The 4 Faces of Business Transformation

If you were to try for an online definition of the phrase “Business Transformation”, you’d get something in this fashion:

Business transformation is a comprehensive process of fundamentally changing an organization’s operations, strategies, structures, and culture to achieve significant improvements in performance and competitiveness. It involves rethinking and redesigning business processes, leveraging technology, and aligning organizational goals with evolving market conditions and customer expectations.

That’s quite a mouthful, you’ll agree.

As a Business Transformation professional, I’ve gotten the question “What does your work really entail?” in various forms. It’s a complex question to answer, because it is multi-faceted: my day-to-day work evolves to meet the complexity of the transformation effort and match organization’s needs based on its level of maturity. I came across a methodology sometime back that does justice to the level of effort involved in Business Transformation, and I’ve expanded on it to land on the 4 Faces of Business Transformation. So here goes:

Business transformation professionals are the folks you can rely on to break through organizational silos and work cross-functionally to unlock enterprise value. Many business leaders find their businesses falling into a rut where there is work to be done, but no clarity on what function is best equipped to take up the work. This critical work to be done then gets ping-ponged around business teams, with no true sense of ownership or accountability, creating risk of task failure. Also, the business transformation officer helps organizations find the balancing line between the strategic and the tactical/operational. Every organization must daily execute the tactical and operational to succeed, but ensure time and energy is still being allocated to the strategic. 

But first, how can we break down what Business Transformation means, to a layman? Transformation is an alternate word for “Change”, so another way we can refer to Business Transformation is “Business Change”. The work of a Business Transformation Manager, or Chief Transformation Officer, is managing the business towards its desired change. Business Change can take different forms: sometimes a business needs Strategic Change – revisions to its business model, value proposition or market positioning to help it better attain its strategic ambition. Other times it just needs Operational Change – optimizing business processes and workflows to enhance productivity and efficiency. In some instances, the change required may be a Structural Change – redesigning organization structures to improve accountability or decision-making or creating new roles/responsibilities to support strategic initiatives, or a Cultural Change – shifting the way its people think and behave to support innovation, collaboration, agility, or continuous improvement. And more recently, the kind of change businesses are seeking are of the Technological Change kind (or Digital Transformation) – integrating digital tools and platforms to modernize operations, or utilizing data analytics, automation and artificial intelligence to drive insights and efficiencies.

One takeaway from all of the above is that the Business Transformation Officer wears multiple hats. The person must be able to exist as both a strategist and an operator, to be able to design, drive and deliver Strategic and Operational Changes as required. They also must be able to balance the hard and soft parts of People Management with ease, promptly identifying what sort of workforce challenges require a Structural Change, or Cultural Change, or both. And they must be savvy enough to keep abreast of emerging trends in digital to pinpoint automation and analytics solutions that can deliver benefits to their organization. It seems like a lot to handle, but the good news is many organizations don’t require a lot of change initiatives to be happening at the same time. In fact, there is a risk of change fatigue setting in an organization when it tries to transform too many areas at the same time. Smart Business Transformation Officers are able to prioritize the transformation effort required and deliver what the organization needs right at the time they need it. And this is where the 4 Faces of Business Transformation comes in.

The 4 Faces of Business Transformation framework answers the question: What angle of business transformation should my daily work be focused on right now? It summarizes all perspectives of Business Transformation efforts into a 4-box matrix based on level of transformation complexity and stage of organization. You can think of transformation complexity on a scale, with organizations requiring all five of the earlier mentioned business changes (Strategic, Operational, Structural, Cultural and Technological) being High Complexity, and those requiring just one or two of the business changes as Low Complexity. Organizations that have been in existence for 0-5 years are characterized by minimal structures and systems, evolving business models and an emerging sense of identity and company culture. These can be considered as Low Maturity, while older organizations can be termed High Maturity.

The 4 Faces framework distills the work of Business Transformation into 4 boxes based on the two aforementioned parameters:

• Report (Low Complexity, High Maturity)
• Respond (Low Complexity, Low Maturity)
• Reimagine (High Complexity, Low Maturity)
• Revitalize (High Complexity, High Maturity)

Here’s a detailed breakdown of what each of the boxes mean:

• If your organization’s transformation status is “Low Complexity, High Maturity”, this means your role as Business Transformation Officer is primarily Report (Maintain the Growth). Your main job is keeping track of the progress of business teams towards the set annual or multi-year company goals. You’ll also be expected to promptly identify risks and escalate issues that may derail attainment of goals.
• If your organization’s transformation status is “Low Complexity, Low Maturity”, this means your role as Business Transformation Officer is primarily Respond (Innovate with Pace). Your main job is to keep a constant pulse on the operating environment, sense emerging customer/regulatory/market requirements, sell business teams on the need to adapt promptly to the requirements, and monitor their evolution towards the right path.
• If your organization’s transformation status is “High Complexity, High Maturity”, this means your role as Business Transformation Officer is primarily Revitalize (Energize the Existing). Your main job is to re-engineer capabilities to meet new business requirements, improve systems, transform the existing culture, and redesign business processes to meet emerging requirements.
• If your organization’s transformation status is “High Complexity, Low Maturity”, this means your role as Business Transformation Officer is primarily Reimagine (Build the New). Your main job is to build the requisite structures, systems, capabilities and culture the business needs to succeed in an agile and prompt fashion.

Depending on the maturity level of an organization, a Business Transformation Officer’s weekly workload may comprise all four at the same time but will be skewed heavily towards one. Also, the reality is work evolves, so what was a low complexity organization can find itself suddenly disrupted by emerging political or economic trends and find its current structures ill-equipped for sustainable operations.