Management of Change: Organisation Development and Design — Microcredential — Open University — 2/4
Continuing my Management of Change: Organisation Development and Design Microcredential from the Open University series. This is the second of the four essays that I produced for the course, enjoy.
Task 2
Write an opinion piece of 500 words, giving your thoughts, informed by your study of the course content, on how an organisation of your choice should develop going forward into an increasingly digital working environment.
This should be based on an organisation you are currently working with or one with which you are familiar. Use the stakeholder value map technique in the Design Thinking Toolkit (available in Step 5.1) to frame your writing.
Underpin your work with the content from Weeks 5, 6 and 7, which concerned design thinking, managing change and leadership at the meso level.
Please refer to Step 8.19 for a list of activities which you might find helpful to underpin your work.
Deloitte, my employer, was one of the 181 companies that publicly shifted policy to maximising value for all their stakeholders, not just shareholders (Business roundtable, 2019, cited in Collins et al, 2021, Step 8.14). They have taken this change at a difficult time where a global pandemic has sped up the adoption of digital working environments (Savić, 2020). However, being at the forefront of this change creates a value opportunity for Deloitte to identify best practices internally and use this knowledge for consultant engagements going forward.
To achieve these goals Deloitte needs to identify what innovations are needed to transform to the new normal (Gurbuz and Ozkan, 2020). There is an ever-increasing number of approaches to developing these innovations but in this essay, we will focus on Human-centred design (Collins et al, 2021, Step 5.2). Human-centred design, Veling (2014) argues, is very effective in the domain of digital transformations and is made up of three main elements, Technology, Business and Human Values (Brown, 2008, cited in Collins et al, 2021, Step 5.2). The technology part is always growing (Nagy et al, 2013), for example, seventy years ago AI was purely a concept in its first conference (Bruderer, 2016) and now it is at the forefront of what is possible (Özdemir, V. and Hekim, 2018). The businesses element is also growing, as they take account of benefits to employees, suppliers and communities they are involved in as part of the 2019 commitments (Business roundtable, 2019, cited in Collins et al, 2021, Step 8.14). As a result, the amount of innovation that can be discovered by this approach is always increasing as shown in Figure 1.
Deloitte has lots of highly skilled employees in each of these areas, as a result, once they learn the tool, they will be able to come up with the innovations themselves, increasing buy-in (Bragaw, 2017). Once best practice is discovered, consulting engagements in this area can be sped up due to domain experts only needing to refine them rather than create from scratch. Hence, I believe it is very important for Deloitte to start investing in this area.
However, the tool is only half of the challenge. The tool needs to be adopted and the innovations that they discover being tested internally. This is where leadership needs to take on a more contemporary style (Collins et al, 2021, Step 6.8) with a more transformational outlook (Collins et al, 2021, Step 7.3). However, all companies will be demanding leaders with the skills, behaviours, values, knowledge and experience to enable this transformation as a result they may not be able to recruit everyone they need. As a result, it is more important than ever to help employees progress through the leadership pipeline (Collins et al, 2021, Step 7.10) and improve the employee experience so that they stay (Collins et al, 2021, Step 8.8) during this transition to the digital workplace.
References
Bragaw, D. (2017). ‘Work With Me: How To Get People To Buy Into Your Ideas’, Journal of Applied Christian Leadership, 11(1), pp.96–97.
Brown, T. (2009) Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. NY: Harper Business.
Bruderer, H. (2016). ‘The birth of artificial intelligence: first conference on artificial intelligence in paris in 1951?’. In IFIP International Conference on the History of Computing (pp. 181–185). Springer, Cham.
Business Roundtable. (2019) Business Roundtable Redefines the Purpose of a Corporation to Promote ‘An Economy That Serves All Americans’. Available at: https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redefines-the-purpose-of-a-corporation-to-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans (Accessed: 29 November 2021).
Collins et al. (2021) ‘A broad categorisation of leadership theories (Step 7.3)’, BZFM802: Management of Change: Organisation Development and Design. Available at: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/management-of-change-organisation-development-design/2/steps/1204563 (Accessed: 29 November 2021).
Collins et al. (2021) ‘Defining design thinking (Step 5.2)’, BZFM802: Management of Change: Organisation Development and Design. Available at: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/management-of-change-organisation-development-design/2/steps/1204518 (Accessed: 29 November 2021).
Collins et al. (2021) ‘From shareholder value to stakeholder value (Step 8.14)’, BZFM802: Management of Change: Organisation Development and Design. Available at: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/management-of-change-organisation-development-design/2/steps/1204591 (Accessed: 29 November 2021).
Collins et al. (2021) ‘Leadership at different levels (Step 8.8)’, BZFM802: Management of Change: Organisation Development and Design. Available at: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/management-of-change-organisation-development-design/2/steps/1204570 (Accessed: 29 November 2021).
Collins et al. ‘(2021) Six human workplace practices (Step 7.10)’, BZFM802: Management of Change: Organisation Development and Design. Available at: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/management-of-change-organisation-development-design/2/steps/1204585 (Accessed: 29 November 2021).
Collins et al. ‘(2021) Traditional and contemporary (Step 6.8)’, BZFM802: Management of Change: Organisation Development and Design. Available at: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/management-of-change-organisation-development-design/2/steps/1204544 (Accessed: 29 November 2021).
Gurbuz, I.B. and Ozkan, G. (2020). ‘Transform or perish: preparing the business for a postpandemic future’. IEEE Engineering Management Review, 48(3), pp.139–145.
Nagy, B., Farmer, J.D., Bui, Q.M. and Trancik, J.E. (2013). ‘Statistical basis for predicting technological progress’, PloS one, 8(2), p.e52669.
Özdemir, V. and Hekim, N. (2018). ‘Birth of industry 5.0: Making sense of big data with artificial intelligence,“the internet of things” and next-generation technology policy’, Omics: a journal of integrative biology, 22(1), pp.65–76.
Savić, D. (2020). ‘COVID-19 and work from home: Digital transformation of the workforce’, Grey Journal (TGJ), 16(2), pp.101–104.
Veling, L. (2014). ‘Human-Centred Design for Digital Transformation’, IVI White Paper Series.
