Pantea, Author at Camrosh

A Systems Approach to Shared Thinking and Planning

Organisations increasingly launch change programs to adapt to rapid changes in their external environment in an increasingly uncertain reality. However, there are two strong forces that often work against such programs:

Human innate resistance to change
A high level of volatility and accelerated speed of change in the environment

By the time a change program is officially completed, the environment in which the business or organisation functions has already changed. This is exacerbated by the fact that many aspects of the change are often forced upon employees. They often do not understand the premises, or do not feel part of or agree with a course of action, and therefore do not integrate/adopt the requirements of new ways of working in their routine. This often leads to different levels of adaptability between divisions in an organisation, or outright conflict in and between teams. Traditional change management programs often fail in addressing the nuances of dynamic human factors of change.

The “Deep Change” approach brings people, processes, and the volatile external environment together in a harmonious manner, based on deep insights into the human need for transparency, trust and ability to have a voice.

To implement “Deep Change” in organisations, leading to a system shift, people need to first be made aware of the unknown unknowns in their relationships with each other in their teams, as well as within the organisation and with the process of change itself. Our uniquely designed workshops bring about such awareness in all involved, by taking teams and organisations through the journey of “Deep Change” independent of issue, industry or geography.

Our process is designed to help you through the perilous convergence of resistance to change, volatile external environments and pressure for a system shift in your organisation. We empower your organisation to find the shared thinking, language, and strategy to move from paralysis to proactive anticipation, so you can address new challenges and capitalise on new opportunities.

Read the case study here: https://www.camrosh.com/strategy-in-action/

Get in touch to find out how we can help you info@camrosh.com

Strategy in Action

Moving forward when strategy implementation is stalled in a deadlock.

The Challenge:

A government department had embarked on a large-scale, multi-million change project encompassing physical changes to a number of premises as well as ways of working and organisational structure. More than a year into the project there was still no consensus on strategy and implementation plan. Frustration was leading to conflict which had paralyzed progress.

Approach:

We used our deep change process, applying dialogue system maps. The maps were shared with the stakeholders at an intensive workshop building dialogue towards reaching a common vision and devise an agreed path forward. The workshop was followed by a report and recommendations by Camrosh.

Outcome:

The project moved the team from a state of paralysis to a proactive state of interaction between the strategy and delivery teams. The teams became aware of not only the practical issues surrounding the project, but also everybody’s feelings towards it, and how these impact the project’s chance of success. This helped the client teams to achieve the ‘performing stage’ with better interactions between the teams actively communicating on a daily basis. The workshop also brought to surface unanswered questions that the teams were unaware of before. Equipped with this new awareness, the client started to appropriately address them and moved forward with implementation successfully.

Understanding complexity should be on top of your agenda

Pantea Lotfian PhD, Camrosh Ltd.

The process of innovation is usually considered a complicated affaire. A lot of uncertainty and unknowns characterise the early stages and as the innovation process is followed systematically, it becomes refined, and gradually the best options are selected, details emerge and innovation becomes a reality in the form of a new process, product, strategy etc. However, there is something else happening in parallel with this, which we rarely pay attention to. Innovation is complex not complicated and is becoming increasingly so. This is because as we move through the process the environment is continuously changing and as the innovation is taking shape the impact of a changing environment will nudge innovation from being a complicated process to complex process. It is crucial to be able to identify when we are facing complexity instead of something that is just complicated.

We use the words complex and complicated in different contexts on a daily basis, and often interchangeably. However, there are crucial differences between complicated and complex:

A complicated system has many components that can have very many interactions with each other. However, these interactions all follow a specific pattern. This makes it possible to predict how a complicated system behaves. For example the majority of transport systems we use today such as a cars, trains, ships, airplanes and spacecraft are complicated systems with varying degrees of complicatedness, however due to the existence of predictable and purposefully designed components and their well understood interactions in the process of their respective functioning, operating them becomes possible with a high degree of predictability and safety.

Complex systems are also multi component and may behave in patterned ways, however; their interactions are continuously changing. The properties of a complex system depends on three elements:

the number of potentially interacting elements
the interdependence level of connectedness of those elements
the level of heterogeneity of the components

Complexity of a system increases with the increase in any one, or all of the above mentioned factors: multiplicity, interdependence and heterogeneity. The implication is that in complex systems the same starting conditions as in a complicated system will produce very different outcomes, depending on the interactions of the units in the system. This makes such systems emergent; that means they can show unexpected behaviours resulting from the internal reactions between units or interactions with the environment. Examples of complex systems are financial markets or an air traffic control system. Nature as a whole is obviously the ultimate complex system, but here I would like to limit the discussion to man made complex systems.

The problem starts by the very act of trying to create a reproducible process within a naturally emergent system where we try to reduce the complexity to manageable complicatedness through creating boundaries based on our assumptions.

In order to be able to create anything at all we have to make assumptions and set boundaries; however, in order to be successful when dealing with complexity before making our first assumption we have to be aware that we are dealing with complexity rather than just something complicated that might have some underlying blueprint that we might figure out at some point.

Why does this matter?

This may all sound a bit philosophical, but often businesses try to increase the pace of innovation by increasing the variety and number of their products or services. This leads then, to the surprise of the keen innovators, to stagnation and decrease of profitability. When the reasons for declining profitability despite innovation initiatives is investigated, the root cause is often identified as increased complexity within the organisation, particularly in operations and as a result unanticipated rising costs. Bad economic data, overoptimistic sales expectations and entrenched managerial assumptions are also causes of the spread of complexity through the organisation. The effects of these factors are interrelated and compound the resulting complexity in unexpected and nonlinear ways.

Increasing complexity also carries other challenges namely unintended consequences, both positive and negative, and difficulty in making sense of a situation.

Unintended consequences are mainly the result of interactions in parts/events in the system, without being initially considered or intently initiated. This often happens when products and services are developed without a full understanding of the environment, which sometimes is not fully accessible .

Environment here stands for variables such as technology and design aspects of a product/service, customer preferences and unexpected behaviour, regulatory and legislative changes and sometimes lack of change in regulation, which can prevent the use of advanced technologies in a context based on trust from customers, such as aviation or medicine. Another example of where complexity can be a barrier to innovation is a highly intertwined supply chain system within and between industries. Often a crisis in one part of an industry or an adjacent industry may cause failure to innovate for a company when it is unaware of how the industry and its supply chains are transforming.

Finally rapid change in the business ecosystem due to rapid advances in digital technologies, in particular of the sort that enables players from entirely different markets to enter and successfully compete with incumbents for products and services can outperform any innovative products that were painstakingly developed for the incumbent’s markets. Sometimes the success of new entrants is mainly due to new business models and network effects that they bring into the new market rather than the product features itself.

More than ever businesses need to scan the environment to detect shifts in technology trends, in markets, and in the competitive landscape that they operate in. The causes at the basis of many of these shifts are:

New levels of complexity
Transformation of the basis of competition, mainly through disruptive digital technologies particularly Artificial Intelligence, blockchain, the Internet of Things and, Augmented and Virtual Reality.
Challenges of regulation for emerging industries
Skills surplus and shortage
Automation
Security and privacy
Consumer trust
Indirect competition (industries that have never been your competitor will become your competitor for higher value products and services)

In order to work with complexity there is a need to break things down into smaller units and simplify. However, the key for success is to maintain and cultivate awareness of the underlying dynamic complexity of the context at hand. This helps to avoid the often detrimental mistake of taking assumptions that were made in order to create “workable simplicity” as facts. Well-informed awareness of complex systems enables the utilisation of their emergent properties to generate truly novel business opportunities.

Get in touch to find out how we can help you.

References:

Learning to Live with Complexity by Gökçe Sargut and Rita McGrath Harvard Business Review September 2011.
Innovation Versus Complexity: What Is Too Much of a Good Thing? By Mark Gottfredson & Keith Aspinall; Harvard Business Review, November 2005.

Celebrating 3 years of Camrosh: Dealing with complexity so you don’t have to

At Camrosh we’re at the forefront of innovation and technology and it’s been our role for the last three years to give businesses, in any stage of development, the insights and confidence to thrive in the face of uncertainty.

What we do

In giving business leaders the insights they need to succeed, we enable them to make sense of complexity and take informed action. We deliver a clear understanding of current and emerging trends to facilitate confident decision making for managing business change and sustainable growth. Like a puzzle, we bring your business and industry’s constituent parts together to give an informed picture of the whole, allowing for optimal strategic planning and execution.

“How do new disruptive technologies affect what my company does?”

“How are the latest and emerging innovations changing my customers’ businesses and their expectations?”

We’re glad you asked. Here’s how we’ll help.

Our Discover – Anticipate – Execute approach

Discover: to see, get knowledge of, learn of, find, find out, or to gain sight or knowledge of (something previously unseen or unknown)

Understanding the external environment of your business is key to designing and executing successful strategy. At Camrosh we use different tools and practices to create a full picture of that external environment for you, including technology and marketing landscaping, expert viewpoints, voice of customer and, current and future market opportunities.

Beneath the complexity and chaos of hype and information overload, there is a current that can be detected and exploited ahead of the curve. That’s where our discovery phase comes in. In discovery we give you the insight you need to explore technologies, markets and opportunities to innovate in complex and changing industries.

Anticipate: to realize beforehand, foretaste or foresee

Success is as much about choosing not to do something, as it is about doing something that was unimaginable before. We therefore work with businesses to anticipate technology trends and future scenarios, so you can shape your business’ future, and in doing so we help you stay ahead of the competition.

There are numerous ways we do this with you, including benchmarking the future, scenario planning, strategy gaming, startup watch and others. Whichever tools we use in the anticipate phase, the objective is to focus on the future to best prepare, shape and ultimately maximise the potential of your business strategy.

Execute: to carry out, accomplish, perform, do, or to produce in accordance with a plan or design

As a responsive dynamic system, the current business environment calls for well executed strategies. Our work on discovering your external environment and helping you become an anticipatory business will put you in good stead as we help you take the necessary steps for directing your investments, be they financial, technological or in human capital.

In working with businesses we give them a strong advantage over competitors when it comes to dealing with volatile and changing markets, supply chains and regulation, among others. Our approach to the execute phase is simple: plan, connect and acquire. We provide the strategic advice to enable you to implement decisions with confidence for long term impact to your business, and help you build a decision process that reduces assumptions and increases the robustness in your ongoing strategy execution.

Our Discover – Anticipate – Execute approach is highly adaptable and being technology and industry agnostic, we specifically select the most appropriate analysis tools for the requirement of the project.

Get in touch to find out how we can help you.

How Can IoT Help Your Business Grow?

Have you considered how the IoT can help your business? Have you adopted any IoT solutions? Have they changed your ability to save costs, increase efficiencies and reinvest in growth?

We would like to invite you to take part in the Internet of Things Survey 2017.

Filling in the questionnaire does not require any technical knowledge. You can find the survey questionnaire directly here: https://survey.zohopublic.eu/zs/gACCDE

We intend to publish the results by mid November 2017 and will be sharing the outcomes on the survey website (https://digitalsurvey.tech) and disseminate the results via various social media and through umbrella organisations.

The survey will be evaluated anonymously and your information will not be shared with any third parties.

We thank you in advance for your participation and are looking forward to receiving your replies to help create the momentum and the community for business growth and success in the UK. [Read more…]