Ideas From the thinking behind Omnicomplexity
Nobody transforms anything
You have probably lived through one. The transformation programme. The imported operating model. The restructure that looked right on the diagram. Eighteen months on, the work has quietly gone back to how it was.
A transformation programme is a method, packed for travel, addressed to everyone. Unfortunately, it spoils on the journey to your context.
Change does not pour down through an organisation from a programme board. It spreads person to person, through the same network that does the actual work. Set the conditions right and it moves on its own. Set them wrong and no amount of pushing makes it hold.
Nobody transformed it. Everybody did.
What actually travels between organisations, and what to build instead of a rollout, is the argument the book follows the whole way through.
If a transformation programme is currently landing on your organisation, this is the alternative we practise: we start on one stuck decision and change the conditions around the work, with nothing to roll out.
This is the argument of the book. Omnicomplexity follows it through real organisations, all the way to what to do on Monday.