I was reading Venkat Ramaswamy and Francis Gouillart’s article Building the Co-creative Enterprise in this month’s Harvard Business Review and was really inspired by the experiences of the organisations they outlined. I was struck by the parallels with our experience in using collaborative approaches to strategy alignment and major organisational change.
We work to get leaders to understand their organisations systemically from the ‘outside-in’, rather than the traditional ‘inside-out’ perspective. We get them thinking about value creation for all stakeholders – including customers, employees and shareholders. Bringing stakeholders with diverse perspectives into the strategic planning process as well as into any organisation design/alignment effort aids this understanding, challenges all sorts of assumptions and, far from being the recipe for anarchy many leaders fear, results in more robust decisions that can be implemented more smoothly and with a faster return on investment for all parties.
People support what they help create
There is also a nice intersection with employee engagement research and wisdom from real world practice that emotionally engaged employees create emotionally engaged customers – who generate significantly greater profitability and loyalty. Co-creation is a great way to achieve this. It’s not ‘fluffy’ or ‘soft’ stuff – but at the heart of building sustainable value creation in any enterprise – profit, non-profit or public sector; the organisations that ‘get it’ and put it into practice, continually outperform the ones that don’t.
True engagement is not the same as putting posters up, running employee surveys, recognition schemes and having the CEO declare that “our people are our greatest asset”, “we value our customers” etc. etc. in the annual report and company newsletter – but really engaging people into the process of creating the organisation’s future – doing real work.
It works too in highly unionised environments with supposedly ‘demoralised’, ‘de-motivated’ and ‘militant’ workforces – as La Poste found; giving people the opportunity to co-create the future creates exactly the opposite and drives up customer satisfaction and business!
It’s easier and often more comfortable to continue doing the same things, fighting familiar battles moaning about uncooperative unions, workforces, awkward customers and impossible to please shareholders - repeating well-established, legacy patterns - but is that what real leadership is all about?
- Contributed by Simon Davies
News, Articles, & More