We are living in special times with opportunities and threats brought about by an epochal transformation with new political and social developments, significant scientific progress, disruptive technologies, new ways of communication and virtual cooperation, and new concepts for energy, mobility, and environmental protection. Enterprises and private individuals cannot avoid being highly impacted, and there is a feeling that, tomorrow, nothing will ever be the same again, but nobody knows what the “new” will look like in detail. It is more than likely that the old traditional state and different shades of new states will exist in parallel for some time—similar to the situation at the end of the nineteenth/beginning of the twentieth century—and, likewise, disruptions; personal, systemic, and political catastrophes; or breakthroughs might be around in a different guise.
The significant uncertainty, the lack of orientation, and increasing number of additional players and factors to cope with need a strong leadership response, especially in the case of enterprises, social organizations, and public institutions. This response has to be technically simple but intellectually sophisticated in diverse facets—and the response, interpreted and well specified, has to have the potential to give sustainable orientation and to lead to successful action. It goes without saying that it is a tremendous challenge but one which must be attempted.
We already touched upon some of the challenges in our book Leading International Projects (Dignen and Wollmann 2016) and continued the discussion on our experiences with change projects and transformative concepts. Our exchange seemed so fundamental to us that we have focused on it in our next step.
We decided to explore the epochal transformation described above inclusive of the various gaps between diverse organization design concepts from classical to agile, and we were confident to have good preconditions in spite of the dimensions of this task. The cooperation of people from different geographies, nationalities, careers, industries, and professions over nearly 2 years had created a desire to continue working together.
It was—certainly—helpful that the exchange on “what’s next” took place in Tuscany, where the joint endeavor had started years ago, and was nurtured by an environment far from each contributor’s business routine, easily connecting intellectual, sensual, and emotional perspectives and supporting every kind of lateral thinking. Those environmental—non-ritualized—preconditions have become very rare in daily business life and are thus highly appreciated if something new has to be developed.
Focus of the book developing from various roots (authors’ own figure)
The severe and demanding issue for the book has already been touched upon from a broad bundle of perspectives above, covering political, sociological, technological, cultural, organizational, and especially leadership aspects. Let’s go now a bit more into detail.
For the world of enterprises, it is some sort of “common—at least often shared—knowledge” that the “old business world” is going to die as a consequence of an epochal transformation based on new technologies, especially concerning data management, communication styles and platforms, global cooperation with a cut in value chains, politics, trade, changes to tax and customs regulations, etc. “Old world” means in the perspective of organizations—only to take some buzz words—top-down decisions, Taylorism, command and control, hierarchical and departmental silos, micromanagement, short-term thinking, focus on career and position, etc.
All of this will vanish, or at least change significantly, in the new digital and data-oriented world as a consequence of one of the biggest paradigm shifts for business in the last two centuries. And it is obvious that things are already changing for enterprises. The impact of huge enterprises from places like Silicon Valley such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Uber, and also of upcoming start-ups and the respective demands and decisions of customers have obviously changed daily life.
Companies want to be like a fleet of start-ups but at the same time be a big strong organization controlled by a sustainable financial and organizational background.
Units want to start from scratch with zero “contaminated” history but with the service of an established organization and with collected professional experience and expertise.
Enterprises want to have an explorative “learning from our mistakes” culture but run a traditional performance management system with fixed objectives to keep results consistently stable.
Organizations want to be agile and flexible but at the same time predictable (e.g., in terms of budgets, profits, etc.) over a long period.
Enterprises want to offer customers individual treatment but use quite inflexible algorithms for customer interaction, denying that mathematical models have to be optimized to fit to reality and not the other way around.
To summarize, companies would love to have a combined new and old world, only based on the advantages (which increases the range of different interests and opinions of the key stakeholders of an enterprise tremendously).
So, to repeat the reference to Lenka’s song: the interesting observation and hypothesis is that an organization today wants to be everything at the same time. We will challenge this exciting hypothesis in all our cases. Assuming the hypothesis is right, this means that issues such as ambiguity and ambidexterity are not coincidental. For leaders, this means to continuously travelling with their teams through multi-polar fields of tensions and having to make decisions, step by step, milestone by milestone. This must not be arbitrary but needs fast management and decision-making processes and rules that are intertwined with the company’s purpose.
As one might expect, such a situation is a good starting point for a collection of business and management literature and presentations to support leaders and experts. In such books, a lot of reasonable theory and concepts have been drafted—and also instructions in the form: “The 10 tools you have to use for success.”
Firstly, current practice is far away from the proposed theories and concepts (Fig. 2), especially in the context of organizational design and culture.
Secondly, the existing concepts and their practices—e.g., between classical organization design and agile organization design—show significant gaps which are not covered so far all, neither theoretically nor in practice.
Thirdly, and connected to the first two reasons, there are not so many concretely applicable ideas for the transition of the organization to the future state. Instead, we have to understand that, as each situation is more or less unique, significant work has to be done to apply concepts in an ideally tailored way and to discuss how such tailoring might work.
Fourthly—and a bit connected with the second point—we frequently experience that the different parts of large organizations are in very different maturity and cultural states, whereas one part is a modern mature network organization, another part is in the pioneer or start-up phase and the third in the phase of systemizing achieving a functional orgchart the first time. So, concepts fitting for the one part do not fit necessarily for the other parts. In general, a gap between the classical theory of organization design (mostly driven top-down) and the theory of agile organizations (nearly exclusively driven bottom-up) has to be urgently closed.
What is our shared understanding of past, present, and future; of organization, development, and maturity; of gaps, contradictions in our pictures of organization, and transformation? (authors’ own figure)
This all underlines that the current book is about one of the most important, challenging, and urgent leadership challenges for organizations facing developments that are more complex and ambiguous than they have been for decades: a situation where nobody can exactly know what the—even near—future will bring although many people with a great deal of confidence pretend to do so (and even publish recipes and solutions to remedy the situation).
In contrast to this, none of our author and editor team believed that they have any absolute truth, but rather a strong belief that most of the challenges are solvable with a well-selected group of reasonable people who are able to discuss—honestly and calmly—all the aspects and commit to going on a journey of exploration where directions and destinations might change in order to get the best result.
The sustainable purpose of an organization (bringing new orientation and certainty to the people that we want to engage for our joint endeavor)
The mind-set of an organization in a permanent state of flux and how to cope with this—we will call it a “travelling organization”
The capability of connecting our valuable resources such as aims and concepts, strategies and processes, experiences and competencies, balancing and interlinking peoples’ interests and ideas in a flexible manner towards joint success
We will describe and define these pillars in detail below.
As we all—also the authors—are looking for meaningful orientation, especially under volatile conditions, the concepts developed have already been quickly tested in practice, and their application in the authors’ practice has already turned out to be very helpful during the finishing of the book. Our business life became more effective, and we succeeded in coping with complex situations faster.
Leaders who are prepared to radically rethink and redesign their enterprises and its journey in the light of the epochal transformation in which it finds itself, in order to create a true shift in performance and value by giving a sustainable purpose, forming organizations and teams that are ready for an explorative journey, and introducing connectivity as a pillar for organization and leadership.
Program and project heads and teams who are expected to consistently make the necessary transformations in this environment, bringing the three aforementioned pillars to life and revitalizing them on an ongoing basis. They have to be encouraged to act as travelers and connectors, following their committed purpose, facing organizational conditions that are characterized by barriers, bottlenecks, and belief in classical structures such as top-down settings.
Consultants and trainers who support individuals, teams, and organizations to build up the required mental and methodical capabilities.
Advanced students and academics who want to develop their understanding of modern creative organizational strategies.