What do you need (to get done)? We can help you if:

You are a leader, manager, director, HR or Organisational Development lead, consultant, coach, advisor, sensei, change agent, catalyst or a workplace activist, and:

• you need to transform your organisation to be more adaptable, more sustainable, more innovative, more engaging and/or more client centric, or …

• you are tasked with adapting a particular approach company-wide, in your department or in your team, such as lean, agile, responsive, holacratic, teal, conscious, beyond budgeting, sustainable, B-Corp or sociocratic, or …

• you want to shift the organisation into 21st century thinking, such as introducing distributed leadership and organic self-management, but are not sure which new approach to take or how to go about it, you just know the organisation needs to reinvent itself.

If so, we may be able to help you by engaging your whole workforce affected, tapping into your organisation’s latent collective wisdom and facilitating change co-creatively. We believe we have a more natural and engaging way of achieving transformation quite fast and effortlessly.

How can you shift the fundamental paradigms and basic mind-sets plaguing your organisation? How can the organisation experiment with new ways of organising, and know that they have given it a good shot without fear, before deciding whether to go ahead with it full-scale?  How do you prototype and iterate change itself?

Your Key Challenge:

Research indicates that around 60-80%* of implementations of new working practices or change interventions in organisations are either ineffective, counter-productive or below expectation. Many are said to fail, though it would be more accurate to say they degrade or disintegrate over time. Management often struggles to achieve ‘buy-in’: well-intentioned implementation strategies cascade down through the hierarchy, effectively imposing reform on unwilling staff.  Resistance and antipathy are the natural human responses.  The reverse also occurs – change that staff want is blocked by management.

Compulsion isn’t effective in practice.  People have a habit of resisting directives, or feeling disengaged when not consulted.  Conversely ideas and perspectives of staff are often not heard – innovative suggestions rarely flow upward through hierarchy. Staff become disengaged, the common symptoms of which are dissatisfaction and dysfunction.  Consequently, after an initial burst of enthusiasm or reluctant compliance, new systems falter and we revert to old habits. Change, all too often, doesn’t last.

The problem with change and the alleged resistance to change is not change itself, but rather the imposition or mandation of change, without consultation, resistance to an alien system in which they had no part in shaping.    If people are not asked, and if strategies and change programs are developed by executives behind closed doors, and then mandated, then people will oppose them. What should be happening is that those affected be invited into the process, invited to co-author the new story, invited to co-create and customise the new emerging way.

How to do this at scale? Thankfully, there is a way forward.

“[People do not] accept imposed solutions, pre-determined designs, or well-articulated plans that have been generated somewhere else.  Too often, we interpret their refusal as resistance.  We say that people innately resist change.  But the resistance we experience from others is not to change itself. It is to the particular process of change that believes in imposition rather than creation.  It is the resistance of a living system to being treated as a non-living thing.”  Margaret Wheatley

Find out more about How you achieve your goals the Caterfly way

* Estimates vary but there is broad agreement across many studies and across many contexts and industries, and 2/3 is a commonly used figure. Please see our resources page to find out more.