Process cultivates behavior, and behavior cultivates culture. Company culture is a combination of work procedures, work management structure and method, and shared assumptions in the organization.
In business entities, the ability to change is necessary to operate with flexibility. The degree of flexibility required depends on the industry. Generally, fast paced industries require higher flexibility.
What happens when an entity lacks the flexibility to adapt to the changing environment? The company runs the risk of being left behind the competitors by conducting undesirable operations, such as pursuing an outdated business model or procrastinating a decisive move. For example, companies with expertise in music record production had to change to become profitable with lower manufacturing volume or in other ways when compact discs emerged. The inability to change at the right timing can mean serious decline in profit.
Some of the factors that contribute to the undesirable operations are fixed mindset, common practices optimized for the previous workflow, and management systems. Many cases exist where people with expertise favored continuing the same practices and resisted making drastic changes. Company structures and procedures tuned to support the previous operation model efficiently can retard organizational acceptance for new ways of thinking and for new work sequence.
Resistance must be overcome for progress. Typically, specific individuals are assigned as leaders to make changes. However, the changes that a leader can generate by himself can be limited. When the size of the operation is large, many people must be mobilized, so a set of processes and systems supporting the new tasks become necessary. The tools defining the new operation are the processes that will promote new behavior in the organization, and when the new behavior spreads, assumptions and mindsets change to build a new culture for the renewed business. In this way, the operational processes and structures become the catalyst for sustainable change.
The new process by itself will not produce change. The new business must be defined according to the business strategy before breaking down into process components, and the deployment schedule must be planned to generate organizational acceptance and training.
The change process is a long-term commitment by the organization. In ideal cases, the long-term direction is accompanied by short-term goals that generate outputs contributing to the continuation of the business.
