruptive change in markets or with competitors.

Excited to share that my colleague (Dr. Dana De Nault  Psy. D) and I will be heading to Whistler, British Columbia to lead a Master Class at the Association of Strategic Planning’s (ASP) annual conference in May 2020. This year’s ASP conference theme is Strategy & Technology: Harnessing disruption, transformation and innovation.
 
Entitled “A New Leadership Mindset for Orchestrating Transformational Strategy and Culture Change” during our class we will be sharing recent successes, AH-HA moments and of course our biggest mistake, in helping orchestrate transformational change in high tech and big-pharma over the last few years.  Using hands-on tools and exercises, our hope is that participants will:

• Gain some practical and strategic insight into five key symphonies that we think are needed for orchestrating sticky, meaningful and sustainable transformational strategy change
• Get introduced to a new dynamic leadership mindset combined with a real-time agile orchestration process to manage strategy performance in complex environments
• Share when, where and how technology-enabled collective intelligence systems can be best used to create a truly agile and adaptive organization.

Click here, to check out the conference, here to learn more details about our class and here for a sneak preview of our key lessons learned.

It’s notoriously hard to drive change in large companies. Being at the top of the heap with steady earnings doesn’t sound like a burning platform for change. However, with the ever-accelerating speed of emergent forces in competitive markets, a company’s position can change seemingly overnight.
 
Under these circumstances, ambivalence towards change is easy to understand. However, whether it is leadership’s desire to be first in the market with an industry-leading solution or to respond quickly to competitive forces, in a fast-paced environment, the critical decisions about what has to change are not always self-evident. One thing we did learn in the heart of the storm was that latching on to an event or time when people expect change makes it easier to initiate a bit more. That was an unexpected lesson.  We’ve learned bigger lessons that we’re sharing here:

1. Establish Guiding Principles to keep teams anchored to company values during change.
2. An agile decision-making process, supported by real-time, actionable intelligence reduces strategic risk. 
3. Cross-functional teams that are empowered and self-sustaining strengthens accountability. 
4. 2.Attentive Leadership©, practices improve key skills needed for delivering the needed leadership responsiveness.
5. Bringing people closer to transformational change with a clear voice, emotionally connects all stakeholders.​

What we learned was our elephant-sized clients turn best through small steps. What started as a push strategy became a pull. Now, we’re taking this new way of working to other parts of the company. The big picture remains the same. The market moves fast and companies, large and small, must be agile and adaptable to compete. But, when a big company decides to move in the same direction through small transformational steps, its velocity can outpace the market. 
For a more detailed version check out our article on LinkedIN.

The silence, when I concluded my presentation was deafening! Clearly to both me and all involved, the ball had not been hit out of the park. In fact, it had barely made its way out of the infield! Not that anyone ever had the expectation that a metrics review meeting would ever be a best seller, but I’d really hoped that this time, things would be different. Let me explain.......