There’s a clarion call across many industries today: Enterprises must transform or risk fading into oblivion. However, many transformation efforts falter because, despite business leaders’ compelling vision, they fail to address the underlying issues currently impeding their success. This is why the Iceberg Model can be an indispensable tool for delving beneath the surface and addressing the true drivers of organisational behavior and culture.
What is the Iceberg Model?
The Iceberg Model is a simple framework for dissecting inter-related problems into manageable layers. It ensures organisations do more than address symptoms by helping them tackle more deeply rooted issues. Comprising four levels, the model guides leaders from the visible issues to the deeply embedded ones.
- Events: These are the observable outcomes and immediate issues within an organisation. Think of them as the tip of the iceberg.
- Patterns And Trends: For the second level of the framework, leaders must look at recurring events or behaviors to discover systemic tendencies.
- Systemic Structures: Once patterns are identified, organisations can begin highlighting the underlying processes, policies and frameworks that influence them.
- Mental Models: Finally, leaders have the ability to see the deeply held beliefs and assumptions that impact their organisation’s systemic structures.
When applied to organisational transformation, the Iceberg Model enables leaders to identify what’s happening and why.
Looking Deeper is the Key to Transformation
A former client of mine, a manufacturing company, was facing disruptive trends like digitalisation, supply chain instability and shifting market demands. Despite having a well-articulated vision, its transformation efforts encountered significant challenges. Through a series of facilitated workshops, we used the Iceberg Model to uncover and address these hurdles.
Events: The Visible Symptoms Of Transformation Challenges
Within the first year of the transformation initiative, the company experienced two clear issues: a sharp increase in employee turnover and a decline in on-time delivery metrics. Meetings and after action reviews indicated widespread frustration about increased workloads and unclear direction. This was especially acute among middle management, where these people leaders struggled to translate senior management directives into actionable plans.
On the surface, these issues appeared to be typical growing pains associated with large-scale change. However, we knew that the company’s leadership needed to probe deeper.
Patterns: Recognising Emerging Trends
A closer analysis revealed several troubling patterns within the company. Employees were resistant to change and didn’t want to adopt new systems or processes. Teams operated in silos, leading to misaligned priorities and fragmented execution, and attempts to introduce a more agile reporting structure created confusion. Finally, important decisions were often delayed because of excessive reliance on top-down approvals.
These patterns signaled the deeper systemic and cultural barriers that were hindering my client’s transformation efforts.
Systemic Structures: Examining The Foundations
At this step in the Iceberg Model framework, I worked with the company to pinpoint three structural elements that were perpetuating its troubling patterns.
- Ineffective Communication Channels: The transformation agenda wasn’t consistently communicated across divisions, resulting in mixed interpretations and even conflicting answers. Additionally, communication was usually one-way, and there was no formal feedback mechanism to close the loop on brewing issues.
- Rigid Hierarchical Processes: The company’s deeply entrenched hierarchical culture limited cross-functional collaboration and innovation. However, introducing new matrix structures added a layer of complexity to otherwise routine operations.
- Outdated Performance Metrics: The company’s existing KPIs prioritized short-term efficiency over long-term adaptability. So it was inadvertently discouraging experimentation and risk-taking.
These structural issues underlined the urgent need for systemic redesign. To better support its transformation agenda, the company’s operational model needed flatter hierarchies and cross-functional teams that were empowered to make decisions autonomously.
Mental Models: Challenging Deep-Seated Assumptions
The base of the iceberg is the most challenging layer: mental models. My client’s leadership team realised that there were several deeply rooted beliefs that contributed to the overarching issues. First, managers didn’t want to delegate tasks because they equated success with having control. This belief created a culture of compliance, where employees were conditioned to avoid risk-taking. Finally, many employees saw the transformation initiative as something temporary, not a fundamental shift in the company’s operations.
To address these deeply ingrained beliefs, the company adopted a coaching-centric culture. Management underwent a regimen to model new behaviors, while employees were encouraged to embrace experimentation through structured innovation programs. Storytelling and narratives of past successes also played a pivotal role in shifting mindsets, making the transformation vision tangible and relatable.
4 Key Lessons from the Iceberg Model
My client’s journey underscores several critical lessons for organisations embarking on transformation.
- Don’t Stop At The Symptoms: Addressing surface-level events only yields temporary fixes, leaving systemic issues unresolved. Organisations need to explore their patterns, structures and mental models. Transformation initiative leaders should document the organisation’s current observable issues and challenges so they can be surfaced for management conversations.
- Analyse Patterns To Predict Outcomes: Repeated behaviors and trends often signal deeper systemic issues. Leaders must track patterns, like chronic resistance to organisational redesign, to understand their root causes.
- Redesign Systems, Not Just Processes: Structure drives behavior, and transformation requires rethinking all relevant structures, including policies, technologies, committees and workflows. These systemic structures must align with the desired future state.
- Challenge Cultural Assumptions: Mental models are the hardest to change, but they offer the most significant leverage for sustainable transformation. Dismantling problematic beliefs and cultural behaviors requires intentional efforts to build trust, foster innovation and align values. Engaging teams in reflective discussions can help uncover the assumptions and beliefs that need to change.
Conclusion: The Depths Hold the Answers
Organisational transformation isn’t a journey of shallow fixes. It calls for deep dives into the core of how an organisation operates and thinks. For my global manufacturing client, applying the Iceberg Model empowered leadership to turn their fragmented, surface-level transformation initiative into a holistic, culture-driven evolution.
Transformation success lies beneath the surface. Systems leaders who dare to explore the depths will discover the true drivers of change and unlock potential for their organisations.
