INSTITUTIONALISING KNOWLEDGE: STAGES IN ORGANISATIONAL TRANSFORMATION

 

 

Driving and supporting an organisational transformation is, after all, an innovative project within an organisation and, like any innovation, it goes through different stages. I am sure they have been widely studied from a theoretical perspective, but it is from my own experience and what I have lived through that I would highlight the following moments:

 

First stage: The intangible

This is the stage in which the person or people who begin to talk about a possible organisational transformation have a vision, an intuition, of a need or an opportunity to organise themselves differently.

The vision is that which does not exist in the present; it is what projects you and guides you towards the future, setting a direction in which to move forward. We will not necessarily reach the vision, as it is often like the horizon: as you approach it, it keeps moving away.

Intuition is neither rational nor conscious thought; it is made up of sensations in our body: in the stomach, in the heart, on the skin... and these sensations lead us to a thought, to a decision. They are physical sensations that, thanks to the knowledge our body holds, tell us (even if not rationally) that what we feel makes some sense and that, therefore, it may be worth listening to.

So we could call this stage the unconscious, sensory, intangible stage...

 

Second stage: The moment to make things tangible

This is the stage in which it becomes necessary to start making ideas tangible: sharing them, opening up the process, gathering as many points of view and voices as possible, and generating a collective process to jointly design the model we want to reach.

This model is no longer the horizon; it is the summit we want to reach, even if we are not clear about how much time we will need, or what we will encounter along the way, to get there.

At this stage, we may think that the time needed to get there is a specific, fixed amount of time, but as we move forward we will become aware that transforming an organisational culture takes time: a lot? A little? It is relative. Drawing on an idea I had read about the variable of time in complexity science, time ceases to be a simple mathematical variable and becomes part of the process itself.

  

Third stage: Implementation

An organisational transformation is not a light bulb you can turn on (and off) with a switch. It is a change of frequency, of rhythm, of orbit for a group of people who make up a particular organisation. So it is time to start walking, trying to learn to do so in the way it has been decided it should be done. This stage is full of doubts, resistance, difficulties, unfamiliarity... and, rather than explaining, it is necessary for someone, or a few people, to stand alongside, helping and supporting others to pick up the pace and to understand the way it has been decided to work.

This is not an easy role, and it requires the trust of the organisation, as well as external support and accompaniment. Supporting people, teams, and the very people who provide support... ends up generating dynamics that keep repeating on a small, medium and large scale within the organisation: fractal dynamics.

This third stage is delicate for many reasons: because of the time it requires, because of the antibodies the organisation itself generates when implementing a new system unfamiliar to its dynamics, because of the uncertainties that come to light, and because when you approach the horizon, it moves further away.

All this support must come from a space conceived ad hoc to drive and support this entire transformation... by people who continue to feel in their stomach, in their heart, on their skin... the meaning of it all, and who continue to glimpse the horizon.

This stage will begin to consolidate when we see that the dynamics, the rhythm and the orbit of the organisation are starting to work on their own.

 

Fourth stage: Consolidating knowledge and institutionalising it

By the time we reach this stage, quite a lot of time will have passed, many things will have happened, and we will have stumbled a few times, picked ourselves up again and approached things differently in order to keep moving forward.

All of this is knowledge that the organisation itself has generated, knowledge that could not have been written in advance. The path had to be walked throughout all this time. Now we really are beginning to see the summit; so it is time to look back and write, structure, turn into procedures, explain, transfer, and incorporate into the strategy and also into the very structure of the organisation: to institutionalise all this knowledge born from organisational practice itself.

It is in this way that we will ensure that the organisation consolidates the learning achieved, and that this learning becomes part of its new organisational culture.

It is time to close the first loop, the first great circle of knowledge.