Transformation has become part of everyday business language. We talk about digital transformation, AI transformation, cultural transformation, sustainability transformation and operational transformation, sometimes all within the same organisation. There are good reasons for this. Technology is moving quickly, customer expectations are changing, costs are under pressure and organisations are trying to work out what the future means for them. The need to change is real, but I sometimes wonder whether we have made the process of transformation far more complicated than it needs to be.

A transformation programme can quickly become a major operation in its own right. There are steering groups, consultants, workshops, project teams, workstreams, reports, new systems and regular meetings to discuss the change. In a large organisation, some of this structure is obviously necessary, but there is a danger that managing the transformation becomes almost as demanding as running the organisation itself. The people doing the everyday work can then become increasingly distant from something that is supposed to improve the way they work.

The people closest to the problem often know a lot about it

Think about an average working day in almost any organisation. Someone knows that a particular process takes too long. Another employee knows that customers keep complaining about the same thing. A supervisor has probably found a workaround for a system that does not quite work, while somebody in another department may have solved almost exactly the same problem without anyone making the connection.

These things happen every day, and this is where a great deal of organisational knowledge exists.

The problem is that we do not always have a simple way of capturing it. An employee might mention something to their manager, raise it in a meeting or simply find a way around it and continue working. Eventually that person may leave, the workaround disappears with them and somebody else has to discover the same solution again.

At the same time, the organisation might be spending a considerable amount of money on a transformation programme designed to discover how the business could work better.

There is something slightly wrong with that picture.

Transformation can become something that happens to people

One of the biggest risks with large transformation programmes is that employees begin to see transformation as something being done to them rather than something they are part of.

A new programme is announced, presentations are delivered and people are told what will be changing. There may be surveys, workshops and opportunities to provide feedback, but many of the important decisions may already have been made elsewhere.

This can make ordinary employees switch off from the process. They still have customers to serve, targets to meet and everyday problems to solve. Transformation becomes another thing competing for their attention.

Yet these are often the same people who understand the weaknesses in existing processes better than anyone else.

Research from McKinsey has previously highlighted just how much organisational change employees are now expected to absorb, with the average employee experiencing significantly more planned change than a decade ago.

Perhaps the answer is not simply to become better at managing more transformation programmes. Perhaps we need fewer barriers between everyday work and organisational improvement.

Transformation should become part of today’s work

I think there is a simpler way to look at transformation.

Someone notices something that could work better. The organisation captures that observation. It considers whether the same issue exists elsewhere, decides whether it is worth changing, tests an improvement and looks at what happened. If it works, the organisation learns from it. If it does not, it learns from that too.

That is transformation.

It may sound more like continuous improvement than the large transformation programmes we are used to, but perhaps the two should be much closer together.

Transformation should not compete with today’s work. Improving how the organisation works should become part of today’s work.

This does not mean abandoning strategy or allowing everybody to change whatever they want. Organisations still need direction, priorities and leadership. The difference is that strategy should provide the direction while the organisation continuously learns how best to get there.

If reducing customer complaints is an important objective, for example, the people dealing with customers should have a simple route for showing leadership what is actually causing those complaints. If improving productivity is important, employees should be able to identify unnecessary work rather than simply being asked to work faster. If sustainability is a strategic priority, the people buying materials, using equipment and managing waste should be connected to that objective.

This is where transformation starts becoming real.

AI could make transformation simpler, or make the problem worse

AI makes this particularly interesting because almost every organisation is now considering what it could mean for productivity, jobs, customer service and future competitiveness.

It is relatively easy to buy an AI tool. It is much harder to understand how work should change because of it.

This is why AI transformation cannot simply be an IT project. An organisation needs to understand which activities AI can genuinely improve, where human judgement remains important, which skills employees will need, how processes should change and whether the technology is actually improving the organisation rather than simply making individual tasks faster.

There is also a risk that we respond to AI by creating another layer of transformation bureaucracy. New committees, new reporting requirements, new policies and new programmes can all have a purpose, but employees should not need to navigate a complicated process every time they discover a useful way of improving their work.

AI itself could help solve some of this. It can help organisations capture observations, identify recurring problems, connect similar ideas from different teams and bring previous knowledge into current decisions. Instead of asking an employee to complete another long improvement report, technology could make it easier to record what happened, what they think could change and what was learnt.

The test should be simple. Is the technology reducing the distance between identifying a problem and improving it, or is it adding another layer between the two?

Transformation is also about learning

One reason transformation becomes complicated is that organisations sometimes try to design the entire future before they begin.

That is understandable. Leaders want plans, budgets, milestones and some confidence about where the organisation is heading, but transformation often happens because the future is uncertain in the first place. Technology changes, competitors respond, customers behave differently and ideas that looked sensible on paper do not always work as expected.

A transformation plan therefore needs room to learn.

Try something, understand what happened, keep what works, change what does not and make sure the organisation remembers what it has learnt. The strategy can remain clear even when the route towards it changes.

This also reduces the pressure on leadership to have every answer from the beginning. Good leadership is not necessarily knowing exactly what the organisation will look like five years from now. It is making sure the organisation is capable of learning its way towards that future.

Connecting today’s organisation with tomorrow’s organisation

In my recent article on Kodak and Fujifilm, I looked at how organisations can overlook valuable capabilities sitting inside their own businesses. Fujifilm’s knowledge was not valuable only because it could produce photographic film. Some of the science, technology and expertise behind that product could be applied elsewhere.

That same principle matters when we think about transformation.

Before an organisation rushes to build something new, it should understand what it already has. What skills exist within the workforce? What technologies have already been developed? What have previous projects taught us? What processes work particularly well? What customer knowledge do we hold? What relationships, ideas or capabilities could be useful somewhere else?

Transformation should connect these things to where the organisation is trying to go.

The process then becomes much more natural:

• Understand what we have
• Understand where we are going
• Identify what could be reused or combined
• Find what is missing
• Act
• Learn from what happens and update what we know.
• Repeat the process all over again, not once every three years when a new transformation programme is announced, but continuously.

Making change easier to participate in

The organisations that adapt best may not necessarily be those spending the most money on transformation. They may simply become better at connecting the people doing the work with the people making decisions.

A cleaner noticing a recurring building problem, an engineer finding a better process, a salesperson hearing the same request from several customers or an administrator discovering unnecessary duplication can all contribute to transformation. They should not need to understand organisational development terminology to do so.

The staff’s job is to understand their work. The organisation’s job is to listen, connect what it learns and decide what to do with it.

That is where organisational intelligence becomes important, not simply about collecting more data or producing more dashboards, although these can be useful. Effective transformation rarely feels like “doing a transformation”, it helps the otganisation understand what is happening across its people, processes, systems and relationships, then connecting that knowledge with where it wants to go.

Transformation becomes much less intimidating when we look at it from a. People’s perspective, it should not be a program that is brought in from nowhere, disrupts the existing flow of work, with little reason why the change is needed.

Perhaps, then, there is a simple question leaders can ask when reviewing any transformation programme:

Are we making the organisation better at changing, or are we simply making change more complicated?