How software companies stay relevant and responsive during organisational transformation

If there have been frequent leadership changes, chances are there’s been frequent structural change and the workers in the organisation are suffering change fatigue and are less likely to commit to longer-term improvement as they fear it’s expected to be blown away by the next restructure.

Reorganisation can take various forms – some organisations might reorganise to better reflect the value they provide customers. This might involve approaches such as Value Stream Mapping, Team Topologies, organising around customer journeys or various other ways of grouping by value rather than by function. Other organisations seek to better align with different dimensions of the organisation, such as when matrix reporting lines are introduced to connect employees to the various pressures and priorities of the business. Some may be responding to issues or audit findings that suggest a correction is needed. Regardless of the driver for change, the effect is usually similar – a lot of effort for something that is very disruptive and it may take considerable time to know if the effects have achieved their aim.

In this article, I look at what I call ‘evolutionary change’, reflective of how an organisation could adjust as needs change, an alternative to the typical approach to structure change in organisations – the dreaded reorganisation! I share that evolutionary change is possible, but to do so successfully requires care and some key considerations to be addressed. I delve into the risks, when it’s appropriate and when it might not be and what benefits this approach can bring.

Why consider evolutionary change?

Some of the reasons leaders should consider an alternative approach to change that is more evolutionary include:

• Organisations have often had several significant changes and there’s change fatigue from large, disruptive changes
• There’s more ability to assess if individual changes have worked when applied separately. Hypotheses can be tested
• Learning can be applied to subsequent changes without the same risk of disillusionment as when there are many simultaneous changes and everyone is trying to learn simultaneously
• The blast radius of any individual change is less
• Even when a significant change is necessary, minor changes and adjustments are often needed and they are better if enacted sooner rather than bundled up with the large change

Taking an evolutionary approach can reduce risk and increase learning. To understand this better, let’s examine the alternative, large-scale approaches to structure change.

The limitations of large-scale change

We can debate that some changes must be large-scale and unavoidable. I’ve experienced such changes – for instance, when a company acquires another company. There’s an inevitable change that everyone is instantly aware of.

We can agree that organisations make changes regularly at all different scales. These changes may include team-level agreements, policy changes, structure changes, practice adoption, contract updates, new meetings and ceremonies etc. They generally make efforts to improve some aspect of the organisation.

Some organisations tend to bank these changes into larger batches so they can be communicated at once and the shock of the change and any temporary effects of disruption can be experienced simultaneously.

Key challenges this approach can represent are:

• Not everyone will understand each change, why it’s being made and how it might affect them.
• It’s hard to detect what changes led to what results. Are some changes that were intended to streamline delivery making it worse?
• The blast radius of change is maximised as this approach often affects many more people than a piloted approach to an individual change
• The opportunity to engage people in feedback on the change formulation and to get meaningful feedback on the change as it takes effect is reduced

When changes become about a large number of discrete changes that are supposed to address a large number of discrete issues, it becomes very likely that changes start to be included that are whimsical. By this, I mean that they seem like a good idea but there lacks any fundamental theory for how the change addresses a given issue and certainly low likelihood to go back and assess if a given change was successful in addressing a given problem.

Evolutionary change is possible (but care is needed)

Large-scale changes appeal to organisations for a range of reasons:

• They don’t know any other way
• There is a belief that a shock to the system is needed or a pleaster needs to be ripped off
• Incremental changes without a clear vision forward are not a good experience

It is possible to evolve towards improvement rather than an all-at-once change. That said, applying an agile approach to change is insufficient. That’s not a knock on iterative approaches – what I suggest has an iterative and adaptive approach at its heart, but it must be paired with some view of the future – the direction the team is heading is realised enough to address common concerns.

What is required to support successful evolutionary change?

So what is required to take a more evolutionary approach to change in an organisation? There needs to be:

• A clear view of where the organisation is evolving based on the best information available and an openness to developing the plan as new information becomes available
• A clear line of connection between the results the organisation is achieving and the contribution of all teams
• An openness where the best response to an issue is that it’s ‘on the table’
• A support mechanism for teams as they go through change
• Approaches to supporting agency for employees and providing opportunities for people to get involved with change as they are ready (think adoption curve: early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards)

When evolutionary change may not be appropriate

Some changes cannot be undertaken evolutionarily. For instance, there may be unavoidable consequences from changes in market conditions, company acquisitions or demergers or other changes that must be larger or all at once. However, many more changes could be more successfully conducted as evolutionary changes but they are typically managed as large and very late changes.

This post aims to share practices for supporting change with a tighter learning loop and a clear but dynamic vision that evolves as the organisation learns.

Where evolutionary change can go wrong

Even if leaders have overcome the common objections to evolutionary change, the experience can be damaging for everyone affected by it or anyone who worries they may be.

Leaders may leverage patterns from Agile software development to iterate their organisation’s design. But people are not software and their work is part of their identity and livelihood – they have things at stake that such changes may disrupt.

Indicating potentially widespread change without visibility on what’s ahead is inhumane as it can put most people in a state of uncertainty and dread for extended periods.

‘Isn’t evolutionary change a commitment to more frequent change and mightn’t that lead to change fatigue?’ you may well ask. Yes, this is a risk that needs to be managed. Small, incremental changes happen in organisations all the time. I suggest that these can be better managed and, additionally, those changes in how people organise themselves around the work can also be handled systematically. Smaller-scale changes may not affect all people simultaneously like reorganisations do so the sort of change that can trigger change fatigue is less common.

I have observed first-hand organisations that have tried to take a purely iterative approach to change without any visibility of where they are headed, learning as they go and using that to decide where they will head next. This involves wrapping change in concepts such as sprints or iterations and, as a result, has caused massive anxiety and uncertainty. It’s not that these concepts can’t play a role, but they do not address the parts of change that cause worry, affect status, role definition, certainty and even livelihoods.

Mitigating the risks associated with evolutionary change

Given that the main challenges with evolutionary change relate to how changes affect people, let’s consider how we can mitigate the main risks. All change involves risk. These risks are not limited to evolutionary change.

Firstly, there may be some concern that incremental changes may trigger change fatigue. However, this is rarely the case for more minor changes because not only are the scope of changes more minor and easier to digest, but they generally impact fewer people.

Another risk with incremental changes is that they are not presented within the context of a longer-term vision. While changes must respond to the present situation, it’s also essential to see what collective changes are moving forward. Without this, people may feel uncertain because they know many changes are coming but it’s hard to predict what they might be and who will be affected.

To support evolutionary change, it must become a capability of the organisation

The practices I describe in this document are not effective if only applied once. Instead, they must be developed as a capability across the organisation so it can continuously deploy and monitor change, including structural change.

This means ‘systematising’ a set of complementary practices that empower people throughout the organisation to identify the need for change and how to assess the appropriate response. In my next post, I will cover some of these practices and provide details on how they work.

Assessing if evolutionary change fits your organisation’s needs

So now we can see that evolutionary change is possible and an often underutilised tool for supporting more humane change. It must be applied in the right situations and supported with appropriate systems and visibility of where you are headed. Still, with some care, the result can be higher agency for your workforce and an organisation that is more responsive to changes in the market and, as a result, more competitive.

Here is a summary of the considerations when assessing if evolutionary change is a good fit for your situation:

• Is evolutionary change relevant to our situation?
• Are we committed to supporting what is needed to do evolutionary change successfully?
• Is there general support for evolutionary change at the leadership level?
• Have we considered that evolutionary change may go wrong? Are we monitoring for this and have appropriate mitigations ready?

If you are committed to improving your organisation but have grown wary of the large-scale reorganisations, come and chat with us about alternatives.