Technology, the driving force of change

Excerpts from the workshop conducted for senior managers of ANCL by CEO (Sri Lanka and the Maldives) of Franklin Covey South Asia, Ameer Ahamed.

Everything in the world is changing. Changes are taking place in people, organisations, in management and leadership. Technology has become the driving force of this change. However, the changes in technology may not bring results unless the mindset of the people who use the technology changes.

There are several economic ages in our civilisation and there are paradigm changes along these economic ages.

The meaning of 'paradigm' is the way we see, understand and interpret the world and it is our mental map of the world.

It changed from hunters and gatherers age to agrarian age and then to industrial age.

Today it has changed from industrial age to information and knowledge worker age. Therefore, today everything in organisations and people has to change to match the new economic age, the information and knowledge worker age. This change is essential in every aspect of management because management theories, concepts and practices we use today belong to the industrial age. The term knowledge worker was first introduced by Peter Drucker.

According to Stephen Covey in the industrial age we valued things such as machines, for what they produced and in the new era that we value knowledge and the application of knowledge that comes in the form of skills.

The overall philosophy in the industrial age is Kind Control and in the knowledge worker age it has to change to Unleash Talent. In the new age, leadership is not formal authority but moral authority.

Leaders and managers should be principle-centered, then opportunities for influence increase. You should be proactive and take initiatives inside your own circle of influence and gradually expand.

Culturally it has to change from boss centered to complementary team and servant leadership. In the industrial age the boss is responsible for results and, therefore, he manages and motivates. But in the knowledge worker age the culture owns results and, therefore, self manages.

The biggest challenge in this change is the strong paradigm that we are in. For anything to change we have to change our mindset. To change the mindset, a person has to leave his comfort zone. This is the challenge in many business organisations. Normally adults are reluctant to change compared to youngsters and most people are reluctant to come out of their comfort zones.

Appropriate changes in business organisations will bring massive results. Even a small physical change in an office, a change in the working environment, may create a new feeling and new energy to work and will finally bring rewards. For instance, after Google brought a completely new working environment it had a zero attrition rate in India.

Sri Lanka is in the forefront of this change compared to other South Asian countries. Our business organisations and government organisations are keen to change and they are changing.

Our IT companies lead this change. If you take leading IT companies such as Virtusa, WSO2 and 99X Technologies their management systems have changed to suit the new information and knowledge worker economic age, because they work purely with knowledge workers.

Not only IT companies, but even in manufacturing organisations with long production lines, the change is taking place and some designations such as supervisor are no longer there because in knowledge worker era, control is not over people. Organisations have systems and control is over the systems and, therefore, there is no need to have supervisors to control people.

Instead of specialisation that limits a worker to produce small part of a product now, it considers his or her feeling of contribution to the organisation and society at large. Banking operation is an ideal example where the whole business is built on the control of the system and not the people.

Most companies block internet, email or social media access to their workers during working hours. But innovative models have been introduced by some companies.

For instance, Virtusa has introduced its own social media network for workers. There should be paradigm change in leaders and managers to change organisations.

Changes are taking place in government organisations but the view or the mental map of the people in the public sector has not changed and as a result most of the people do not see these changes.

For example, changes that have been taken place in organisations such as SLT, State banks, Bank of Ceylon and the People's Bank are massive and in some cases they are better than their private sector competitors.

The technology and the mindset of the people in these organisations has changed. My opinion is that the public sector is more receptive to change simply because they are waiting for it. People change if they have benefits or better results and the public sector needs it. Therefore, there will be massive changes in the public sector in the future.

GW