Inspirational sofa session with Jan De Visch: Three hidden insights from managing organisational hypergrowth

The new normal: growing three times more sustainably.

Jan De Visch – Exec. Prof. Flanders Business School (KU Leuven) & the University of Twente, Managing Director Connect & Transform, Chief Ecosystems Officer Dynamic Collaboration App

Is a new way of collaborating and business development emerging in the post-Corona world?

The pre-Corona trackrecord of changing is poor. As many as 70% of digital transformations fail. In their quest for more agile organizational forms, the initial enthusiasm in 80% of the companies that start it off with Holocracy, Sociocracy 3.0, Spotify, Teal, and Agile is waning, and new ways of working are not becoming entrenched. However, the managers involved often rely on a range of tools and the professional help of change management experts. It is still another story to put this into practice. Breakthroughs are not forthcoming. It seems as if the management theories used form a compendium of half-hearted introductions and outdated mantras without any fundamental foundations.

 

Gallup noted significant growth in employee engagement during the Corona: 36% of employees are engaged. This is high, but still sadly low.

 

Three hidden dimensions in the development of collaboration are increasingly coming to the fore, namely the impact of organizational structure, the estimation of how employees form a perspective on challenges and problems, and the dynamics that go along with perspective differences in teams.

 

In the following normal, we rethink our organisation from these three insights. The first insight is that the essentials in functions and roles must allow employees to make a substantial difference. This is in stark contrast to a focus on activities that must be performed. The second insight builds on how employees evolve over a lifetime and how this evolution affects their awareness, their problem approach, and their “collaborative approach. This complements the one-sided focus on competencies and skills. The third insight is that the key ingredient of winning teams is collaborative thinking, bringing things together while thinking. Again, this is in stark contrast to the view that the chemistry between team members and the behavioral skills associated with it make the difference.

 

In this talk, executives will discover a range of powerful tools to enrich their approaches so that they can achieve a real quantum leap in sustainable business development and ultimately create a more humane organization.