Organisational trauma and transformation during and after the crisis

The keynote speaker and moderator for this event, Dr Zvezdan Horvat, Managing Director for South-Eastern Europe at Adizes, opened the workshop by making a brief theoretical introduction to corporate lifecycles, highlighting control and flexibility as the two key factors.

The panellists, Aleksandra Ognjanović of Erste Bank and Aleksandar Vratonjić Gligorijević of TeleGroup, shared their experiences with the impact of organisational transformation and people development on responsiveness to business challenges. TeleGroup pivoted from a sole proprietorship to a professionally led company, providing an example for the inception of a system, whilst Erste Bank embarked on process improvement, which entailed the introduction of flexibility.

The event heard that organisations were constantly facing pressure from change, and that the entire management had to go beyond solving problems to continuously advocate and make small-scale evolutionary adjustments. It was highlighted that time-bound decisions were key to decision-making.

The participants raised the issue of how successful companies can be when viewed from the perspectives of external integration and internal disintegration, including their interactions with their environments and ability to identify opportunities in those environments whilst maintaining internal stability.

The event also focused on achieving and maintaining corporate top form through flexibility and control. When seeking to fulfil its mission, a company must constantly re-assess and adjust its organisation throughout its lifecycle. Top form was defined as the point at which a company reaches its greatest extent of both flexibility and control at the same time, and it was the management’s task to recognise that moment and make the appropriate organisational adjustments.

Organisational culture, dissemination of the company’s values, and the choice of people sharing those values were what makes a company exceptional. At a time when many processes were being automated, the event concluded, people remained a key element in doing business.