SMA Solar Technology AG has been committed to shaping a regenerative future through renewable energy for over 40 years. The German mid-sized company is one of the pioneers and leading players in the renewable energy industry, with more than 3,000 employees across 18 countries. With its engineering expertise and innovation power, SMA ranks among the top in its field and actively helps drive the global energy transition.

In a highly complex and fast-moving technological environment, SMA is not immune to the challenges of digitalization. Like all technology companies, SMA faces accelerating innovation cycles and ever-changing customer needs. In addition to demanding engineering achievements, customer-centric, seamless processes will become mission-critical in the future—processes that are aligned with market needs and can evolve flexibly.

So how does an organization like SMA adapt its capabilities, ways of working, and decision-making processes to meet these demands and help shape a decentralized, digital, and renewable energy world? How can it transform into a responsive organization that can keep pace with constant change?

Complexity demands continuous learning, iteration, flexibility, and adaptability—and that’s exactly the mindset we were able to establish in our joint transformation project with SMA. We consistently took the time to reflect on our approach and integrate the current priorities in the best possible way. Step by step.

The first teams (IT, Sales & Services, DigitalCore, and emerce) began their transformation journey with our transformation framework in 2020 The Loop Approach® to find out whether this approach could be the right fit for SMA. At the same time, a shared transformation core team was formed, consisting of consultants from TheDive and SMA colleagues. This team coordinates all joint activities and ensures they are aligned with SMA’s strategy.

In an internal Loop Fellow Ausbildungsdurchgang, 14 employees from across SMA were trained to bring the Loop mindset and ways of working into the organization. The trained Loop Fellows act as multipliers within the organization and regularly host Loop Masterclasses to inform interested employees from across SMA about Loop. In parallel, this network structure supports one another with questions, development, and stakeholder management.

Since mid-2021, the internally trained Loop Fellows have been supporting additional SMA teams on their Loop journeys—either in tandem with a consultant from TheDive or in fully internal configurations. In this way, SMA scales its transformation journey almost autonomously, achieves deeper organizational penetration, and builds sustainable internal expertise.

Since early 2022, the Loop Fellows have also taken on roles within the transformation core team, helping to anchor key structures. Together, they are working on a “Loop OS” rule set designed for self-organized teams at SMA, creating a reliable framework within flexible and agile structures.

To consistently embed customer centricity into structures, selected teams have also been actively working in new configurations since 2022 to implement cross-functional collaboration. Supporting this process currently rounds out the mandate, enabling Loop to be used not only as a team development approach, but also as a catalyst for evolving processes and structures. TheDive’s expertise in organizational development expands the scope of action here to include aspects such as leadership questions and service design (Design Thinking), and continues to reinforce iterative ways of working.

To achieve the best possible fit of the Loop Approach to SMA’s needs, a so-called “slim” variant of the approach was developed and tested over the course of the collaboration. Together, we recognized that this variant is not a valid way to introduce Loop into the organization with the necessary care. However, this insight is by no means viewed as failure. On the contrary, it contributes to the cultural embedding of honest retrospectives and continuous learning. Sometimes, choosing not to do certain things can already be a large part of the solution.

14

Loop Fellows across all SMA departments

12

Loop team journeys with approximately 100 employees

150

Participants in Loop Masterclasses

500+

Appreciative check-out rounds where people’s strengths were acknowledged and ongoing change was celebrated as something positive

5

Masterclasses with around 30 participants each since 2021