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Transforming Organisations forOrganic Growth: The DNA of ChangeLeadership

TOM KARP

Oslo School of Management, Norway

ABSTRACT Organic growth has put transformative change on the corporate agenda. Poor recordsof change have led to a search for alternative ways of leading change as most contemporary theoriesare neither narrow enough nor broad enough. This article presents a view that leaders should takeaccount of chaos and use a systemic view when changing their organisations. Applying principles ofself-organising and spreading change by minimum intervention provides facilitative environmentsthat better sustain change. This is best done by searching for the organisation-specific DNA ofchange leadership. The success of leadership intervention during change will depend on the innercondition that we exhibit as change leaders, as well as our abilities to read change signalscorrectly, to time leadership interventions and to set out a few basic principles holding theorganisation together under chaotic circumstances elements in leading transformative change.

KEY WORDS: Change management, leading change, transformative change, processes, chaostheory, systemic, holistic, integral psychology

A Search for the DNA of Change Leadership

The global economy is expanding. Growth is on the corporate agenda. The risingaffluence in developing economies and the fast pace of technological innovationpresent new opportunities for growth. Most top leaders have, during the lastdecade, learned the hard way that organic growth is preferable to growth frommergers and acquisitions.

Organic growth means changing and transforming the organisation. Leadingchange is one of the most difficult leadership tasks. In organisations today, there

is a strong desire to change but a limited capability to lead change successfully.

Journal of Change Management

Vol. 6, No. 1, 320, March 2006

Correspondence Address:Tom Karp, Gamle Rykenvei 19 b, 1386 Asker, Norway. Email: [email protected]

1469-7017 Print=1479-1811 Online=06=01000318# 2006 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080=14697010600565186


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This article offers an alternative approach to change management a search forthe DNA of leading transformative change.

This article is written in a Scandinavian context; perhaps with a view of organ-isations with standards of equality and efficacy. This context is chosen because theScandinavian model of compromise between professional management anddemocracy and the compromise between capital and people issues mayattract renewed interest in the years to come.

Successful transformative change and growth does not depend solely on theleader at the top but on every person who in one way or another, formally or infor-mally, acts as a leader to a group of followers. This article is therefore offeredto leaders wherever they may be. Although the article is addressed to businessorganisations, the recommendations given may also be interesting for publicand non-profit organisations embarking on change initiatives.

Surprise: Change is Tough. . .

Research shows that the record of change management is poor. The most criticalingredient in any change effort is leadership, and managing change is fundamen-tally a people issue. Organisations are complex systems. Any intervention needs tobe handled delicately. After 20 years of leading change, retired Hanover InsuranceCEO Bill OBrian sums up the hardship of change: A value is only a value when itis voluntarily chosen (Senge et al., 1999: 13). This is perhaps why less than tenper cent of top leaders in global companies rate their companys record of changemanagement as having been successful (IBM, 2004). Most change initiatives thatend up going nowhere do not fail because they lack grand visions or noble inten-tions. They fail because people do not see the realities they face. One sad story isthe new CEO of a global company who tried to change strategic directions. He

failed, and was fired after just one year on the job. He thought he could changethe company through his intellect alone, without moving people emotionally orbothering to get buy-in from the people who would execute those changes(Golemanet al., 2002).

Although researchers and experts on change management produce a steady flowof new theories and models, leaders struggle with the practicalities of leadingchange. Alternative approaches to change management are needed. As PeterSenge and colleagues (Senge et al., 2004) put it, contemporary theories ofchange are, paradoxically, neither narrow enough nor broad enough. The appropri-ate dimensions of transformational change represent a largely unexplored territoryboth in current management research and practice and in our understanding ofleadership in general. Many leaders cling to the misguided hope that one magicconcept will unlock the mysteries of change. This is not the case, and leaders

need to acknowledge the following:

. Most organisations are rich in structure, activities, processes and culture, and itis not possible for a management team or a single top leader to understandcause-effects loops, as well as systemic connections, when changing the organ-isation. The nature of an organisation undergoing change is best understood asnetworks of relationships and communication. In these networks, people

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influence each other through loops that create the behaviour and the identity ofthe organisation. Organisations behave like ongoing reality construction

entities there is no one reality leaders can decide on. Each person has aninternal mental model of his/her world; a dynamic model that guides his/herthinking and behaviour and that changes as a result of the consequences ofthat persons actions and of the information exchanges. This is how organis-ations as a whole adapt to changes and it is why leading and controllingchange is extremely difficult.

. Human beings in organisations are not the rational actors leaders wish them tobe, and they behave and react to change in a number of unpredictable ways. Ourbrains are wired as much for positive and negative manipulation of socialrelationships as for management of rational thought. When we are undergoingchange, our consciousness spans across levels of matters and behaviours, levelsof cognitive aspects of the mind, levels of affective aspects of the heart and

ultimately across levels of deep-source aspects of our will. One singlemagic change management strategy or psychological trick will therefore notdo the job with respect to difficult people issues.

. Change initiatives in organisations today operate in a complex external andinternal environment on the edge of chaos because vital planning assumptionscontinuously change due to dynamic developments and events in organisationsexternal and internal environments. Organisations that exhibit chaotic beha-viour are deterministic and orderly in some sense they are not merely com-plicated but dynamic, emergent self-organising systems which are difficult topredict and micro-manage by traditional management control and powermechanisms.

Taking a Biological and Systemic Perspective

Organisations undergoing change are living entities. Biological evolution andorganisational evolution are similar systems, and leaders need to take a cuefrom nature on how to change organisations. The balanced scorecard (Figure 1)

Figure 1. The balanced scorecard

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developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton (2004) offers one out of severalapproaches that provide a systemic perspective to change. The scorecard can

be viewed not only as a performance indicator but as a dynamic change mapconsisting of a series of systemic cause-and-effect linkages.

People Issues

The critical resource of most businesses is no longer capital but the people acompany hires, motivates and develops. In people-intensive businesses, as forinstance security, facilities management, advertising, IT services, finance,hotels, engineering, telecommunication and industrial services, the people costsare often more than half the total costs (Barber and Strack, 2005). People representthe major cost but, more importantly, the major driver of most value creation.Small changes in performance have major impacts on returns; consider a typical

facilities management company in which operating profit is 10 per cent ofemployee costs and economic profit is 8 per cent of employee costs. In such acase, a 5 per cent improvement in employee productivity for instance as aresult of a successfully implemented change initiative increases operatingprofit by 50 per cent and economic profit by over 60 per cent. Vice versa, apoorly executed change initiative leading to a decline in employee productivity(because of resistance, de-motivation, lack of skills and so on) will have theinverse negative impact on profits.

To address people issues, leaders often stress the need for alignment andreadiness of an organisation to sustain processes of change. This is a designapproach to a highly complex issue. Acknowledging that people issues havetroubled a lot of change initiatives, this challenge needs to be dealt with inother ways than by discussing alignment. The problem is that organisations

do not just do something new; they build their ability to do things in newways. In most cases, the only way an organisation can grow organically isto change fundamentally the way people think and behave across the organis-ation. This will mean changing the culture, competencies, values and behaviourthroughout most of the organisation. This is a most ambitious undertaking, entail-ing changing the minds of many people a transformative way of changing.Successful organic growth in organisations will therefore need to combine theinner shift in peoples values, aspirations, mental models and behaviourswith outer shifts in process, strategy, practices and systems. The greatestdifficulty in the world is not for people to accept new ideas, but to make themforget their old ideas, the economist John Maynard Keynes once said (deVries, 2001).

Taking Systemic Perspective: The Whole Person Approach to Change

In any human system, one is always three. Each single situation in organisationsundergoing change reflects not just the system at its own level but the largersystem (the organisation) and the smaller system within each person (and notonly within oneself but within everybody involved in the situation). Mostchange initiatives operate on collective and external dimensions of systems. If

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. Behaviour: our behaviour in certain situations and contexts; what do we do?

. Capabilities and skills: our knowledge base; what capabilities and skills do we

use to do what we do, what do we know (or not know) with respect to what weare doing in certain situations? What are we really good at, and what are ourunique capabilities?

. Values: the values underlying our behaviour; why do we do as we do, whatvalues guide our actions?

. Identity: what roles do we take in the organisation? Who are we in given situ-ations? What needs do we serve in society, in the marketplace or to colleagues?What is our inner motivation, what drives us or what makes us go the extramile?

The interior balanced scorecard for individuals in the organisation may thereforetake the form as shown in Figure 3.

Adding the time dimension into this, we may create an interior change map.This has to do with reflecting, professionally and personally, on past, presentand future potential and learning points. People may need dialogue partners (acoach or a colleague) or they may want to do this alone.

During Shells massive transformation in the 1990s, the company gave thosewho worked at Shell the opportunity to become whole people at work (Sengeet al., 1999). The Fortune 500 energy and materials company Hydro recentlygave all its employees in its oil and gas division a chance to relate individuallyto change, using a scorecard as presented above, when the division launched amassive transformation effort. The individual reflections were tied to the overallchange process, and a series of proactive change dialogues and learning sessionsresulted. Another example on the more personal side is Jurgen, the head of a Swissbank, who had a crisis of personal commitment. Jurgen began by looking inside,

reflecting on his life and personal vision inside and outside work. Comparing thereal and the ideal gave him more clarity and the motivation and energy heneeded to change and take on the tough tasks ahead in his job. Keki Dadiseth,who took over as chairman of Hindustan Lever Ltd., has another story. Dadiseth

Figure 3. The interior balanced scorecard

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moved towards the ideal by first becoming an exemplar himself. He then modelledthe changes he wanted to see and involved people in the process of creating a new

reality for Hindustan Lever Ltd. (Golemanet al., 2002).

Searching for the DNA of Change Leadership

General Electric (GE) is renowned for its pioneering approaches to change. GEseems to rely on a mixture of top-down and bottom-up, between complianceand commitment, between chaos and heroic hands-on leadership and betweenindividuals and teams. This is typical for successful transformative change.Processes take the form of being anything from top-down/bottom-up, planned/emergent, process/content focused, structure/culture oriented, shareholder/people focused, external/internal, all variables seemingly in play at the sametime and shifting according to different situations.

There is no simple prescription on how to lead change. Accepting chaotic1 andemergent principles will, however, help leaders to accept the idea that after aperiod of time people in organisations tend to self-organise into systems whereprocesses of cooperation and adaptation will create, shape and sustain transforma-tive change. Order emerges out of chaos. Leaders will need to discover this orderand the patterns of change the organisation specific DNA of leading change (seeFigure 4):

At a meta-level, the DNA of change leadership is about striking a balance inpeoples individual/collective/internal/external perspectives and coupling this

Figure 4.Order emerge out of chaos



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to important organisational parameters such as financial, customer, organisationaland growth/learning perspectives. Balancing this interface will create changemomentum (see Figure 5).

Leading change in chaotic environments is about finding the genetic instructionsspecifying the organisational development of the people, culture, capabilities,structure, business processes, products/services, business models and otherimportant organisational parameters. The leadership challenge is, as in biologicalevolution, to find the cells that create and shape transformative change. If wedevelop the above further, and perform a sectional cut-through of the organis-ational-specific DNA of leading change (Figure 6), we will most likely find thefollowing cells of change:

Focusing Change

Why do successful companies sometimes falter because of changes in the businessenvironment? Typically, it is not because they are paralysed due to the shift in thebusiness environment. In fact, they tend to respond too quickly, Donald Sull notesin his book Revival of the Fittest (Sull, 2003). They respond to even the mostdisruptive shifts by executing actions that worked in the past. Over time, thesuccess formula that helped to beat the competition can become a blinder.Instead of asking whether the logic that once made success still holds, people inorganisations too often respond to market disruptions by doing more of the same.

Organisations have well-developed immune systems aimed at preserving thestatus quo. Leaders need to challenge the status quo and pursue the best change

Figure 5. Balancing external and internal objectives will create change momentum

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ideas (the ones that give the most benefit and are easiest to implement) while at thesame time achieving a difficult balance by building on the important successes ofthe organisation. Think of Intel. In the 1980s, CEO Andy Grove listened to discon-firming arguments that the future of the firm rested on microprocessors not itscurrent product, memory chips. Grove challenged the arguments and, over the next

few years, microchips became the core of Intels business.Change will have to start in smaller pilot groups and grow organically overtime. Organisations have a limit to the changes they can absorb. One powerfulmechanism is to set up the whole system in the room environments (theseenvironments may include customers, suppliers and others) such as for instanceGEs WorkOut sessions which facilitate divergent and convergent thinkingabout change. Important stakeholders will then have a chance to come up withnew ideas and experiment and learn collectively. The scale effect will increasethe likelihood of expanding the search for signals of change, as well as pickingthe best change ideas to implement, as the multiple ideas from many peoplewill always exceed the benefit of the results achieved by fewer people.

There is a common misconception among many leaders that a new order ofthings will be accepted just because it is a good idea. This is not the case. Owner-

ship of the change agenda will increase if people have had their say. Recognitioninspires strong intrinsic motivation, often causing people to go beyond their call ofduty. Emotionally, people seek recognition of their value not as humanresources, management teams or colleagues but as human beings. Theywant to be appreciated for their worth. Intellectually, people seek recognitionthat their ideas are sought after and given consideration, and that we thinkenough of their intelligence to explain our thinking to them.

Figure 6. In search of the cells of change leadership



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A series of process-oriented workshops with key stakeholders is needed as partof most change programmes. William Isaacs and his colleagues at MIT argue that

such processes will need to provide a psychological and physical environment thatlowers the risks of peoples interaction (Isaacs, 2001). Techniques of dialogue,focusing on finding common ground and exploring new opportunities and theunderlying mental models of thought, may be used. An example of this isIsaacs and his teamwork with the change process at US steel manufacturerArmco. They set up a controlled environment in which certain rules apply asetting in which the interactions between people could develop, allowing newthoughts to flow. The outcomes of such sessions can be in the form of visions,strategies, change agendas or other ways of describing a new order or a desiredfuture for an organisation. When doing this, we should bear in mind that idealsmay be dangerous. It is always a risk that ideal-led organisations may becomeparalysed, keeping them away from dealing with the ever-changing realities of

the external environment.

Start With Yourself

The Russian thinker, novelist and philosopher Leo Tolstoy once said that every-one thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. This isespecially true for leaders. We may be inspired by the transformation of the globaloil and gas giant BP during the last decade. BP has revamped its profile, butperhaps most astounding are the shifts that have occurred within BP itself, leadby CEO John Browne and his management team. People in BP spend time reflect-ing on the state of the industry and their organisation. This way of working couldnot have been institutionalised if influential individuals had not changed theirthinking and behaviour. In this case, the change started with CEO John Browne

himself. BPs competitor Shell did the same in 1994 when the new CEO, PhilCarroll, and his senior management team embarked on a company-wide trans-formation. They started a new way of working, and became a pilot group androle model for change.

The issue at stake is that people strive to achieve their highest professional andpersonal potential in the organisation or, if that is not possible, elsewhere. Theinternal score card may be used to discipline peoples thinking. Leaders changeleadership, as well as their principles and moral authority, will be shaped bythis. When we as leaders live by our principles we will be given credibility inrelation to the change agenda we will be regarded as role models and begiven even greater authority than is written in our job descriptions.

Motivating Key PeopleLeaders should invite and inspire other key people in the organisation to reflect ontheir behaviour, capabilities, values, and roles. We may be inspired by the motiva-tional efforts of political leaders such as George Washington, Gandhi or NelsonMandela, who changed the course of nations, or by successful business leaderswho display a strong blend of personal humility and professional will, as presentedby Jim Collins in his Good to Greatwork (Collins, 2001). One example of this is

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groups i.e. the supporters and opponents. The ones that profit from the new orderwill warmly support the change agenda and conversely the ones that lose will fight

and resist the changes. From initial discussions, a leader will know how theimportant players position themselves. Leaders should actively seek out thoseimportant supporters the ambassadors of change. You will discover thatchange ambassadors supporting the initiative will rise to the challenge, and aleaders job will be to support and motivate these efforts. Change ambassadorswill also need to be given formal and informal incentives, for instance in theform of a pay increase, new position, higher formal or informal status, recognition,new responsibility, advancement, training or new line of work. At Charles Schwab& Co., the broker firm, the change ambassadors have consistently been promotedout of rank and out of order. One example is Susanne Lyons, who arrived atSchwab in 1992 and shortly after changed Schwabs customer segmentation strat-egy. She says: Everyone in top management had a big idea when they were more

junior. Each of us did something with our idea and got rewarded for it (Hamel,2000: 226). The change ambassadors will promote change. The most adaptiveideas of change will survive the organisational scrutiny and add momentum tothe overall change effort.

Leaders also need to pick the high ground where important battles withopponents will take place by the place, time and issues on which to fightopponents. The change ambassadors should be involved in the battles to come;a range of tactics from open battle to silent guerrilla campaigns need to bedevised and applied according to situational needs.

Finding the Resources

After key people in the organisation have accepted the need for change and more

or less agreed on the new direction, most leaders are faced with the reality oflimited resources such as time, money and the people necessary to advancechange. How does a leader get an organisation to execute a shift with limitedresources? Either a leader can trim his/her change ambitions (and possiblyde-motivate the employees) or he/she can fight for more resources, for instancefrom bankers and shareholders; this is a long but sometimes necessary politicalprocess (which may focus attention away from the change initiative).

Another alternative is concentrating efforts on multiplying the value of theresources leaders already possess. The Italian economist and sociologist VilifredoPareto proposed early in the last century what has come to be known as the 80/20principle. Simply put, one can generally accomplish most of what one wants perhaps up to 80 per cent of the targetwith only a relatively modest amount ofeffort perhaps only 20 per cent of the expected effort. Where can resources be

freed on the one hand, and multiplied on the other? This is a matter of askingand questions instead of the classical either/or dilemmas. Leaders shouldask themselves if they are allocating resources based on old assumptions: whatactivities have the greatest performance impact but are resource-starved; whatactivities are resource-oversupplied but have scant performance impact? WhenBill Bratton was appointed commissioner of the New York Police Department(NYPD) in 1994, muggings, murders, Mafia hits, vigilantes and armed robbery

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were at an all-time high. In business terms, NYPD was a cash-strapped organis-ation, and Brattons budget was frozen. In two years, without an increase in

budget, Bratton turned New York City into a safe large city. One of his changeweapons was his constant ability to redirect scarce resources from cold to hotspots, and thereby shift the rules of the game and add change momentum (Kimand Mauborgne, 2005).

Spreading Change by Making It Operational

Leaders have to set the initial conditions of change; they need to work on changingthemselves, they should motivate other key people to do the same, they should findtheir ambassadors and the resources in short, they should create the rationale andcontext for change. Then they have to step back. In order to further spread changethroughout the entire organisation and make change operational, leaders should

plan for minimum intervention and provide only a small set of specifications a set of ground rules, principles, shared assumptions or beliefs which people inthe organisation can figure out how they are going to follow.

Ricardo Semler, president of Semco, a manufacturing and services company inBrazil, has given up the need to be in constant control. Semcos managementallows change to happen on its own. Such a formula has enabled Semco to elim-inate the change management boarding-school issues that take up 2030 percent of managers time (Morgan, 2005). Less is more. The trick is not to do asmost consultancy firms or change management experts do that is, to addcomplexity to an already complex organisation (and thereby clear the way forthemselves as the only experts who can discuss change and growth, preferablyby the use of some sort of fancy analytical tool understood by very few).

Think of a flock of birds flying in formation. The formation is formed by rules

followed by each bird, such as maintaining a fixed distance from its neighbour, tomatch its velocity to that of neighbours, and to move towards the centre of thegroup. The same will apply in chaotic organisations undergoing transformations.Think of Visa International. Visa is one of the largest businesses in the world and itis operating as a self-governing system. Visa has showed a unique capacity tolearn, and Visas purpose and principles act as a self-governing system fromwhich power and direction flows when Visa is undergoing change. Oneexample on the negative side is from a Norwegian municipality. The chiefofficer applied principles of self-organisation and 65 municipality units weregiven freedom to transform the municipality; the end result was successful. Thepoliticians, however, felt they had lost power, so they fired the chief officer andreinstated tight command-and-control mechanisms. Taking back control addedcomplexity, and the positive development of the municipality was gradually

reversed.Our Newtonian minds have been conditioned to believe that someone must be

in control, and that is why we are continually trying to gain control and to avoidbeing controlled. We can influence a chaotic organisation, but we cannot control it.Besides defining the context and the ground rules, leaders should set up environ-ments and processes which stimulate ownership, learning, experimentation andquick-win possibilities in the organisation as a whole. Ownership is best



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stimulated when people are involved somehow. Most people in organisations willalter their mindsets more easily if they have a chance to have their say. The overall

direction, as well as some heart- and mind-focused ground rules or governingideas, should be set by top management, but the how-tos must be left topeople throughout the organisation.

The biggest problem with most corporations today is that they are governed bymediocre ideas, according to former Hanover Insurance CEO Bill OBrian(Senge et al., 1999: 375). A mediocre set of ideas or principles often reflectslack of conviction and direction. People are motivated to adjust their behaviourmore easily if they really believe in the purpose, and understand the wider impli-cations of their individual actions (Strohl, 1998; Lawson and Price, 2003). Mostpeople in organisations today are in desperate need of human attention. In atime-and-efficiency-focused society, human attention is a scarce commodity(even more scarce than capital in many organisations) and a leaders ability to

give people attention will cause people to go the extra mile.Setting up learning environments and learning incentives are one way to dis-seminate new skills. People in organisations learn and develop at their best bytelling and retelling the organisations success stories. These stories are constantlybeing co-authoredthe past, present and future are sources of learning, inspirationand interpretation. People love to hear stories; stories stick in our minds, and mostof us are natural storytellers (Gardner, 2004). Think of the stories told by JohnChambers, CEO of Cisco Systems. He describes a future of living better thoughtechnology. Often sounding like a preacher, he speaks of his belief that Ciscocan create this model of the future, thereby enabling everyone to contribute to abetter society.

The power of play is another way to enable people to absorb the new order. Asyoung kids we learn by playing and experimenting. This mode of learning tends to

disappear as we grow older. The ability to use the new order experimentally, andintegrate it with existing knowledge bases through, for instance, the use of gamesand experimentations, is a powerful learning mode in organisations. Often, themost valuable managerial insights arise from both designing the rules andplaying the game. Hard-disk manufacturer Maxtor Peripherals has used Legobricks to describe the company, to develop leaders and to align individuals per-sonal goals with the companys vision. The oil giant Shell has been using futurescenarios since the 1970s to absorb new change and to alter the rules of the game.

Finally, leaders should prepare the ground for short-term wins. Large changeinitiatives may take years, so there is plenty of time to mobilise resistance, to redir-ect attention, to launch other initiatives and so on. This is why short-term concreteand easily visible performance improvements are crucial; they are the proof thatthe change effort can deliver superior results. To be effective, such short-term

wins must be visible and unambiguous, and they must clearly relate to theoverall change initiative. When AlliedSignal CEO Larry Bossidy rolled outthe companys improvement programme, he started in manufacturing, becausehe thought the company had more to gain there and it would also give himplenty of highly visible changes. It also goes without saying that successfulshort-term wins must be preached and sold to all stakeholders as evidence ofthe new order.

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Prototyping and Experimenting

Peoples minds are influenced by their mental models that, invariably, determinewhat decisions get made. Mental models are often fuzzy, incomplete andimprecisely expressed. Mental models change with time. The human mind oftenassembles a few relationships to fit the context of a discussion. As the subjectshifts, so the mental model often changes too. Fundamental assumptions amongkey people in the organisation offer differ, but are seldom brought into theopen. Externalisation of important organisational assumptions about the neworder (a procedure, a value proposition, a product, a way of working, a businessprocess, a market campaign or whatever) by physical representations as model-ling, prototyping, small scale testing or experimentation have long been usedfor change and innovation purposes by a number of leading business players for instance Boeing, Microsoft, General Electric, Gillette, HP, McDonalds,Sony, IBM, Swatch, Shell, Caterpillar, Federal Express, Walt Disney, Procter &

Gamble, Nokia, Intel, 3M, Merill Lynch, and Toyota (Schrage, 2000).Such prototyping and experimentation can include everything from internal role

playing to letting a department try out a new business process, from giving animportant customer a presentation of new ideas to small-scale testing of pilotproducts in the marketplace. Many large companies have a bias against smallexperiments. They believe you have to make something big to make a noticeableimpact on the top line. The challenge, however, is not to find that enormous changeidea but to plant enough acorns to raise the chances of getting an oak tree. A port-folio of experiments is often needed to cover the discontinuities most likely tochange the current value proposition as well as those most likely to spawn entirelynew opportunities. Such experimentation should be organisationally, physically,culturally and managerially separated from the core business. Most experimentswill not pay off. A new way of working or a concept that is killed off rather

than scaled up is not a loss. Every model, prototype or experiment produces learn-ing which, if fed back and shared, can help to increase the odds that the nextchange idea is a success. Bill Gross, founder of Idealab, finds great value infailed experiments: We learn from every idea. We think of every $250,000spent as a $250,000 class. We want to learn something from that class andapply it to another class (Hamel, 2000: 301).

Organically Growing by Rolling Out the New Order

Change initiatives are not linear. There will come a time and place, however,where leaders must focus on institutionalising parts or the whole of the neworder. The change ideas that have survived the spreading in the organisation

and the testing in the market place need to be implemented throughout the organ-isation in terms of systems, structures, human resources, competencies, businessdevelopment, management behaviour and so on. Management role modellingand incentives for people to modify their behaviour are important mechanisms,as are organising for debriefing and learning activities. As it is important tocreate events to initiate change, it is equally important to formally close thechange initiatives and mark the transition to business as usual according to the



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new practice. People throughout the organisation need ceremonial activitiesduring such transitions; they want to celebrate achievements, mourn the old

ways and welcome the new organisational practices.

Pulling it All Together: The DNA of Leading Change

Leaders should accept there is no single cure for all when changing and growingtheir organisations. However, if leaders accept chaos and emergent principles as away of leading, as well as the fact that order emerges out of chaos, patterns ofchange may be found patterns which form the DNA of transformation in theorganisation.

By taking a systemic as well as a whole-person view of people in their organ-isation, leaders may discover the organisational-specific DNA of change leader-ship. If we imagine that we can cut through the above DNA structure oftransformative change across time and space, the cells shown in Figure 7 aremost likely found.

These are the organisation-specific cells as discussed in the sections above. Theleadership act is to find and develop these cells by searching for the DNA ofchange in their organisation.

Figure 7.The various cells of the DNA of change leadership

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Notes on Contributor

Tom Karpis an assistant professor and the head of the KaosPilot studies at Oslo

School of Management in Norway.

20 T. Karp


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