Empowering Transformation: Governance Strategies for Future-Ready Organizations

Governance in transformation assumes the organization is managing a growth strategy where frontier technology will be harnessed to enable new value creation and productivity. People - augmented with new capabilities and empowered to innovate - adapt to and create new ways of working, embrace new behaviors and mindsets, and bring human ingenuity into an automated enterprise. Governance is the “how” to the “what” in the emerging operating model, together with its stakeholders, initiatives, and roadmap. It brings the needed methodology, policies, structures, change, and communications for a workplace and workforce in transition.

Both the pinnacle and bedrock of the growth strategy are the clarity and credibility of the organization’s purpose and reason for being beyond delivering value to its shareholders, as well as values and commitments that are ideally unique to the business and centered around sustainability goals such as the wellbeing of people, the sharing of prosperity, and the welfare of the planet.

Governance in a Transformational Business Strategy | © LDS Inc.

All the while, the business operates with “porous walls” in a growing constellation or ecosystem of interconnected industries and markets, and with dependency on fit-for-future economic management and regulatory practices, together with sustainable global cooperation. Latency in developing these policies and systems, along with seismic changes in social and political sentiments, sweep through the business, creating both anticipated and unexpected headwinds and tailwinds to strategy, operating plans, and people agendas.

Governance, then, manages the disruption to the organization and its people by helping to build the new cadences, systems, and structures needed for the business to succeed. Capabilities such as innovation, resiliency, agility, optionality, and incrementalism must be built into the model by design. Governance in transformation is a journey of big bets and options; it anticipates confidence that the next step may only be possible once the first step is taken. Critically, it readies workers and leaders to fly by new instruments while building new models for collaboration among peers that are made achievable only when robust dialogue can challenge assumptions, change minds, and lead views to evolve.

The System of Governance

With transformation as its backdrop and a growth strategy and emerging operating model as its reference point, governance factors and then organizes and manages a system of critical, interdependent moving parts. It ensures that important questions are answered within the work of transformation. For example:

• Are key initiatives prioritized in our overall strategy and roadmap?

• Do we have sufficient cross-organizational enablement and control in place to govern transformation?

• What is the relationship of technology investments to business capabilities needed, and have our operational models been built to maximize these investments?

• How has transition planning for the workforce been aligned with our strategy and plans?

• Are cross-functional capabilities and new work practices harmonized across the business where value is leverageable or processes are dependent?

• What behaviors hold up the model, bind the organization, and calm people through unsettling times, ensuring the transformation’s sustainability?

Governance, then, is an investment in a rigorous system of oversight designed for the unique circumstances of transformational change. It is broad scale and top-down, aligned to the Strategy Office or led by a senior team appointed to guide the overall program and manage performance and results.

Inside its program, related business and technology initiatives execute in a function or BU and ladder up to the transformation strategy (i.e., development and readiness of leaders designed in a corporate function like HR; a strategy for worker experience run in Operations; key architectural or technical capabilities delivered by IT; and so on).

A key idea, though, is that governance ensures both horizontal interests and numerous points of integration across stakeholders and initiatives - including dependent processes and capabilities - are harmonized, coordinated, and represented as a workforce strategy and a rational roadmap.

When governance works well, it accelerates change and develops adaptation as an organizational capability. It detects and minimizes drags on transformation and removes obstacles to momentum. It ensures uniformity and connects the dots for people by reinforcing the relationship of projects and activities to goals and vision. Ultimately, governance is a people-first program and approach, advancing a platform of inclusive participation, experimentation, early adoption, and planning for the impact of automation. Good governance anticipates and smooths the sharp edges caused by the acute stress of reshaping the organization while the proverbial plane is in the air.