CLIENT
Andrea Nicholas, CEO of Green Tourism
ACTIVITY
Transformation and Change
INTRODUCTION
As a consultant and coach, I have been involved in transformative assignments for over twenty-five years. One thing that has always been familiar, from the boardroom to the shop floor, is that everyone has accrued lots of wisdom from their life experiences. This wisdom is valuable to a business, as it adds corporate capacity.
All too often, a small senior team hold sway over the transformation agenda, which leaves staff feeling that their voices go unheard. Corporate capacity is left unused, engagement in the initiative drops and things start to go wrong. In a recent Scottish Enterprise study, research showed that more than 80% of transformation initiatives failed to deliver on their objectives.
There are however, different ways to approach such activities. It is refreshing when a business leader is open to thinking about their organisation as a community, and leadership as a framework in which everyone acts. This encourages everyone to share their wisdom and it improves the chances of success.
THE TRANSFORMATION PARADIGMS WE LIVE BY
Amanda Sinclair, Professor of Management, Diversity, and Change at Melbourne University, describes where we have become stuck in our thinking about leadership, and organisational transformation. Her critical appraisal of the mainstream business literature makes for dismal reading. She highlights a toxic narrative where leaders are expected to perform heroic acts of decisiveness, even when things are not clear. They are responsible for orchestrating change in others, whilst providing the energy and impetus to move things forward, even when staff are actively disengaged from the activity. These assumptions place a terrific and unnecessary load on the shoulders of senior management.
Wilfred Drath and Charles Palus, both from the Centre of Creative Leadership, point out that the leadership narrative assumes that humans are naturally still and need some external motivating force to get them going. They go on to say that people are always in motion, and rather than needing motivation, they require only frameworks in which to act in the business interest. From this position, we can start to imagine leadership as a community-wide process of coming together to make change. From there on, the magic of innovative group creativity takes place and wonderful things can happen.
Rather than using theoretical frameworks to illustrate the topic, I’ve used a real-life example because it’s much more impactful.
The following case study explores one of those occasions when a business leader decides to take an alternative approach to organisational transformation.
Andrea Nicholas is the CEO of Green Tourism and was kind enough to allow me to use her experiences in the business she founded twenty-seven years ago. I have worked with Andrea as an external management consultant and coach for the past eight years, so in a way, I’ve been on the journey too.
Andrea is a leading light in the sustainable tourism and hospitality industry. She sits on the Scottish Government Leadership Group for Tourism and Hospitality and appears in the Top 100 Women in Tourism listings in Scotland and is a Climate Commissioner for Edinburgh.
Green Tourism is a certification programme that promotes sustainability within the tourism industry. Its client-base includes a range of businesses from multinational hotel chains to visitor attractions and national parks, to small guesthouses. Its gold, silver and bronze awards are globally acknowledged as indicators of good sustainability practice.
HOW THE TRANSFORMATION OF GREEN TOURISM BEGAN
Here, Andrea explains how they came to start the transformative process:
“We had an external business assessment of where we were. From the review, we understood that our business model needed to change significantly to allow Green Tourism to survive and grow. We knew this anyway but wanted to validate our thoughts. Everyone, including me, was closely associated with the status quo, but because everything had grown and developed organically, it was difficult to imagine an alternative business model.”
It was clear to me that carrying on doing the same thing would have been detrimental. There was a lot of transactional customer activity that was no longer appreciated and that we could no longer afford. Customers wanted something more agile and fitting for their own busy schedules, and we weren’t providing it properly.”
ASPIRATIONS FOR TRANSFORMATION
Andrea explained, “My aspiration at the beginning of the process was that we would all go on the journey together. It was going to be a process that included everyone”
At this stage, Andrea and her team didn’t have a defined picture of where they were going, but they were going somewhere better than where they were now. That’s all they knew for certain.
PRACTICALITIES OF CHANGE
Transformation activity started in 2018, with a customer journey workshop in the basement of the Green Tourism offices in Perth, Scotland. There were many more similar workshops to follow, leading to small changes in working practices. There wasn’t one massive ‘go live’ event but rather many incremental steps led by different people at different times. This meant that small successes could be celebrated, and problem areas could be ironed out before they impacted the whole business.
The way Andrea articulates her concept, is aligned with many of the most successful corporations of all time. In Jim Collins’ book - ‘Good to Great’ the study of global corporate critical success factors, he writes that one of the first activities of great transformation is to get the ‘right people’ engaged and then decide where you’re going. The destination is less important than having the right people to work with. This ensures that team members are made up of excited people ready to make innovation happen.
Andrea explained, throughout the process, some people didn’t stay, deciding that they could make more of a contribution elsewhere. She said that it was sad to see old colleagues leave, but that this process allowed the organisation to evolve.
Collins also highlighted that for many leaders, letting go of control feels risky. We’re constantly fed the heroic leader narrative, and yet the concept doesn’t make sense. It’s very ineffective and doesn’t build human capacity. In Andrea’s case, leadership dispersed across her business, was going to be one of her biggest strengths, because it mitigated risks by bringing forward skills, knowledge, and experience that might otherwise be overlooked.
Another essential element of Andrea’s change initiative was dialogue—lots and lots of dialogue. Some conversations were structured with specific questions in workshops; others were meetings with unclear topics and inconclusive outcomes. Disagreement and challenges were accepted. The inconclusive and unknown were fine. Having a difference of opinion was valuable.
Andrea explained that through the dialogue process, “We kept returning to the work we’d previously started and built on it using a test and learn approach. Although the process appeared messy, it delivered a constant stream of innovation and change.”
There was a sense of collective decision making. When there was disagreement, opinions about the topic were explored over many rounds of discussions until an acceptable decision was made. This may have seemed time-consuming and unnecessary when the person at the top could just have stepped in and had the final say. However, that wasn’t aligned to Andrea’s transformative vision for her company.
The final element in Andrea’s approach was an openness to innovative thinking. If the team couldn’t decide on a topic, they returned to the drawing board. If that wasn’t sufficient, they went back to the research stage. No one needed to know the answer, but they were required to be energised enough to go and look for it. Not knowing wasn’t a sin, but not being curious enough was. The result was that they became more educated as a company.
The Green Tourism approach did not deliberately use a model from one of the well-known management gurus. Acts of exploration rarely fit into the jargon of business schools. If we were to retrofit a model at all, it would probably be Peter Senge’s Learning Organisation.
Senge described a learning organisation as, “A place where people continuously learn and enhance their capability to create the results, they truly desire, and where collective aspiration is set free.”
CONCLUSION
I asked Andrea about the scale of change she’d gone through, and she said, “We introduced a very open approach culture, and this led to a massive change. We achieved everything we were trying to do, plus we continued to next-stage opportunities more easily.”
The team ended up creating an unintended virtuous circle, each time making improvements to the initial innovative jump. A virtuous circle is defined as a situation where one good thing leads to another, creating a positive feedback loop. Innovation then becomes an endless cycle embedded in group culture.
Andrea spoke about the critical success factors for the Green Tourism team. She said that getting everyone together and listening to each other’s experience was important. Everyone had a valuable voice, sharing what it was like to work with the current systems and processes, and what good might look like. The way we all wanted to work emerged from the group discussions, and the direction we needed to go in became obvious to everyone.
Andrea concluded with, “If I’d known what we could achieve by doing it this way, I’d have started the process earlier.”
Andrea keeps reminding me, that the transformation of Green Tourism is not finished, and there is still much to do, but we are all on a journey together. I have been proud to help and support Andrea realise her ambitions.
Even though I’ve been working with Andrea and the Green Tourism team for all this time, it’s still fascinating to hear her insights and reflections.
Andrew Woodward is a highly experience management consultant and coach, supporting organisations and individuals make step change performance improvements. He has been working with businesses around the world for the last twenty-five years.
www.woodwardconsulting.net