Any manager, at least in his dreams, strives for an ideal company in which the right structure has been built, an excellent team has been assembled, an effective motivation system has been developed, and business processes have been streamlined. And, of course, an excellent business development strategy has been developed. Some people even manage to achieve the ideal after investing a lot of effort. However, changes soon begin to occur, and the beautifully assembled picture falls apart into puzzles, and conflicts arise. Essentially, at the heart of all these business problems is disintegration, preventing the parts from being put back together into a whole. Irina Sotnikova, an expert in organizational development, consultant, co-founder of A.maze.s, spoke about how Dr. Adizes’ methodology helps companies acquire sustainable integration skills. 

— As you know, the Adizes Institute cooperates with companies in almost 80 countries, and over the past years this methodology has only been gaining popularity, especially in Eastern Europe. Many companies around the world use Adizes' approaches, and this allows them to achieve noticeable changes. What are these approaches? What is the “trick” of the methodology, its key features?

The fact is that all business problems are systemic in nature. They are determined by the reaction of companies to changes that lead to disintegration. And we are talking about the disintegration of everyone and everything - the interests of people, including owners and managers, as well as business processes, organizational structure, motivation systems, powers of employees, individual departments. In large companies, especially rapidly growing ones, such disintegration processes are most common. And if you look at any of the problems, it becomes clear that it arose as a result of something whole falling apart into parts. That is, processes of disintegration arose. And in the end, the business disintegrates with the market environment.

What is the nature of the crisis and any complex phenomena in the economy? By and large, they all arise because the rate of change is higher than usual. Moreover, the changes are so significant that the company can hardly ignore them. And if there is internal disintegration, then the company does not have (or does not have enough) energy to integrate with the market. And we see that the organization becomes inflexible, difficulties arise with introducing changes, managing projects, increasing employee engagement, etc. That is, the company is not able to respond to the situation, and the reason is very simple - the disintegration of the whole. 

What kind of whole are we talking about? According to Adizes’ methodology, it includes four main blocks.

1. People.
2. Processes (in addition to business processes, these are also decision-making processes).
3. Organizational design (consists of the responsibilities distributed among employees, their powers, as well as the reward system).
4. Mission - a very important block for business, the importance of which owners often underestimate. Meanwhile, people are interested in working for an organization that provides something valuable to the market, and not just to the owner who makes a profit. 

The disintegration that occurs within these four blocks, as well as between them, significantly reduces the organization's ability to integrate with the market environment.

It is commonly believed that people are fearful and mistrustful of change. The way it is. What is the reason? People feel that changes will lead to the disintegration of something whole, which will then be difficult to put back together. And many have had similar experiences. We often start to improve something, break existing connections, but then we forget to connect these processes with other parts. And over time, companies accumulate similar experience. In addition, such factors as the size of the company and the speed of its development are important.

Someone may have the idea of not changing anything in the company. But does that really happen?! We are truly capable of building ideal business processes, hiring highly qualified employees, and developing an effective remuneration system. It is quite possible to create the ideal structure and develop the ideal strategy. However, at some point some change will happen - and the whole ideal picture will again fall apart and become disintegrated.

How to deal with this? Let's say we spent a huge amount of resources and built a successful company. But how can she continue to be successful and develop? The answer is simple: every company needs strong integration skills. We can compare it with the skill of any educated person to write correctly. That is, disintegration occurred - the company integrated again. And so on down the chain. How to acquire this skill?

Isaac Adizes developed a system for transforming an organization, which includes 11 stages. During the transformation process, the company acquires sustainable integration skills.

The first experience of completing a program for a company can be difficult, unusual and quite lengthy - up to a year or two. But subsequent steps are easier and bring greater effect.

At the very beginning, companies are helped by external consultants specially trained to work according to the Adizes method. Subsequently, all technologies are received by employees within the organization, the company independently makes changes and develops integration skills. It’s hard to believe, but in just a year, a company can change its structure, introduce a new remuneration system, review financial flows, improve management accounting, develop a strategy, and resolve issues with personnel. And this is in a calm working rhythm, without conflict situations and serious shocks. Do you think this is impossible? What if we imagine that this is also a large company, with several thousand employees? In fact, everything is real. And there are many examples of this.

I'll tell you more about 11 stages of transformation.

1. Synergetic diagnostics. The idea is for the company's top managers and key specialists to get together and discuss the main business problems. Participants find cause-and-effect relationships and begin to deal with these problems. Moreover, they accept problems, that is, from now on there are no “their/her/his” problems in the company - there are only “ours”. This psychological transition is very important. The second point is that employees receive a powerful boost of energy to cope with these problems. After all, often any changes in companies are implemented very difficultly, with great effort. If people know what they need to work hard for and get energy, then everything goes much easier. Usually implementation is difficult precisely because we have not prepared for implementation, have not worked out the main points, and have not interested the participants in the changes.

2. We already have a list of problems, priorities, and an action plan. Next, we begin to create teams that will include department heads. And this is where integration training begins - after all, we involve people in joint work who usually interact little. This could be an accountant and a production site manager. Or an engineer and a salesman. At this stage, they are interested in solving specific problems and have the necessary resources. And together they begin to act according to a certain technology. This is usually not one team, but several - their number is determined by company leaders taking into account the workload of employees and their involvement in the change process. What are we seeing in the next six months? These people work together to solve many problems that have existed in the company for many years. And during this work, they learn to accept the problems of their colleagues, understanding that if someone hindered the adoption of necessary decisions, it means that he had objective reasons for this.

3. In fact, this stage runs parallel to the previous one. While teams are solving problems, someone must coordinate, prioritize, accept results, and control. This is the functionality of a specially created governing body. Here we are not talking about the executive body that is familiar to us, which controls and punishes. In fact, Adizes does not abolish the need for dictatorship during implementation; however, according to his methodology, it is necessary to develop decisions in a democratic way. A special body is responsible for development, this is the so-called organizational development committee. He is responsible for coordinating work, making decisions on creating teams, and determining deadlines for solving problems. All team leaders provide monthly reports to the committee on what results the team has achieved. Thus, within six to eight months, the company solves a large number of quite acute problems. There is no deep dive yet - we are not talking about changing the motivation system or the structure of the company. This stage is important because people gain experience in solving problems together and achieving positive results. And this leads to an increase in the level of mutual respect and trust among company employees. This gives the company a resource with which to make more significant changes.

4. Next, we need to look into the future of the company so that we can then begin to change the structure. We are not yet talking about a full-fledged strategy, but about a vision of the future with elements of strategy. At this stage, this is enough for us to start discussing the structure.

5. And here is the main idea: how to prepare the “troops” in order to then go in the right direction to implement the strategy. The structure is primary; changing it will take time. And we are working on the structure, that is, we distribute functionality and powers in accordance with the vision of the future.

6. Working with information: adjusting the structure of finance and accounting. A new structure has been created, and now we need to set up information flows for it so that department heads have the opportunity to be responsible for the results that we expect from them.

7–10. Next follow the stages, the essence of which is to improve the results obtained. This, for example, is the “stretching” of the company, when everything unnecessary is squeezed out of it - like from a twisted wet towel. At this point, the organization is at the peak of its effectiveness, which allows it to achieve outstanding results. In addition, here we cascade the implemented changes from top to bottom - to lower levels, subsidiary divisions.

11. At the final stage, we are making major changes to the remuneration system for key employees. And we really have such an opportunity - to create a system taking into account the interests of all specialists, to balance all the deviations that could occur during the process of change. It is important that people are warned at the very beginning that we will come to this.

After going through all 11 stages of transformation (this takes about a year), we begin the changes again. And as a result, after some time, the company acquires this skill and becomes trained in terms of changes. They say that rather than introducing one major change in 10 years, it is better to shoot yourself. But in our case, when the company is constantly changing, this becomes a way of life for it. Any external change will no longer cause global shocks - the company quickly adapts and integrates with the market. That is, no crisis will unsettle her.