By Dr. Al Zeitoun, PgMP, PMI Fellow
October 23, 2024
Intro
Peter Drucker, often used the term, “The Failure of Success,” where companies become so successful at what they are doing, that they refuse to challenge the outcomes and their ways of working, even though there might be much better ways to get things done and achieve higher value.
The future of work is going to be led by strategists who also understand execution. As in Figure 1, these future strategists have the capability to see holistically End-2-End and are the kind of leaders who are not affected by limiting beliefs and rather possess a growth mindset. These orchestrators for future organizational success will not only know how to connect well across the horizontal boundaries of our organizations, they will also know how to seamlessly link the human and the digital.
Figure 1. The Future Strategist
(https://pixabay.com/illustrations/music-conductor-background-melody-5949820/)
Excellence in the future organization is about creating an experience-driven culture. This is the culture that will allow five different generations in the workplaces of the future to thrive. The level of safety of experimenting and the willingness to adapt to changing internal and external dynamics will define these future organizations.
What should the future organization consider?
Continuously revisiting what success looks like is a strategic responsibility in the future organization. The leadership focus should be on creating a culture. They should own the design of a culture that fits the needs for the organization and its portfolio of initiatives. This experience-driven culture has a distinct tone of communicating purpose and that tone is cascaded well and explored by the future workforce.
Three building blocks should be considered by the future organizations and their leaders to create an experience-driven environment where teams and key stakeholders could effectively focus on achieving meaningful business outcomes across their portfolios of initiatives.
The first building block in continual adapting. Leaders need to realize that empowering change is a strength creation investment. In these experience-driven cultures, leaders should be comfortable adjusting their organizational strategic focus to exhibit the fluidity needed to align with outcomes that matter. The classic statement “success could be our worst enemy,” could apply here and might be an inhibitor for achieving excellence.
It is essential that the future organization continues to challenge its view of success. Having the vulnerability to continually be open to learning and to realize that rethinking the future strategy an approach is a dynamic process is a must-have lens in the future regardless of the size of the organization and how successful it might have been to-date.
Related to this important view, is the second building block of continual ecosystem learning. Possessing this is a strong differentiator for future organizations and teams. A growth mindset and deep humility are required to learn from every stakeholder and partner in the organization’s ecosystem.
The 3rd building block is business model adapting and is a natural outcome of effective strategy refinement and the openness for learning. To succeed in establishing and benefiting from this building block, a high transparency in the culture is critical in order to rethink how we do business and how much we create and innovate.
Future organizations are fluid and should behave like a sponge that is relentlessly absorbing and learning new tactics and insights and quickly squeezing out the practices that don’t fit their strategic view of value. This capability will make the future organization stand the test of times whiles sustaining and scaling growth. These organizations will have to properly connect the human and the digital threads.
What threads should come together?
Two threads have to come together for the future organization. A digital thread that is data-driven and connects the components of the organization’s portfolio of initiatives to the dynamic view of value. Then a human thread focused on connecting the cascade of the intellectual direction of the organization through the hearts and creating the motivation of the initiatives’ teams on their movement towards execution. The hands of execution then combine the enablement of both digital and human to achieve the most relevant outcomes.
This integrated human ad digital tone will define the future organization and what is necessary to build the right experiencing culture of the future. To build the integration foundation, management has to set the strategic tone in the culture and enable the creation of an open and transparent environment that is investing in the trust currency.
Project and program teams have to continuously challenge their abilities to handle tough challenges, ensure positive open discussions around differences of opinion, and continue to be inclusive and inspiring in their leadership style. With GenAI and the consistency of connecting the real and the digital to innovate and deliver at scale, future organizations will be better at strategically thinking and adapting while delivering value at clock speed.
Plan Forward
This experience-driven culture of the future is built on bold leadership. Future leaders are highly open for feedback, focused on innovation, and continuously come up with ideas that might be seen as extreme or controversial. Risk appetite and the strength of risk-taking are typically at the core of this bold leadership.
Leading project into the future, powered by AI, is a new dawn for initiatives’ professionals. It will require a recipe that puts adaptability at its center though. This digitalization level leaves the door open to crystalize the human creativity and value.
Future leaders know how to excel in interacting with their teams and collaborating with customer and partners. It is uncertain what words will likely be used to describe the portfolio initiatives’ leaders in the future? Who knows? The only predictable knowledge is that those leaders will master the handling of change in an increasingly uncertain world and thrive in the experiences they create for their organizations.
Interested in this topic? Al Zeitoun will be speaking at International Project Management Day 2024! Learn more here!
Reference:
Creating Experience-Driven Organizational Culture: How to drive transformative change with project and portfolio management, Zeitoun – January 2025
ISBN: 9781394257010
Consultant and Trainer, International Institute for Learning
In his current role with Siemens DISW, Dr. Zeitoun is responsible for driving the global program management practices, master plan governance, and enable strategy transformation priorities.
Dr. Zeitoun’s prior roles include Executive Director for Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation in Abu Dhabi where he led the transformation of capabilities to support the operational readiness of their $40 billion nuclear power plant across four facilities. He was Senior Transformation Executive & Strategic Portfolio Solutions expert at Booz Allen Hamilton in the U.S, where he envisioned and customized a digitally enabled EPMO to support their billion-dollar strategic initiatives. He also led the firm’s Middle East and North Africa Portfolio Management and Agile Governance Solutions.
