Strategic self-renewal: take in signals, decide, embed

Organisations develop structures, processes and routines to solve certain tasks for their environment. Once this has succeeded, they prefer to take up impulses from outside in a way that confirms the established solution patterns. This self-adaptation is sufficient as long as the environment remains stable and only requires small corrections.

In a turbulent environment it is not enough. The result is organisational blindness: early signals are overlooked or misinterpreted, decisions are made too late, and imbalances arise that force radical cuts. Such emergency operations cost a great deal of energy and often destroy precisely the competences that would be needed for renewal.

Organisations change constantly, even without steering. If this ongoing adaptation is not enough, there is targeted intervention. There are four types of change. Crisis management and restructuring solve an acute, threatening problem. Ongoing optimisation maintains the existing system. Both deal with the respective occasion using routines that have proved themselves in the past, in other words with more of the same.

Genotypic transformation and foresighted self-renewal go further. Here the organisation learns to observe how it has dealt with change so far and whether these patterns themselves need to be changed. Transformation is limited in time; self-renewal is designed to be permanent. Its core is: organisations need routines for changing routines.

Organisations select which information they treat as relevant. Established patterns of observation can therefore mask important changes. Variation refers to broadening the possible learning impulses: for example through customers, employees, partners or developments outside one's own market. The aim is to make even indications that call previous assumptions into question something that can be worked on.

More information does not yet create a direction. Leadership needs occasions at which observations are evaluated together and examined for their strategic significance. Which option is relevant for one's own organisation? Which prerequisites are missing? What should be pursued? Different perspectives help to make assumptions visible. The selection remains a decision for which someone is accountable.

Selected innovations need processes, responsibilities, competences and suitable forms of communication. Re-stabilisation means that new solutions become usable routines again. This includes evaluating the experience of implementation. Otherwise a decision remains a project idea while the organisation works according to its previous rules.

For each of the three dimensions there are reflection points at which the capacity can be assessed. Variation includes, for example, cooperation with customers, observation of the market and environment independently of customers, cross-disciplinary networking within the company, dealing with deviations and mistakes, and a willingness to experiment. Selection includes a regular strategy review, functioning leadership teams, the courage to engage in controversy and jointly shared criteria for what is relevant.

Re-stabilisation includes a coherent overall concept of the implementation steps, the interplay of line and project, and accompanying reflection on the change process. A self-renewal audit uses these reflection points. Managers assess the organisation individually. In the management team, commonalities, differences and contradictions are evaluated and a target profile for the three dimensions is worked out.

A regular review can itself become a routine with the same answers every time. The way of observing is therefore also reviewed: which voices are heard? Which developments are considered? Where are contradictions sorted out? The combination of strategy work, implementation and reflection is designed as an ongoing leadership task. It provides no certainty about the future, but it makes one's own assumptions and decisions open to review.

Self-renewal cannot be introduced as a programme. It is a meta-concept of corporate management and requires constant fine-tuning of several levers. This includes a certain attitude. Management gives chance a chance and accepts that the new arises from contradiction. Unfinished ideas have value.

Experiments and possible failures are permitted, provided lessons are learned from them. New employees and encounters with people from outside the organisation are seen as opportunities to discover blind spots. And resources are needed for both at the same time: for optimising existing routines and for discovering the new.

Strategic self-renewal is based on three mechanisms. Variation provides several perspectives and future possibilities. Selection is the reasoned choice of which of them to pursue further. Retention anchors new capabilities and routines when a direction proves itself. An organisation can get stuck at any of these points: it hears too few impulses from outside, it does not decide despite many ideas or it ends experiments without adopting them into the business.

Together with leadership and the units concerned, it is therefore examined where the connection breaks off. Suitable decision and learning formats emerge from this. The capacity for self-renewal only shows itself over repeated cycles, when new insights actually find their way into strategy and ways of working. A single initiative can be a start, but cannot on its own prove the lasting capacity.

The transformis approach is based on modern systems theory. According to this, organisations are highly complex social systems with their hierarchy and communication structures, their characteristic observation and decision routines and their cultural particularities. In this understanding, the key starting point for observation and intervention is not primarily people. The focus is on the way an organisation supplies itself with information and impulses, evaluates them and arrives at decisions.

The consulting is based on Wimmer's third mode of consulting, which differs fundamentally from classic expert consulting and from pure process consulting. Three dimensions are taken into account on an equal footing from the outset. The factual dimension concerns the task-related problem and the organisation's performance. The social dimension concerns the quality of cooperation and the decision-making capacity of the teams involved, which are developed indirectly.

The temporal dimension concerns the development of the company over time. Here the aim is to counteract over- or under-steering in work and decision processes and to carefully balance acceleration and deceleration. The three dimensions are inseparably linked in communication and decision processes and are therefore observed and worked on together.

Organisations derive their reason for existence from solving problems for their relevant environments. The diversity of developments outside is always greater than what can be processed internally. Every organisation therefore selects what it observes and develops its own frames of observation and evaluation over time.

If it reacted to every event, it could no longer deliver stable performance. It must master opening and closing at the same time, which amounts to a paradox. This selection often happens only implicitly, without those involved being aware of the criteria by which they select and evaluate.

Reducing complexity also carries the greatest danger: setting the wrong observation and evaluation points or leaving them unchecked for a long time. If frames have led to success in the past, they are very likely to continue to be used without reflection. This is how blind spots arise.

An organisation sees what it sees and does not notice what it is missing. The image of the black swan describes this: what has been experienced is transferred to what has not yet been experienced. Cases that confirm one's own view are sought. The unknown is interpreted until it fits the existing frame, or it is ignored altogether.

An indication of unsuitable radar systems is when an organisation arrives at wrong market assessments for years and is steered from one emergency operation to the next. This can be prevented by observing and critically examining the observation of the relevant environments and the established evaluation and decision processes themselves. If it turns out that they have led to wrong hypotheses, assessments and decisions, they are due for renewal.

For leadership, this results in a changed role. A single person at the top cannot successfully cope with growing complexity. What is needed are well-functioning management teams who understand how complex social systems work and can be influenced.

Their core task is to keep an eye on the boundary between inside and outside, to ensure sufficient impulses from outside and to create pressure for development at the points that are relevant for further development. Finding the new and exploiting the existing are different tasks that require different processes and different people.

Self-renewal differs from better-known concepts of the learning organisation in that the organisation's learning itself becomes the subject of learning. transformis has described around 40 reflection points for this. Changes to structures, processes or strategic commitments are closely interlinked with the development of the relevant groups of people.

Social systems cannot be influenced through direct chains of cause and effect. Their relevant environments can irritate an organisation but cannot force it to adapt. It uses its boundaries to supply itself with irritations to a certain degree. These can be an impetus for the further development of the internal structures, but they need not be. Those who intervene to steer intervene in something that is in motion. Surprises are therefore to be expected.

Leadership sets an organisation in motion through recursive processes: observing, evaluating the observations and deriving steering impulses from them. Management ensures that relevant information is carried from outside to inside, finds resonance there and flows into communication and decision processes.

The established patterns of observation and evaluation are the result of the previous history of survival and learning. According to Wimmer, situational assessments condense into fixed patterns of explanation and interpretation and into basic convictions that even divergent experiences can hardly shake. This mechanism can be undermined when structural couplings give rise to irritations that are considered relevant and stimulate changes to routines and structures.

In addition, the future remains uncertain and the paradigm of plannability and predictability is dissolving. Organisations have to design their future themselves. On the basis of jointly made trend assumptions, they develop a vision of the future that is shared in the company. This includes routines that review this vision again and again in the light of observable market and environmental developments and adjust it if necessary.

The audit serves self-observation and takes place in three steps. Planning and preparation consist of a one-day working meeting with the internal project leads. This is preceded by a company check on corporate development, strategy, organisational structure and current challenges. In the meeting, the approach, the reflection points and the individual statements are discussed and adapted to the company if necessary. It is also determined which organisational units will be included and who will take part.

In the second step, the participants assess the capacity for self-renewal individually. This is done online using 120 statements in which the three basic dimensions are mixed, and takes about 90 minutes.

The third step is a two-day workshop in the management team. In preparation, the assessments are evaluated, commonalities, differences and contradictions are worked out and initial working hypotheses are formulated. In the workshop, a basic understanding of the concept is first secured. The results are then presented and interpreted together. The assessment is validated and changed if necessary. Conspicuous reflection points undergo a stress test.

The result is a company-specific target profile for variation, selection and re-stabilisation and the resulting need for action for the organisation and individuals. Three questions guide further work. How does the organisation supply itself with more diversity in order to recognise opportunities? How does it allow the new in during selection? And how can resistance to innovations be reduced so that introduction succeeds?