Sustainability dominates the corporate transformation space. It is comprehensive, impacts all parts of a business and it is urgent, driven by hard regulatory deadlines. As more and more deadlines approach and projects fail this dominance will only increase.
This will channel resources away from the other also important transformation topics like globalization, individuality, digitalization and agility that do not go away. Our increasing VUCA world continues to demand answers for what it means to be global, individual, digital, agile and sustainable.
As the corporate transformation agendas become more complex and urgent, change pressure increases. Overload, burn-out and change fatigue loom. Yet, we cannot afford to become tired while our house is burning.
To successfully ride this big wave of change we need to learn how to put the different transformation topics in positive relationship to each other and use them as levers for each other.
This is particularly important for the two innovation drivers agile and digital. They establish new (technical) capabilities and behaviours that define the what and how organizations can operate better. Together they were the key drivers of transformation programs for several decades. Yet, they sometimes lacked direction and were done for their own merits. Automated bad processes are still bad processes.
With the dominance of sustainability on the transformation field, agile and digital are gaining a new sense of purpose that answers their ‚why‘. Putting agile, digital and sustainable into a positive relationship with each other is the the Triple Transition.
Their relationship is not one of equals. Sustainable is the outcome of all transformation activities (the WHY). Agile and digital are supporting.
The two supporters shape the internal working of an organization and act as enablers for sustainability. Digital is the dominant trend shaping the capabilities of organizations (the WHAT) while agile is the dominant trend shaping their behaviours and way of working (the HOW).
Agile and digital encompass other ways of building behaviours and capabilities. For example, the evolution of operational technology (OT) is critical for achieving sustainability of production processes like making the transition to electric and H2. Those new OTs are subject to the accelerating convergence of IT and OT that drives automation and efficiency of production processes towards Industry 4.0.
The connections between the top transformation priorities establish their levels. Two of the three levers are well established:
1. Agile and digital are internal innovation drivers for more then two decades. Digital business models enabled by customer-focussed, autonomous, cross-functional and self-organizing teams are still an ultimate innovation goal. Digital and agile transformations continue to drive each other. New technologies enable new behaviours. New behaviours need new technologies. This digital/agile innovation ping-pong to higher organizations performance seems to be never ending.
2. Digital drives resource efficiency. Doing something digitally over physically is typically less resource-intensive like completing and sending a form. Establishing digital as a lever for sustainable is called the Twin Transition. It is estimated that up to 55% of sustainable can be achieved by going digital.
The third lever, agile driving sustainable is not as well established and the focus of the Triple Transition.
Filling a form digitally is good. But wouldn’t it be even better if it is not needed at all? The Triple Transition starts with the question „do we really need this?“. If the answer is „No“ we achieve 100% carbon-neutrality. If the answer is „Yes“, we will first look into how to make the process as simple as possible. Only then we automate it. Simplification is the core the Triple Transition.
Triple transition is the combination of digital capabilities and agile behaviours to achieve higher levels of sustainability through innovation, simplification and resource efficiency.
- Avoiding over digitalizing: ask if this needs to be done at all. If the answer is „no“, retire it to enjoy 100% carbon savings.
- Simplifying over automating: reduce the steps needed to get something done and reduce complexity first before automating it to achieve, for example, scalability. This maximizes speed, customer satisfaction and carbon-savings.
- Delegating over streamlining: if a process cannot be simplified, put it into the hands of as few people as possible to reduce waiting times and communication efforts. Delegate as must as possible into the hand of autonomous, cross-functional and self-organizing teams that work close to the problem. They understand the problem best and will find the best solution in the shortest possible time.
- Guiding over prescribing: Preserve a sufficient amount of control not by prescribing in detail how the process should be done but by providing guidance on the expected outcomes and boundaries. An early example for this is the implicit guidance & control of the OODA loop that enabled autonomous combat units to stay on-mission.
The stepping stones from agile to sustainable including the recommended practices are illustrated below. Note that we at Thrive8 distinguish between systemic (planetary) sustainability which we hopefully achieve by 2050 and business sustainability as an ever-ongoing aspiration as part of an infinite game.
The complexity and multiple dimensions of the corporate transformation challenge is not easy to manage. Many organizations experience an explosion of the number of projects. In extreme cases the number of current projects exceeds the number of people in an organizations. Un-coordinated activities create resource competition and bottle-necks. In the worst case, projects start to work against each other. Our journey to sustainability with its absolute and hard dead-lines cannot take this. It takes a unified target system, courageous leadership and continuous change management and their operationalization through portfolio management to deliver successful projects.
Contact us at Thrive8 if you are ready for it.