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All large organizations eventually face the same problem: they become so big that when it’s time to change direction, the process is painfully slow if impossible to execute, and they risk becoming ineffective or even obsolete. This is the situation a national intelligence agency—with tens of thousands of employees and contractors around the world—faced when the customers it served and the Cold War-era mission it pursued both changed dramatically, especially after September 11, 2001. “The organization was at a point where it had to transform itself into a more dynamic enterprise,” said the Toffler Associates Engagement Leader. “The intelligence needs of the military departments and other entities the agency served had changed, but the agency itself had not. It was on the right track, but the external environment was careening along that track much faster than it was. For example, the focus of intelligence gathering shifted, some areas of responsibility now overlapped, and the agency’s teams needed to learn how to work with multiple data sources and customer groups.”
WHY TOFFLER ASSOCIATES?
Because of Toffler Associates’ extensive history and experience helping companies and government organizations navigate change, the agency asked the firm to develop and help implement a strategy that would transform the way it does business. “What we brought to the table was a clear understanding of the agency’s mission, the technical expertise to comprehend its intelligence capabilities, and the ability to anticipate future developments and trace back from them to the changes the agency had to make today to deal effectively with them,” explained the Engagement Leader. “Because we had all three, we could create the high-level strategy they needed and then roll up our sleeves and work down at the execution level when it was time to implement that strategy. Most consulting firms can do one or the other but rarely both. It’s much more efficient if you can do both because you don’t have to bring another firm up to speed on the strategy and hope they can implement it.”
Toffler Associates spent months interviewing staff and contractors on all levels of the agency from every region of the world. After establishing a snapshot of the agency’s existing operations, and specifically where and how those ways of doing business were and were not in synch with the external environment and the needs of the agency’s customers, the firm developed a strategy for changing the whole posture of the enterprise, encompassing everything from capital investment and communications to facilities and information technology (IT). “To figure out where the agency needed to go,” continued the Engagement Leader, “we had to first establish where they were in the present. We pulled together a snapshot of the entire enterprise, and could show them, for example, the hub through which all of their communications were routed. The agency was so dispersed—its sources of people, money, IT, etc. was so varied—that it never had this type of granular overview before.”
ENVISIONING A BETTER FUTURE
Too often, organizational transformation efforts expose so many problems, so many disconnects between how things are and how they need to be, that the process actually works against the goal of making the organization more effective and successful; it seems impossible to achieve all the things we need to. Toffler Associate takes a different approach. In parallel with the analysis of the “as-is” state, the firm facilitates clients – staff at every level in addition to the top executives – in imagining the future they desire and describing it in detail, along with the many benefits they and their customers will receive as a result of the changes. This allows everyone in the organization to buy into the transformation, and to see any impediments to change as obstacles that must and will be overcome.
“We asked this intelligence agency to imagine several alternative futures,” stated the Engagement Leader. “Once you get everyone in management saying, ‘Wouldn’t our agency be great if it looked and worked like this or this,’ then change is much easier to implement. Then we get the client to think through a range of different ways to get to the end-state they’ve identified, helping them understand there’s not just one correct way to execute change.” Toffler Associates uses a variety of creative techniques, from role-playing to gaming and others, to help clients envision the desired future, understand what is going on in the environment that makes that end-state the right one to pursue and create, and understand what they need to change in business processes, infrastructure, and culture to get there.
MORE RESPONSIVE TO END CONSUMERS
The strategy Toffler Associates developed completely reorganized the agency. “Our client changed its global footprint,” said the Engagement Leader. “Management redefined the agency’s mission, the way its employees work, its policies—the gamut. They are also closer and more responsive to their customers, the end consumers of the intelligence they gather and analyze.”
One example of the revolutionary changes that are taking place concerns the IT department. Before, the agency saw it as a support service, but Toffler Associates showed that IT was a knowledge-management center and critical to the agency’s mission. “Based on our input,” said the Engagement Leader, “the agency actually reorganized itself from a two-part structure to a three-part, giving IT that much prominence and stature. The strategy is effective and producing results. The agency’s director even remarked that after our plan was in place, he was, for the first time in any of his executive roles, making decisions based on strategic and long-range planning activity.”
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Knowledge 
