Sense of urgency: why change needs a shared sense of necessity

The term describes the accepted necessity of change. transformis puts it as a question: what hardship needs to be averted? It does not mean that senior management has recognised a problem. It means a shared picture that change is urgently needed for survival. This is why transformis speaks of a collectively shared sense of urgency.

The reason lies in the systemic understanding of organisations. Companies are complex social systems. They organise themselves, refer to themselves to a high degree and cannot be changed from the outside. An instruction alone therefore does not create change. The necessary energy only emerges when the organisation accepts a gap between its current state and a desired target state. The sense of urgency is the first part of this gap.

Urgency describes what an organisation has to move away from. It does not yet say where to. Alongside the sense of urgency, change therefore needs a perspective: an attractive vision of the future that is worth getting involved for. Robert A. Sedlák reports from his experience that failed change processes usually lacked exactly these two levers: a collectively shared sense of urgency and a collectively shared, attractive vision of the future.

Once the sense of urgency is on the table, transformis therefore works with the organisation to develop a vision of the future that mobilises the forces needed for the change process. Without this energy there is no fundamental change. Together, the two create the gap between target and current state that the change process is meant to close.

No. In the conversation, Laura Wruck distinguishes three orders of change that call for different interventions. For transformis, change management is therefore not the same as change management, and making this distinction is an important success factor.

First-order change is built into every social system and happens without major initiatives. transformis calls this dynamic stability. Applied to the human body, it resembles the constant renewal of our cells.

Second-order change begins when management realises that evolutionary change is not enough to respond to changing market requirements. Programmes are then launched: a cost reduction programme when costs are too high, a customer satisfaction initiative when customers are dissatisfied, process optimisation when workflows are too slow.

If the programmes have worked, the organisation falls back on them at the next sign of trouble. The motto is more of the same. Restructurings and continuous change processes belong to this order. They always follow the same logic and do not change the organisation fundamentally.

Third-order change becomes necessary when more of the same no longer works. What is needed then is a paradigm shift, which transformis calls genotypic transformation or anticipatory self-renewal. Through deliberate reflection, the organisation changes the patterns of its change and builds the changing of change into the ongoing process. This is demanding and laborious, but very effective. And it requires a sense of urgency that is shared collectively. Our article on the four types of change management describes this in detail.

This is where the real work begins. People know that something has to change, and there is a shared picture of the future. Now it is a matter of developing a suitable intervention strategy and implementing it consistently. There are no shortcuts. As Robert A. Sedlák puts it: “It is not a sprint, it is a marathon.”

The basis is a well-designed intervention architecture, in other words detailed planning of which organisational and personnel changes are needed to reach the desired target state.

Alongside the sense of urgency and the vision of the future, transformis names four further essential elements: a logical Strategy Map, a tailored intervention and learning architecture, monitoring of effectiveness and change communication geared to each target group that ensures transparency throughout the process. At every point it must be clear what is being done, why it is being done, which benefits are expected and who is affected.

A sense of urgency cannot be decreed. It emerges when an organisation looks at its situation together. In the transformis consulting process, the consultants therefore start by listening and looking for patterns and blind spots. They do not bring ready-made concepts. They develop them in direct exchange with their clients in what are known as consulting systems.

This includes making visible the gaps between what exists today and what would be possible. Even though the consultants are not industry experts, they look closely at the client's relevant environments, business model and market conditions. From this they form an opinion of their own, which they contribute as an impetus for change. When analysis results are processed together and the need for action is derived together, a shared sense of urgency emerges.

Credibility is a prerequisite. Many organisations are tired of change, and the sense of urgency has often been misused in the past. That makes it all the more important to derive the urgency from a shared look at the situation.

The statements come from the fourth part of the video series “Systems theory & practice”. Laura Wruck, then Laura Hüer, and Robert A. Sedlák recorded the conversations in 2022, when transformis was still called SEDLÁK & PARTNER. This article is based on the discussion guide for the videos. The conversation can be watched as part 4 of the video series on YouTube. How an organisation's culture affects such a process is described in our article on culture change.