Like the onerously overused “innovation,” transformation may be getting a bad rap. Both are broad, overstated terms that mean very different things to people, depending on background, experience, industry. Both must be defined in their contexts of use before we can have any serious discussion. The wide range of meanings and uses of transformation should give us pause before going too far with the term in mixed company. But transformation (as in organizational) has been merging closer to design (as in envisioned, creative, structured changemaking and sensemaking).
Time magazine may have just eased our quandary by making Humantific, and its transformation practice, a sort-of household term. People may know what we mean now. In Different by Design, Time reports on New York’s Humantific, and the West Coast’s IDEO and Jump Associates. While we’ve seen tons of press on IDEO in recent years, the 3 paragraph exposure of Humantific (with a nice shot of GK and Elizabeth) was refreshing. The brief piece keeps it light, there was nothing mentioned about their practice areas or methods (Strategic Co-creation, Visual Sensemaking, Complexity Navigation, Innovation research).
Also see:
NextD.org (Transforming that Sustainability Thing)
No post would be complete without advocating my perspective on transformation. in a paper presented at the 2007 INCOSE Symposium I suggested:
The general thrust of transformation efforts aims toward significant organizational changes that institutionalize desired behaviors necessary for long-term business success. While some management thinkers may place the responsibility solely on management to accomplish transformation, in our view successful transformation depends on the collaboration of all stakeholders in the enterprise, at a minimum by adopting the new practices as full participants. This view is supported by Kotter (1995), whose findings show transformation efforts fail to the extent that organizational communication and collaboration fails.
Indeed, that seems to be a suitably complex, interesting design problem.
