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Story:
Transparency unlimited - how we transformed a rather conservative corporate culture

By Markus Schwemmle - founder, entrepreneur and one of my best employees (from time to time) at system worx GmbH & Co. KG

July 17, 2011 at 10:37am

change controlling

transparency

social control

employee survey

implementation boost

Moonshots

Redefine the work of leadership

Summary

As we got an assignment of a rather conservative German based electricity supplier to start a organizational development process after an employee survey. As we started with interviews most of the people we met startet the conversation with the words: "You are the 5th consulting company in the last 10 years. We don't believe you to be successful."
But we were. By adding a very unconventional piece of technology to our consulting approach...

Context

The context was the assumption, that we as a process consultancy would do, what our colleagues did: Conduct large group interventions, create a lot of material and so called "motivation" - and leave it to the company to deal with results...

It was time to create a new context...

Triggers

The main issue was, that all managers were trapped in a mental model. So were the employees. No one was actually thinking about new possibilities. So noone was convinced in the beginning how they would leave this spiral. Everything was about qualifying the system instead of qualifying the persons involved...

Key Innovations & Timeline

- development of a web based platform were everyone could access the results of the large group interventions
- defining a process to keep the momentum
- implementing the way of this Management 2.0 approach to the rather conservative environment

Challenges & Solutions

First Challenge was the implementation of the platform in the company environment. Well, but after a while, we found a joint solution.

Second Challenge was the real-time usage of the application during the large group intervention - it worked!

Third Challenge was to keept the momentum for the next months. It all is a matter of commitment... and intelligent ways of displaying relevant information...

Benefits & Metrics

We reduced the number of workshops needed by two thirds.

We increased the number of implemented measures by 70% !!!
The company never had any success like this before!

We increased the number of persons involved up to 93% (access to the system) of the overall staff!

Lessons

It was so successful, that we use our now so called change controlling platform as an integrated approach, even for smaller change projects. We now even have a smaller ASP-solution for small and medium sized companies or smaller projects...

No change without Change Controlling.

And the interesting thing: Social control of measures has a direct effect on the outcome of a project. There is a saying: What gets measured, gets done. We now have a new saying: What is visible for everyone gets really done - or will be discussed further...

Credits

Credits to my colleagues:

Jan Jaakko Johannsen for all the discussions while we invented the approach
Anton Kejr for countless nights to program the platform

Materials

All information available on: http://www.change-controlling.com/en

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