Transformation: the ultimate change

Pascale Viala

Vice-Dean and
Corporate Office Director
SKEMA Business School

Fabien Seraidarian

Director of Knowledge Transfer and of the Global Executive MBA
SKEMA Business School

The media reflect strategic moves by companies. Whether these are the result of changes in the environment, technological challenges, the geopolitical context or deliberate and carefully orchestrated choices, they give rise to large-scale projects. Does this involve change or transformation? From one to the other, there is only one step… a methodological one.

For 50 years, companies have been confronted with significant changes that have disrupted organisational life, like external growth, new information systems or innovations. With the acceleration of business life, companies need to adapt constantly, i.e. make incremental changes to respond to customers’ and stakeholders’ expectations “as they go”. Beyond specific changes, companies need to adopt a more macroscopic and strategic view. This involves managing the transformation, which means changing the organisation’s structures, competences, business models and even its culture.

What does management theory say about this? The approach is primarily sociological and psychological: Lewin (1951) emphasises the role of individuals within social groups in understanding the dynamics of change. He outlines three stages: “unfreezing” to understand the issues associated with the symptoms; “changing” to provide answers, and “refreezing” to recreate new practices. Individuals develop resistance to change, which can be explained by a reluctance to abandon routines, fear of the unknown and the effort required to learn new things.

Change then became a management issue, particularly in terms of supporting computerisation and the integration of new technologies. Kanter’s wheel of change, for example, has inspired many of the change management approaches used by consulting firms.

But in the mid-1990s, a large number of projects undertaken by companies struggled to achieve their goals. Kotter (1996) then carried out a study on around 100 companies and concluded that nearly 70% of change projects fail. Apart from the methodological issues, he believed that is is crucial for managers to be mobilised and committed: they must be trained to act as agents of change throughout the eight stages of his model, and thus become managers who can communicate the approach.

Given the mixed results of instrumental approaches, the emergence of collaborative sociology is fostering the internalisation of engineering efforts within companies and a move away from an overly prescriptive approach in favor of co-constructing change – and indeed transformation processes – with stakeholders. Change management and implementation are becoming more agile, and experimentation is developing learning loops. Transformation, meanwhile, enables organisations to move forward and thus create adaptive capabilities, facilitate employee engagement, and develop management skills or even a corporate doctrine.

In this issue of Glimpse, several cases provide evidence that companies have matured significantly. Whether it involves conceptualising transformation issues, building their own model or defining their approach in order to turn it into a doctrine and grasp the complexity of projects responsibly, decision-makers are ready for any challenge!