The senior executive team at Westland Helicopters—the largest division of GKN's Westland Aerospace—was suffering the turmoil of changing from a primary reliance on a mature military market to an additional reliance on a rapidly growing civilian market. The division's production runs had been extremely small, typically just four helicopters, each customized for a specific type of military mission—submarine hunting, for example, or tank busting. That production style was fine as long as military budgets were big. But after the end of the Cold War, the market became much more competitive, and the division came under intense pressure to achieve economies of scale in development and production. In other words, it needed to change.
Change it did. Indeed, Westland Helicopters became awash in so many change initiatives that it had trouble getting helicopters out the door. It had trapped itself in a cycle of repetitive-change syndrome in which executives addressed problems created by one wave of creative destruction with yet another wave of creative destruction that only compounded the problem.
Blind to this vicious cycle, the overworked senior executives faced another change: launching yet another product-development change program to obliterate what was wrong with the existing program. Fortunately, the executive team was able to see that it could not continue to do its work while taking on more change management responsibility. Sick with repetitive-change syndrome, this crack team of highly committed executives agreed to try a new approach—resulting in a rare fairy-tale ending for a division so overwrought with change initiatives.
By looking around the division and its parent company to see what they already had in place that could be reused to craft the changes they needed, the executives found an easy, cost-efficient solution. First, they discovered that they already had a very good product-development model in the company's in-house software division. With a little customization and translation, they realized the process could be adapted to helicopter production and therefore minimize product design costs. Second, they could improve production economies by reusing the knowledge of employees who had come to the division from the automotive sector of the parent company and therefore already had experience with mass production of cars. Finally, they redeployed another product proposition that they called the "Barbie Doll," which had long been in use in another division of the company. This enabled them to build a base helicopter that could be dressed up (or recombined) with any number of accessories—guns, bombs, and avionics for customers in the military to play with. The strategy allowed for mass production as well as mass customization, enabling the organization to reap economies of both scale and customization. Of course, the change was not pure creative recombination. Some creative destruction was necessary, but much less than had been the norm.
| You look only at existing parts of the organizational architecture for your change solutions. |
Unlike the highly disruptive and painful change modalities that typically accompany creative destruction, creative recombination facilitates the kind of smoother, easier, and more cost-efficient transformation that Westland Helicopters was able to foster in the end. The division did not need to obliterate the past to create the future: Few layoffs occurred, few new software or machines were purchased, few brand-new ideas were either invented or imported from outside, and little cultural shift was required. The overall effect? Westland Helicopters achieved much less destabilizing and painful change, with great success.
Change without pain, then, comes first by knowing what you already have that you could reuse in your organization (rather than creating, inventing, or purchasing something new) and second by knowing how you can reuse, redeploy, and recombine these existing elements of the firm into new configurations. That is creative recombination in action.
Let us now explore this notion in more detail by examining what specific kinds of things an organization might already have lying around its workshop with which it can work to effect positive, painless change.
What to recombine
One of the key challenges in creative recombination has to do with the possibilities you see. Finding those organizational elements that you can recombine effectively begins by knowing first where to look. What follows is a mapping technique that highlights the full range of possibilities and acts as a tool to make sure you don't miss any good ones.
The five recombinants
Look at any organizational architecture and you'll find five common elements, or recombinants: people, networks, culture, processes, and structure. These are the organizational equivalents of the steel rods, old leather belts, and metal disks found lying around my father's workshop and with which he crafted my potter's wheel. Put another way, they are the things you'll find sitting right in your own corporate basement: They are the organizational elements that you can recombine to create painless change.
The people in your organization, of course, are your employees. These employees create networks among one another; that is, they exchange information, favors, resources, and even gossip through the firm's informal systems. The firm's culture comprises its values (for instance, decision by consensus), norms (what the firm considers normal behavior, such as working past midnight on weekends), and informal roles (becoming an informal mentor, for instance). Processes are the recurrent activities—such as purchasing, production, or distribution—that enable a firm to transform inputs such as raw material, labor, or capital into outputs such as products or services. Structure refers to the organizational boxes, lines of communication and reporting, staffing, and control mechanisms that managers put in place to make sure that employees carry out processes effectively and efficiently. Thus, selling is a process, whereas a sales bonus is a structural control mechanism to guarantee effective and efficient sales.
| Finding those organizational elements that you can recombine effectively begins by knowing first where to look. |
When you craft change through creative recombination, rather than eliminating existing people, networks, culture, processes, and structure and replacing them with new ones, you instead work with what you already have. In other words, you look only at existing parts of the organizational architecture for your change solutions.
The shrewdness of the leaders at Westland Helicopters was evidenced not so much by the fact that they figured out how to mass produce helicopters, but by the fact that they saw what they could recombine to do so. They discerned two existing elements in their processes—a software development process and the Barbie Doll process—that might be useful, as well as the invaluable automotive industry knowledge that some of their people possessed. And they saw that they could recombine these elements to create a production line that could generate hundreds of helicopters at a time, rather than batches of only three or four. In so doing, the executives also revived yet another organizational recombinant—a forgotten value, latent in Westland Helicopters' culture, for "making do with what we have."
The result was that Westland Helicopters crafted a painless, cost-efficient change by creatively recombining processes, people, and an aspect of its culture. Imagine how much time, effort, and money the division would have wasted—not to mention the disruption created—had the executive team continued to invent "new" solutions to its problems rather than leveraging its existing recombinants!
Another way of thinking of the five recombinants is as a structure of Legos, atoms, or Tinker Toys—those multicolored plastic hubs with holes that can be linked together by plastic spokes to create all forms of combinations and configurations. Change in a Lego or Tinker Toy structure does not have to take place by creative destruction—ripping the entire structure apart, throwing away all the pieces, buying a new set, and rebuilding an entirely different structure. Rather, change takes place by tinkering—taking one block from one substructure and adding it to another. In still other instances, entire Lego substructures can be recombined with other substructures and can play a new role in the overall structure.
Figure 2-1 depicts the organizational Legos: people, culture, network, process, and structure recombinants. It also illustrates how the five recombinants tent to divide along the lines of "hard axis" and "soft axis" and how they overlap when a company, such as Westland Helicopters, changes through creative recombination. The process-structure axis represents the "hard" organizational recombinants axis—that is, recombinants directly under the control of management. At Westland Helicopters, this was helicopter acquisition, production, and contracting processes, as well as the elaborate division of labor into coordinated production units. These processes were reinforced by measurement, evaluation, and rewards systems that guaranteed that each attack helicopter was delivered on schedule, with the right armament and battle-worthy qualities necessary to defeat the enemy. The network-culture axis represents the "soft" organizational recombinants axis, because recombinants such as culture and networks often tend to emerge in an unplanned fashion within an organization rather than being directly dictated by the management team. At Westland Helicopters, these soft elements included the firm's engineering culture, which valued producing fast, elegant, and lethal military helicopters rather than a better widget, and extensive social networks linking not only employees with the firm, but also some of these employees with regulators, army and air force generals, and all forms of technical specialists outside the firm.
| So instead of downsizing, redeploy your people's talents. |
Every time a firm pursues an existing or new strategy by reusing, redeploying, or recombining aspects of its people, networks, culture, structures, or processes—rather than destroying them and recreating them from scratch—the firm is creatively recombining. So instead of downsizing, redeploy your people's talents. Rather than paying for some new form of computer network to manage the firm's knowledge assets, leverage the social networks through which this knowledge is already flowing. Instead of inventing a whole new culture, turn to cultural values already present in the firm and revive or reinforce them. Rather than restructuring, reuse existing elements found in your present structure. And rather than reengineering brand-new processes, salvage perfectly good ones that have long been used in the organization.
In short, you do not start with a clean white sheet of paper and design your ideal vision from scratch. You do not slash and burn what exists in order to create the Promised Land. You start with what you already have lying around in the corporate basement. Then you use good old Yankee ingenuity, tinkering, bricolage, bulup bulusturmak, kumikaeru, and flickschusterei to futz, fiddle, jury-rig, bootstrap, cobble together, and patch your way to effective change that causes the least disturbance to everyone.
But let's take a step back for a moment. Once leaders have used mapping techniques and know what to look for—which type of elements in the organization they want to reuse, redeploy, or recombine—they might wonder what the trick is for finding useful ones. In other words, they need a search technique in addition to the mapping technique.
One search technique is to ask, "What do I need in order to produce my desired end?" and then go about looking for those means in the organization. At Westland Helicopters, for example, the executive team began by clarifying the end they needed to pursue: to move from batch producing to mass producing helicopters. That clarity and focus enabled them to discover what organizational recombinants they possessed could serve as means to this end—and became a key early step to finding the means to painless change.
The other search technique is to ask, "What do I already have lying around in my basement, and what emergent opportunities can I capitalize on?" The task then is to find a good end to which to put those existing means.
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Figure 2.1: The Recombinant Map
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