What type of organizations will be successful in the future? What kinds of workplaces will work for the millennials when they take over? What can the OD professional do to leverage their own potential?
These are some of the ideas that Françoise Morissette will explore in the break-out sessions she will be leading at the 2015 Workplace in Motion Summit on April 16 in Toronto.
“Systems thinking and transformation will be the new primary competency moving forward in the future,” said Françoise. In the past a lot of organizations were organized by expertise, and although that is still important, Françoise explains that this has yielded very siloed organizations, and people in turf wars over territory. “People were more concerned with making their department successful, rather than making the whole organization successful.”
She said this way of running organizations will not work as we move forward in this fast-paced, global, complex world. “I believe that the way of the future is that organizations will be designed to produce certain outcomes, and the groups that are involved in producing these outcomes will have to work together and combine their expertise.”
According to Françoise, future organizations will have to concentrate more on strategic planning. “I think that the loosey goosey strategic planning that we see now is going to run organizations into the ground. They are going to have to be a lot more rigorous, a lot more strategic, and a lot more accountable in order to remain competitive,” Françoise said. “We will see much more rigor in the actual architecture of transformation, having a vision, having a plan, implementing the plan, monitoring the success, reporting on the success, and fine-tuning.”
There will be two types of organizations moving forward. “The proactive ones start thinking about those things now and start planning for it, and the reactive ones will be caught by surprise. And guess which ones will be successful?”
She sees a number of issues for OD professionals: there’s not enough of them in organizations, a lot of them are doing the wrong things, and a lot of them have no power.
OD professionals should be involved in systems transformations, but in order to do that, they will need much better analytics. Organizational development and organizational effectiveness people often don’t have data on many things which would help them make better decisions, and help managers to make better decisions. Many OD professionals (and their organizations) are missing data on:
- Their workforce
- How many people are leaving
- The reasons why people are leaving
- Retention statistics for the millennials
The one thing organizations are going to have to improve is forecasting, and forecasting depends on analytics.
“Forecasting is extremely poor. A lot of organizations are shocked by the retirement picture. They don’t have data on things like who is eligible to retire in the next five years. And because their succession planning is so bad in general, the two issues compound each other.”
Organizations need to be anticipating and following trends. “What are the global trends for workforce mobility? Very few organizations know that. I would presume that many of them don’t know the trends for domestic mobility either. Many organizations never think about these kinds of things. What kinds of workplaces will work for the millennials when they take over? It won’t be the cubicle.”
Françoise is confident that the 2015 Workplace in Motion Summit will help people start talking about these issues, start reflecting and planning for a successful future so their organization can remain ahead of the game. “This idea of really tight, synergized, aligned organizations is the way of the future. If they can’t get to that, they will lose.”
Françoise Morissette has been a facilitator at Queen’s IRC since 1994, and was made a Fellow in 2006. She played a key role in developing and implementing the Queen’s IRC’s Organizational Development curriculum intended for OD practitioners, and teaches on the OD Foundations and Coaching Skills programs. Françoise is a major contributor to the field of Organizational Development, with an emphasis on leadership. At the 2015 Workplace in Motion Summit, Françoise will lead the break-out sessions geared to OD professionals.
