The Decision Pivot

THE DECISION PIVOT

Helen Keller, Nick Vujicic and Stephen Hawking are all great inspirations. Like thousands others, they were born with disabilities or encountered them as they grew but did not give up. Then there are the likes of Aamir Khan who transform their bodies to suit the movie roles and the likes of colonel Sanders, who transformed his life in his 60s after retirement starting the KFC franchise. The internet and specially showbiz is replete with many transformation stories. Most of them celebrate how an individual overcame a physical condition (body shape, illness, disability etc.) to become a more resplendent version of oneself. They invariably focus on the determination of the individual and the transformation process followed by them.

Can the same be done for an organization?

Let us look at the differences and similarities between a human transformation and an organizational transformation process. This can help us identify both opportunities to harness and pitfalls to avoid.

Let’s begin with a similarity. In humans the transformation begins in the mind. In an organization, it is the mind of the leader. In most organizations people work to earn a living. The stakes of an employee are limited to a narrow responsibility area. The stakes for leaders are the entire organization. Just like for a human to transform the first concrete step is that the mind fixes itself on a target, for an organization, the leader must make a decision to transform. Any leader who would depend on circumstances or external consultants for determination is much less likely to succeed in making it happen. The decision that triggers off the transformation happens in the mind of the leader.

After this, the differences between a human and organization come into play. While brain/mind controls the body parts, the relationship between a leader and other employees is not that straight forward. Body parts do not have a mind of their own and they rarely rebel and quit. Occurrences like paralysis, amputation and dystrophy are more an exception rather than a norm. In an organization, however, employees have a mind of their own. They have their likes and dislikes, values and assumptions and their “free will”. What a hotel guest experiences depend much more on how the bell boy acts rather than what the chairman thinks. How happy you are with your latest gadget is more likely to depend on the actions taken by the assembler and the designer rather than the CEO of the company. This leads us to conclude that if we are to transform the organization, the individual actions of the employees need to transform.

But how do you control the actions of a few thousand people?

The answer is that you don’t. In fact, you can’t. Neither can you get the data on all the actions, nor will you have the bandwidth to analyze all of it and even if you did that, how will you make a change? Action is a consequence of the decision made by individuals. If you want to transform the actions, you need to transform the way decisions are made.

Many would say that a transaction is a basic unit of business. I agree at a measurable level. The force that guides the transactions is the decision making of the individual employees. For transformational purposes, “decision” is the fundamental unit of business. It is the pivot point. If you want to transform the business, you need to transform how decisions are made in your organization.

We use 4 levers to transform the organizations. These are the pillars on which we build a sturdy business. These pillars are- “Strategy”, “People”, “Process” and “Technology”.

In the next article in this series, we explore the decision making process and how these pillars impact the decisions at a high level.

If you have not already read the previous article in this series, please click here.

Anatomy of a Transformation

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