The New Normal of unpredictability became a constant creative destruction. It calls that the old is constantly replaced by the new. Nowadays, dynamic imbalances are the only stable state of enterprises. Furthermore, the even more expensive production cost in any industry sector calls for permanently managing the unexpected. What actually is possible, however, is the transformation into the New Normal. And the transformative effect that emanates from different perspectives leads to new considerations.
Let’s see this from a special angle; to get rid of business punches such as energy crises, inflation rates, central rates, the aftermath of the Covid crisis and the Ukraine war yet force almost every industry sector and most companies to rethink their customer business processes, product development processes, migrations, and R&D Engineering. Managers had to realize the hard way that mainstream statements and models are becoming more and more obsolete as simply pushing harder within the old boundaries will not ensure windows of opportunity out of the creative destruction.
The truth is reasonable for human beings
Leaders are forced to mitigate some of the business punches and their effects and coordinate their organization’s response. Hence, leaders, managers, and executives should face a new reality in their leadership style – continuing with town hall meetings with verbiage talks won’t work anymore (if they ever did). However, a perpetual problem has even been tightened up – the appreciation of experts and the relationship of employees’ trust in their leaders. It is an iron rule of social psychology that people know if they are appreciated and taken seriously. Another fact is, believe it or not, that nowadays are more decisions made at the operational level than at the strategic management level. It is clear as daylight that experts need to trust their executives so that productivity and economic thinking are flourishing at all levels.
Incorporating permeable hierarchal structures
This is where the permeable hierarchical structures come into play. Managers must also trust in people’s ability to associate with new circumstances if they got understandably informed otherwise, knowledge workers don’t feel appreciated, and productivity won’t increase. The executive video information in a town hall meeting such as …we need to create an environment that enables everyone to really be their true self; where people feel they can speak up, challenge the status quo and drive change… does not fulfil the criteria of the sensemaking information loop. We have often introduced live talks with executives and used communication tools which ensured that employees could ask direct questions which were also shown on a screen monthly. Not surprisingly employees started to re-trust their managers because of the possibility to give knowledge workers a chance to understand companies’ facts better. The reason is that anything that can be misunderstood will be misunderstood.
Hence, this formalization and institutionalization is a way to standardize organizational maintenance of stability and decode verbiage. We were taught in many projects that it is not wise to defend what you must give up anyway. The old boundaries of continuing with yesterday’s logic should be outpaced by the improvement of proactive management practices. On the other hand, knowledge workers need top-down authority for joined-up effort, strategy, and worst-case scenarios. However, one does not exclude the other.
