The Loop Approach E-Book

Sebastian Klein

• Herausgeber: Campus Verlag
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 222

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

How best to adapt established companies to a rapidly changing economy has long been a topic of debate in both the corporate and academic worlds. This challenge is especially pressing for large organizations that may have grown top-heavy and rigid with time but now need to be light on their feet to stay relevant and profitable. Until now, the best attempts have consisted of plucking tools and methods from the world of start-ups and applying them wholesale in large corporate environments. Most of these efforts have either fizzled or failed outright because they lacked a framework for a comprehensive corporation-sized rollout. »The Loop Approach« introduces a new series of methods that could help change the course of operations for even the most colossal organizations. Sebastian Klein and Ben Hughes provide a wide-ranging set of guidelines for achieving corporate agility, complete with checklists and worksheets that should prove instantly applicable. Want proof? The methods outlined in »The Loop Approach« have already been successfully implemented at such European corporate giants as Audi, Deutsche Bahn, and Telekom.

Leseprobe

Sebastian Klein, Ben Hughes

The Loop Approach

Campus Verlag

Frankfurt/New York

About the book

How best to adapt established companies to a rapidly changing economy has long been a topic of debate in both the corporate and academic worlds. This challenge is especially pressing for large organizations that may have grown top-heavy and rigid with time but now need to be light on their feet to stay relevant and profitable.Until now, the best attempts have consisted of plucking tools and methods from the world of start-ups and applying them wholesale in large corporate environments. Most of these efforts have either fizzled or failed outright because they lacked a framework for a comprehensive corporation-sized rollout.»The Loop Approach« introduces a new series of methods that could help change the course of operations for even the most colossal organizations. Sebastian Klein and Ben Hughes provide a wide-ranging set of guidelines for achieving corporate agility, complete with checklists and worksheets that should prove instantly applicable. Want proof? The methods outlined in »The Loop Approach« have already been successfully implemented at such European corporate giants as Audi, Deutsche Bahn, and Telekom.

Übersicht

Cover

Title

About the book

Content

Copyright notice

Content

Part 1

Launch

Check-in

Let’s start with a check-in.

A new mindset

The upshot?

Failures and success stories

Into uncharted waters

Why this book?

Before we start

The Pyramid

Tankers cannot navigate these stormy times

Employees want responsibility

Employees want something bigger

What’s new

What’s missing

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution

The Loop Mindset

Our Sources

Holacracy

Getting Things Done

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Nonviolent communication

Design Thinking

Agile methods (such as Scrum)

Systemic Organizational Development

Mindfulness practices

Positive Psychology

Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory

The Loop Mindset

Autonomy and Self-organization

Purpose-orientation

Self-responsibility

Solution-orientation

Thinking win-win

Transparency and open communication

Thinking in continuous iterations

Role vs. soul

Ego to Self

Tension-based work

Distributed leadership

Focusing on teams

Part 2

The Loop Approach

The 7 Habits

Clarity, Results, Evolution

Clarity

Clear alignment: Why does this team exist, what is it needed for?

WORKING WITH TENSIONS

ALWAYS START WITH WHY

FROM WHY TO HOW TO WHAT

THE PURPOSE PLAYOFFS

1 The Stakeholder Map

2 Value Clusters

3 Integration Playoffs

Fully-used potential: Which skills and strengths do team members bring to the table?

MY PERSONAL PROFILE

1 Collecting your own strengths

2 How your colleagues see you

3 Filling the profiles

Distributed authority: Working with roles and accountabilities

DEVELOPING A FIRST ROLE STRUCTURE

1 Write down all relevant tasks performed

2 Defining roles and their purpose

3 Understanding the status quo in roles

4 Making roles explicit

5 The evolution of the role structure

Lead role

Coach role

Transparency role

Facilitator role

Loop Ninja

Results

Personal Effectiveness: How can each of us be effective in our roles?

GETTING THINGS DONE

AN INBOX FOR EVERYTHING

Team effectiveness: How can we be effective as a team?

WHERE TENSIONS BELONG: THE FOUR SPACES

EXERCISE: SORTING TENSIONS

AN ENLIGHTENED APPROACH TO DEALING WITH TENSIONS: “WHAT DO YOU NEED?”

WORKING IN THE OPERATIONAL SPACE: SYNC MEETINGS

MAKING DECISIONS IN A TEAM

Evolution

High adaptability: How will we change the team’s structure?

WORKING IN THE GOVERNANCE SPACE: THE GOVERNANCE MEETING

FILLING ROLES IN A GOVERNANCE MEETING

Conflict & feedback competence: How can we give each other powerful feedback and resolve conflicts?

NONVIOLENT COMMUNICATION

THE FOUR ELEMENTS OF EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION

OBSERVATIONS VS. INTERPRETATIONS

FEELINGS VS. MASKED JUDGMENTS

NEEDS VS. STRATEGIES

REQUEST VS. DEMAND

GIVING POWERFUL FEEDBACK

SITUATIONAL FEEDBACK: SPEEDDATING

BUILDING A FEEDBACK ROUTINE

SOLVING CONFLICT CONSTRUCTIVELY: THE CLEAR THE AIR-MEETING

ITERATING ON THE MEETING ROUTINES

The Broader Transformation Architecture – Success Factors

The leaders show the way

Creating islands of success within the organization

Communicating clear reasons for the transformation

Welcoming all leaders aboard

Accept that not everyone will join the journey

Find and support strong internal change agents

Communicate continuously

Don’t expect miracles

Focus on pioneers and internal multiplicators

The team makes all the difference

Going beyond change management

SCOUTING AND PREPARATION

STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT

THE LOOPS

MODULE 0

Taking stock of the status quo

What’s our target here?

TRAININGS AND DEEP-DIVE MODULES

Facilitator trainings

Deep-dive module on personal effectiveness

Deep-dive module on nonviolent communication

Deep-dive module on mindfulness

THE LEADERSHIP LOOP

Lead role

Processes

Coaching

CONTENT AND COMMUNICATION

THE OPERATING SYSTEM

Part 3

Arrival

Check out

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Reading list

New Work Glossary

Part 1

Launch

Check-in

Let’s start with a check-in.

Whenever we want to do something well, we always start our work with a check-in. Checking in is the simple act of stepping back, taking a deep breath, and affirming to others that we’re really there, present in the moment. Making time for this short break helps us understand our own intentions and communicate them to others, thereby getting everyone on the same page. If someone’s mind is still dwelling on last night’s Margarita Monday or on their life crisis, they shed such preoccupations here.

Typically, a check-in takes the form of two simple questions, which everyone present answers in turn. So to get you started on your journey of working through this book together with us, please answer the following questions.

What’s on your mind?

What has your attention right now?

Take as much time as you need.

Just like you, we find ourselves taking part in a major transformation that’s gripping the world right now. A transformation that’s fundamentally changing the way people work together in organizations. The rigid hierarchies of old are being replaced by new, more flexible organizational models, and this will be arguably the greatest organizational upheaval since the Industrial Revolution.

And as with most revolutions, there’s just no ignoring this one. New organizational models will become the status quo, and traditional hierarchies will fall along the wayside of history, like steam engines and fax machines before them. We can’t imagine going back to a world without electricity, airplanes or the internet, and soon, the same will be true of these new organizational models.

But why is this revolution happening? If you’ve ever worked in a corporation that’s organized as a traditional hierarchy, you probably also recognize and appreciate that change is sorely needed. Until recently, it was commonly accepted that if you wanted to get any larger group of people to work together, the pyramid1 model was the only way to go. But today, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the era of the pyramid is over. And while there are many reasons for this, we want to highlight three:

First, people find it very demotivating to work in a rigid hierarchy, where they’re just expected to do as they’re told. Young, well-educated professionals entering the workforce today are no longer willing to sacrifice years of their career to just following orders from pointy-haired bosses. After all, they can afford to be picky: the market for good talent is competitive, meaning employees are no longer desperate to cling on to whatever stable job they can. The most sought-after professionals demand much more than a steady paycheck: they want meaning, flexibility, and to be trusted with the authority to make decisions that actually impact the organization.

Second, the rigid, hierarchical pyramids of the past are just too slow and cumbersome to succeed in competition with young, agile upstarts. Without the burden of a pyramid on their shoulders, the newcomers are much faster at adapting to their changing environment. As a result, they are inventing and reinventing businesses faster than the old guard can even fathom, let alone compete with. If established corporations used to laugh off small startups operating from garages somewhere, their smirks have since been thoroughly wiped off their faces. As companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google have proved, any scrappy newcomer could skyrocket to the top of the Fortune 500 list in under a decade, leaving former industry leaders in the dust. The age of the dinosaurs is over—the mammals are here, baby!

Third, if we take a big picture view, we rapidly see that our world desperately needs new kinds of organizations. From accelerating climate change to increasing inequality, we believe that many of humanity’s biggest challenges today stem from our sadly out-of-date organizational model. Countless organizations emerging today have already adopted the greater purpose of changing the world for the better, and they only continue to evolve around this purpose2. Many such companies have already entered the spotlight via Frederic Laloux’s book Reinventing Organizations. And in our own work, we see more new purpose-driven companies similar to Patagonia, Burtzoorg, and Zappos emerging every week. What’s more, we’re also excited to see many larger organizations—or at least parts of them—take on the challenge of reinventing themselves and boldly reorganizing how people work within them.

A new mindset

What we’re currently witnessing in the world around us is a great shift from one dominant type of organizational operating system3 to another. The old, hierarchical management pyramid, which for millenia seemed like the only viable option for running any larger organization, is finally being replaced by more network-like models. But this “update” isn’t going smoothly. Not at all. In fact, it’s generating lots of tension and friction.

On the one hand, we have a new generation of companies that’s instinctively embracing new way of doing things. They adopt ready-made solutions like Holacracy, or design their own, and just go with it. Meanwhile, most companies still run on the old operating system, and for them, updating to a new one is no easy task (yes, even worse than Windows 10). Though the software analogy can make it sound like companies just need to press a button to update and reboot, the truth is that it’s much more complicated and arduous. And the older and larger an organization, the harder and more painful the transformation will be.

So does this mean that all the old “tankers” weighed down by pyramids are doomed to rust in their old docks and sink? Or can they be refitted with the new operating system, making them agile and nimble skiffs once again? These aren’t easy questions to answer. But one thing we know for sure: it’s not enough to just put a fresh coat of paint on a rusted structure. What’s needed is a fundamental shift of mindset within the organization.

The classical management hierarchy operated under a mindset of “predict and control,” with those at the top of the pyramid making plans and commanding those below to execute. But today, this mindset is being unseated by one called “sense and respond.” Instead of a few clever brains deciding what should be done, the power to “sense” new information and make decisions as to how to respond is distributed throughout the organization. This means that every member of a company becomes an intelligent sensor, receiving and evaluating signals from the outside world and then responding to them autonomously, without asking their bosses for approval.

The upshot?

Rather than waiting around for information and decisions to percolate up and down a hierarchy, an organization can make thousands of smart decisions every hour. Even better, they are made by the true experts on the ground, not the suit bossing them around thanks to a degree in executive hand-shaking.

But how are these large organizations, which have basically ruled the world until now, supposed to “change their mindset”? With hundreds or even thousands of employees, what should they do and where should they start?

Failures and success stories

It’s no wonder that the prospect of this shift is already leading to great uncertainty or even panic within some organizations. And this isn’t helped by the constant articles, case-studies and keynote presentations recounting cautionary tales of transformations gone wrong. For instance, stories of some organizations trying to become more agile and self-organized but only ending up more chaotic as a result. Or how others got off to a promising start and scored some initial wins in the transformation, but then quickly ran into huge obstacles that no-one foresaw.

But these tales are only disheartening if viewed through a certain lens, namely the assumption that we ought already to know exactly what the organization of the future should look like. Putting aside this assumption, the stories become something else: chronicles of brave people venturing out into the great unknown. We cannot expect perfection from explorers setting sail on an uncharted ocean: under such wild uncertainty, just discovering the first few islands should be considered a major success. It’s easy to forget that even Columbus technically failed at what he set out to do: finding a shortcut to Asia.

One such success story, to our mind at least, is that of Zappos, the American online shoeretailer founded in 1999. In 2013, the company introduced Holacracy4 as its official operating system, and things started out swimmingly. Many people applauded as Zappos made the bold move to get rid of its managers.

But as is often the case with change, this initial success was followed by a swathe of new challenges. It rapidly became clear just how difficult it is to transform a 1,500-strong organization. The shift required everyone to throw many old behaviors overboard, and no-one likes doing that.

For Zappos, the process turned out to be time-consuming, non-linear and controversial. Many employees were unhappy about the move and left the company. Eventually, Zappos even had to step back from a comprehensive implementation of Holacracy. And now, over five years since the transformation started, it is still far from complete.

Into uncharted waters

Of course, the story of Zappos can easily be seen as a cautionary tale. If you wanted to, you could use it to bolster a case that any organizational operating system beyond the classical hierarchy simply won’t work in the real world. But to do so would be to take an overly simplistic view of how transformations in complex systems work.

That’s because complex systems can’t be transformed just by opening a can of ready-made solution and painting over the old one. The very notion that this is possible is a fallacy baked into the old predict-and-control mindset, which is obsessed with top-down solutions. But as we can see from the example of Zappos, a successful transformation requires a new mindset. And we believe this mindset is “sense and respond.”

Here, the transformation is a never-ending process, marked by learning along the way, casting old assumptions overboard and always looking for the sensible next step to take. Of course, this approach isn’t easy; it requires a lot of work and constant rethinking. But we’re convinced it’s worth it.

Our model, The Loop Approach, is intended to help you start such a transformation journey and navigate it safely. This book is by no means a one-size-fits-all blueprint for a successful transformation, but it will hopefully help you plan and guide one. It does so by providing a structure for something that we’ve found is intrinsically hard to plan, while still leaving room to maneuver around individual circumstances. It comprises a process, but still remains open and flexible enough to be adapted to each organization’s needs and constraints.

Why this book?

Over the past few years, we’ve spent a lot of time reading and thinking about the future of work and how to get there. We’ve tried various approaches ourselves and worked with many clients and partners trying to answer the question: How can we transform an existing system without breaking it?

The answer is that the process is invariably complex and non-linear, which makes it very challenging for most organizations operating under the old predict-and-control mindset to pursue. Meanwhile, consultants and coaches are excitedly screaming dozens of new buzzwords at them, adding to the sense of overwhelm and leaving these organizations wondering about things like: “What does agile have to do with self-organization? Do we all need to be ambidextrous now? Do our employees need to become design thinkers? When and where are new systems like Holacracy helpful, and where do they just complicate things?”

Over the course of this book, we’ll present our approach, which was developed to make transformations of all sizes manageable without stress-eating, hair-pulling, or fist-on-desk-pounding. We’ll teach you the tools and behaviors that can best support a transformation toward an evolutionary, agile organization. And if you’re skeptical about what exactly this transformation is supposed to look like, considering that it’s based on the rather vague demand to “adopt a new mindset,” fear not—we’ll show you that too.

Can’t we just decide on a name for next-level organizations already?

If you have any knowledge of the field of organizational development, you might already be wondering what we think the correct term for the organization of the future is. There are so many flying around already! Is it “teal”, as Frederic Laloux says in Reinventing Organizations? Is it “evolutionary,” as Aaron Dignan says in Brave New Work? Or maybe it’s “agile,” “self-organized,” “next-level” or “Alice in Wonderland”? Our advice: relax. The label isn’t the important part here, and in fact trying to pin down the “correct” one is pretty typical “predict-and-control” thinking. Our Loop Approach is all about the process, not the end result, because the result will be different for every transformation. So please feel free to call your organization whatever feels right. Call it fabulous for all we care! In this book, we’ll use changing labels, but as you’ll soon learn, for us they all mean pretty much the same thing.

In our experience, organizations spend far too much time trying to define the What (meaning the desired end result), when they should really be focusing on the How (the process of getting there). That’s why one of our main goals in this book is to give you a set of useful tools for mapping out the How.

Before we start

Everybody makes mistakes. But with this book, we want to give you the tools to hopefully avoid the mistakes that others (including ourselves) have already made. What’s more, we also want to encourage you to continue along this path you’ve chosen. The world needs brave pioneers like yourself, and organizations can only be transformed from within.

The Loop Approach has been developed to help you on this journey, whether you’re just getting started or alread knee-deep in a transformation. Armed with it, you’ll be better prepared to master the transformation process you’re about to embark on, or to regain a firmer grasp of the one you perhaps find yourself in the midst of. But whatever you do, please don’t consider this book complete. We certainly don’t, and we plan to continue developing these tools further. Take the parts that you find useful, adapt them as you see fit, and then implement them out there in the roiling seas of real organizations. Meanwhile, if something seems useless or doesn’t fit your organization, then please, go ahead and ignore it. And of course, if you feel something is missing or have any ideas for how we could make the Loop Approach even more useful for other pioneers, drop us a line! Just as we hope that you’ll benefit from our experiences, future readers might benefit from yours. By sharing and learning, we can all nudge this necessary revolution forward one step at a time.

Last but not least, we have one more question for you.Whenever we start working on something, we ask each other: what do you need? This helps us align on our expectations. What’s more, it also makes it easier to tell when we’re actually done with our work, because we’ll have defined what “done” means for each of us. Hence, we’d like to ask you: What do you need? What are the big questions you’re hoping to be able to answer by reading this book? What do you need to get out of it in order to say that choosing to read it was a worthwhile decision? Jot down your answers somewhere, perhaps in the margins of this page like some Renaissance genius, or in the box provided like a regular person. Then, when you get to the end of the book, you can come back here to check if you got what you wanted.

The Pyramid

Just a few decades ago, the world of organizations was much more straightforward than today. That’s because it was generally acknowledged that the only right way to structure any large grouping of people was as a pyramid. In this rigidly hierarchical construction, all major decisions are taken by those at the top, and they pass down orders through the pyramid to the workers, employees, and minions on the lower levels, where the actual operative work takes place.

And looking at the arc of human history, we can see countless examples of how successful the pyramid model has been. One of the most massive and famous organizations run this way was the Roman empire, where the Emperor reigned supreme at the very top of the pyramid. From there, he used a vast machine of government and military officials to implement his commands. As a result, the Roman empire ruled over large parts of the world and shaped their development in ways that are still felt to this day.

With such compelling success stories to its name, it’s no wonder that the pyramid has been the almost inevitable organizing principle for any operation involving more than a handful of people. From clans to villages, towns to cities, kingdoms to armies, countries to corporations, and coal mines to car factories, the pyramid was the way to go.

That’s because the classical hierarchy of a pyramid is quite effective at reducing complexity in a system. It does this by creating clarity. Everyone knows exactly what he or she is supposed to do: just follow the orders given from above. What’s more, large projects can be easily split up and shared among different parts of the organization, so the pyramid also works at scale.

But, you may now be thinking, if the pyramid model is so fine and dandy, then why did we say before that change is sorely needed?

Tankers cannot navigate these stormy times

Just a few decades ago, most organizations found themselves operating in relatively stable environments. Sure, there were plenty of revolutionary technological developments and political upheavals before the late 20th century too, but in general, these were rare and unfolded more slowly than today. In an environment that didn’t change much year to year, companies could also expect the same business model to work for decades, with at most only minor tinkering needed to keep them competitive. And the pyramid is a great organizational model for keeping things running as they are: “No new commands from above? Keep up business as usual!” In other words, the pyramid matched internal stability with external stability. A match made in the Elysian Fields!

Today though, most organizations operate in environments that are anything but stable. New competitors, business models, and technologies pop up every week, with the losers in this grand competition vanishing just as quickly. And while the pyramid model can be fast and efficient when it comes to executing plans, it’s painfully slow when it faces change and must adapt. This means that it’s simply not suited for the hectic times companies find themselves in today.

What makes a pyramid so slow?

When something changes in an organization’s environment, it’s usually not the CEO who spots it first. Rather, the first people to notice are typically the ones on the ground, because they are closest to the action. These are the salespeople, customer service reps, mechanics, nurses, waiters, drivers, cashiers and so forth who form the interface between the company and its environment. These “sensors” communicate the perceived change up the chain of command, and the impulse for change must then make a slow journey up to the top of the pyramid. Only then can a decision be made, which then has to trickle back down before any actual behavioral change happens in the organization. Needless to say, this is slow going, and it’s good neither for the organization nor for empowering the people working within it.

Employees want responsibility

In a classical hierarchy, employees have a simple role: they execute the orders given to them by those above. They have a clearly defined zone within which they operate, and everything to the right or left of them in the pyramid is none of their concern.

In the constantly changing environment of today, organizations need well-educated employees who can detect and respond to change. In other words, they need people who are alert enough to spot opportunities and threats, and also do something about them. And to be able to abble to do this in the long run, employees must also be willing and able to continuously learn on the job and develop new skills.

But these kinds of employees know they are in demand, and they come with demands of their own. They refuse to merely obey orders at work, wanting to instead make their own decisions and wield a real influence on what the organization does. They want to be trusted with authority, offered opportunities to grow, and given the flexibility to do what they think is best.

If an organization can’t give them the environment they crave, it won’t be able to attract them to work there in the first place. And in today’s turbulent times, lacking such employees can mean a death sentence for a company.

Employees want something bigger