What Is “Transformation”?

When we talk about “transformation” in changing how a business works, we’re talking about a really big change. It’s not just about moving some things around or doing the same things a bit differently. It’s about changing everything: what the business does, how people work together, what the business believes in, and how it does things.

Think about it like a caterpillar changing into a butterfly. That’s a transformation. It’s not just a caterpillar with wings. It’s a whole new creature. We’re trying to do something similar with a business. We’re trying to make it into something it’s never been before, something better. To do this, we need to think about the business as a whole, not just parts of it.

This is a move towards an aspirational state, a leap into the realm of the not-yet-existing, driven by the vision of a better future. Transformation demands systems thinking, viewing the organisation not as a collection of independent parts, but an interconnected, complex whole. Here, change isn’t achieved by tweaking or rearranging the old, but by transcending it, by forging a new organisational reality.