For the fourth and penultimate of our keys to a successful organisational transformation, we look at the importance of remaining grounded in reality and not becoming blind to the challenges and realities of change.
It is common, particularly in large federated organisations, for transformation to be driven or even mandated from the top. This would normally be considered a good thing, particularly given the support and attention that one would expect to come with it. Practically, this seems rarely to be the case, with top level leaders making big claims and promises of benefits such as operational cost savings, speed to market, revenue growth and customer satisfaction with little real understanding of how this relates to the process of transformation.
Successful transformations work to understand the impact of these goals on the organisation and plan to understand how they can be realistically achieved. They use feedback on progress to adjust their plans and expectations, then apply effort to where it is most effective. Where this is not the case, we typically see a strategy of ‘hope’ or ‘blind optimism’ leading to stagnation and eventual failure.
Focussing on strategy and tactics
Sun Tzu said in the Art of War that “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat”. This applies just as well to organisational transformation as it does to warfare. For our purposes we will consider the organisations Goals, Strategy and Tactics. The Goals tells us where we are looking to get to, the Strategy tells us what we are going to do to achieve them, and the tactics tell us how we will make it happen.
Organisations that take a well-structured approach to understanding their transformational goals, what they are going to do to make them as reality as well as how to do this are setting themselves up for success. They have not only taken the time to understand the purpose of the transformation, but have also considered what it will take to deliver this in reality. This allows them to form the basis of a high-level approach for their organisational transformation and is a fundamental input for a realistic plan for delivery.
Where there has been a failure to consider how strategy and tactics will make the organisations goals into reality, we see transformations that are poorly coordinated and floundering. Teams are not sure how or to what extent they are contributing to the new organisation, and are often frustrated by a lack of ‘big picture’ thinking. The inability to clearly relate work back to strategy and goals hinders meaningful prioritisation of work, resulting in lower team motivation and poor delivery of the desired organisational outcomes. There may be a lot of change, but it does not deliver the expected value.
Plan and monitor the delivery
Successful transformations have a plan – the future state is achieved by completing a series of concrete activities, initiatives or ‘projects’ that move the organisation towards it. These actions can be effectively planned and their delivery monitored, and the extent to which they contribute to the organisations’ goals measured.
Initiatives are structured cross-functionally, delivering work that meets the organisations goals while building out the desired future state. In this way it is easy to monitor progress as the success at delivering the work will mirror the success of building out the new organisational state for that team. Team maturity around concepts such as lead time, cycle time, velocity and capacity, with the progress on delivery that they provide, allow the transformation leadership to effectively understand where transformation is going well and where it needs more support. The transformation is delivered through the effective delivery of these initiatives as vehicles for change.
Organisations that do not effectively plan and monitor their transformation are very likely to fail, or at least cannot indicate whether the steps they have taken are contributing to the creation of the desired organisational state. They can expend enormous effort making change that does not meet their business
goals, and are unable to monitor and course correct their efforts. This is most commonly seen where transformation is siloed, as changing a function independently rarely delivers the future state and holistic benefits that are the desired outcome.
Effective business prioritisation / limit Work In Progress (WIP)
The strategic and forward-looking nature of building your future organisational state will mean tackling the big challenges, particularly in terms of building capability in people and providing modern tools and technologies. In order to be successful, it requires many key resources in terms of people, funding and time. Critically, the one factor organisations fail to plan into their transformation is the impact of learning, failing, experimenting and general change activities on existing work.
Organisations that are making a success of their transformation recognise this early in the planning stage and achieve better results through the effective prioritisation of work. By limiting the amount of work in progress, they ensure that the organisation has the spare capacity to learn and adopt the future state before they are encouraged to speed up their rate of delivery. This spare capacity is a crucial factor in teams and individuals having the time and space to truly embed their new lean and agile ways of working, ensuring that they do not revert back to previous behaviours when the pressure is on.
Where organisations fail to manage WIP, we see large numbers of concurrent activities with transformational activities fighting for resources and attention against short term, tactical work. The focus on the future state is lost in favour of ‘immediate short-term benefits’ and transformation is relegated to a back seat and back of the mind for leaders, leading to stagnation and failure.