Mental Models of Transformation
Draft for Harvard Business Review, Mark Bonchek, PhD
It seems that every business these days is undergoing some kind of transformation. Digital transformation. Marketing transformation. Business transformation.
Like innovation and culture, transformation is a concept as important as it is hard to define. Without a shared mental model, people can easily talk past each other or perceive resistance where there is only misunderstanding.
As human beings, it is our nature to see the new through the lens of the old.Transformation is an unfamiliar concept, so it gets filtered through our existing models of change. As leaders, it is helpful to understand these mental models, both to engage people where they are in their thinking and also to shift them to new and better models.
For most people, their most immediate experience of transformation in the workplace is re-organization. This typically means redefining roles, reassigning people, finding efficiencies, optimizing processes, reducing headcount, and replacing leadership.
The mental model of re-organization is medical. The patient is ill and needs a radical intervention to restore it to health. Parts of the corporation (Latin for “one body) need to be removed, repaired and reconnected. Problems needs to be diagnosed, and the right medicine prescribed. We can see this mental model at work in a recent HBR article: “No surgeon would start operating on a patient before conducting tests and reaching a diagnosis. And when excising a tumor, he or she would be careful to avoid removing healthy tissue. So should it be with a reorg.”
If employees hear transformation as re-organization, their role relationship with leadership will be one of doctor-patient. Intellectually they will question the necessity for the change, have difficulty accepting the diagnosis, and will approach the change with fear and worry.
A more positive model for transformative change is development -- the process by which an organism steadily matures from infancy through adolescence and adulthood. Development is a familiar model in a corporate setting. As managers, we coach employees around their career development, while specialists in organizational development guide the organization towards higher levels of capability and performance.
The development model of change is additive. Over time, we steadily acquire new skills, knowledge, and relationships. These expand our ability to adapt and succeed in increasingly complex environments.
In transformation efforts, the development mindset is what informs training programs to promote new skills and behaviors, re-examinations of value and mission statements, and the creation of stretch targets or moonshots. The assumption is that with ambition, hard work, focus, and teamwork, the organization will transform.
The problem is that transformative change is discontinuous and disruptive, while development is linear and incremental. Developmental efforts are therefore helpful but insufficient. We need mental models (other than surgery) that can guide an organization through exponential change.
One such potential model is evolution. In its original Darwinian sense, evolution describes how the survival of the fittest leads a species to adapt to a changing environment as natural variation and accidental mistakes become sources of competitive advantage. In the case of the peppered moth, after the industrial revolution, the species became darker in color. This wasn’t because the individual moths changed color. Rather, the naturally darker ones avoided detection against sooty backdrops. The keys to fostering evolutionary change are creating the right conditions through diversity, competition, and selection.
A pharmaceutical company recently employed an evolutionary model to accelerate the transformation of its analytics function. Using agile and design thinking, they created sprint teams to engage internal customers in co-creation sessions. Instead of giving the assignment to a single team, they empowered multiple teams to work in parallel with the same goals and objectives. The best ideas from each team will inform the ultimate strategy - a survival of the fittest towards a shared purpose of creating better health.
By definition, transformation is a change in form, nature or character. It makes sense that transformations are often framed as a journey. A journey takes one from one place to another, and a transformation takes one from one state of being to another. Leaders employing the mental model of a journey should keep in mind that there are different kinds of journeys. No one would say a transformation is a vacation. But there are important differences between an exploration, quest, and migration. As you design your narrative for change, be sure you are clear which kind of journey you are on.
Explorations and quests are both voluntary journeys. Explorers set out for new discoveries; they are seeking what they don’t already know. Those on a quest set out for a particular object; they are seeking something already known. Typically these journeys involve a return back to one’s home, with tales of adventure and access to new wealth and knowledge.
By contrast, migration is an involuntary journey. Faced with threats to their safety and way of life, people leave their home, usually never to return. They reach their new destination with tales of hardship and triumph, often with a newfound sense of identity. It becomes a hero's journey in which everyone is the hero.
The original pioneers of the digital revolution were able to inspire their teams with narratives of quests and exploration. They transformed not because they had to, but because they wanted to. Most companies today are transforming out of necessity rather than choice. This means the narrative needs to blend the different kinds of journeys. Like Shackleton and his crew, you have to take a situation that wasn’t of your choosing and turn it into one that is empowering and energizing.
First, you need to make a compelling case why you can’t stay where you are. People need to see how the status quo leads to certain demise and that a journey of transformation is the only hope for survival. Second, you need to build confidence that the outcome of this journey will be successful. Paint a vivid picture of the better future -- the “promised land” - on the other side of the journey. People need a vision that pulls them through the disruption and hardship. Don’t minimize the struggle; rather, use it it to create a stronger sense of solidarity. Finally, point out the camaraderie, discoveries and achievements that arise along the way. Your teams might start out as reluctant refugees but they can finish as ambitious explorers.
Let’s take stock of where we are with our portfolio of mental models. We need a model that is empowering to individuals and transformative to the organization, enabling discontinuous change and exponential results. Surgery enables discontinuous change but is disempowering to people. Development is empowering but incremental. Evolution can be empowering and exponential, but can be relatively slow. Journeys are useful for the “why” and “what” but don’t address the “how.”
For the how, we can return to biology and find a discontinuous version of development in metamorphosis. Most common in insects and amphibians, metamorphosis is “a conspicuous and relatively abrupt change in body structure through cell growth and differentiation.”
Perhaps the most well known example of metamorphosis is the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly or moth. The caterpillar creates a cocoon or chrysalis. Inside, the caterpillar breaks down its existing structures into a nutrient-rich soup and “imaginal disks” of highly organized cells that grow into the parts of the new body.
The metamorphosis of a caterpillar is a good mental model for something that needs to transform as it matures and grows. This might be a startup as it begins to operate at scale, or a new venture within an established company. But what about “dual transformation” in the core of a business? Can there be a metamorphosis from one mature state to another? The answer is yes, but we need to look to a different insect for inspiration.
You might not know that grasshoppers and locusts are the same species. Normally, these short-horned grasshoppers are solitary and stay in one location. But when the environment changes - in particular drought followed by rapid vegetation growth - they transform. They become gregarious, meaning they prefer to be with other grasshoppers. They become bigger and stronger, able to fly long distances. And they begin to breed abundantly. An environmental trigger leads a sparsely scattered population of sedentary and benign grasshoppers to transform into a coordinated swarm of locusts roaming the countryside to access new supplies of food.
Like the butterfly, the locust’s transformation is a result of latent DNA that is activated by hormones and triggers. The butterfly transforms based on an internal trigger automatically at a certain stage of its development. The locust transforms based on an external trigger when faced with a threat to its survival and an opportunity to grow and prosper.
Leaders should employ both models of metamorphosis in their transformation journeys. Every company has "latent DNA" that can be activated with the right set of tools. These include a shared purpose with associated metrics, principles that empower distributed decision-making, social currencies that build trusted relationships, and network effects to unleash exponential results. As leaders, you have to become comfortable with the liminal “soup” of the chrysalis and cultivate an ability to unlearn the old ways of working.
The second step is to apply this transformational DNA and new mindset to both the core and the edge. The already-mature core needs locust-style metamorphosis, as it transforms from the hierarchical to networked, bureaucratic to entrepreneurial, and incremental to exponential. The newly-hatched edge initiatives need butterfly-style metamorphosis, as they mature from infancy into adulthood, develop consistency and scale, and ultimately connect back to the core.
All of these mental models are relevant to the transformation journey. As a leader, your job is not to pick any one model, but to know which model to use in which situation. You need to develop your people, guide the evolution of the organization, lead the journey towards a better future, intervene when things go off track, and catalyze the metamorphosis of the core and the edge.
As Andre Gide said, “[We] cannot discover new oceans unless [we have] the courage to lose sight of the shore.” The right mental model gives us the courage to leave the past behind, the confidence in a better future, and the creativity to solve the problems along the way.