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The only transformations are people-transformations
Prioritizing the talent and not the technology is critical if we want to deliver transformations that work (Bain&Company).
An organization is not defined by its outputs nor by it’s technology, data or processes. It’s the sum of its people. According to most available definitions an organization is .. :
“a group of people who work together in an organized way for a shared purpose” — Cambridge dictionary
“a structured group of people who work together to achieve common goals” — Gemini“An organization .. is an entity .. comprising one or more people and having a particular purpose.” — Wikipedia
Having spent years seeing first hand how often top down or technology led transformations fail we flipped the narrative when creating the strategy for a new transformation and used the power of the people who make up the company to decide where, what and how to change.
How we did it?
We transformed how we approached transformations.
We created a process starting with the people who do the work, represent the delivery and have the expertise to tell us what the market and environment looks like. With a shared understanding and agreement of what needs to be improved* we continued to ask and discover where and how to make what improvements.
*This is fully in line with the writings of Mary Parket Follett suggesting that only a shared agreement on what the ‘situation’ the company needs to respond to looks like will create a shared agreement on where and how to act (2).
To pull this of we needed to change our process from coming up with and installing “best practice” technologies and solutions, to include and investigate what people wanted and needed that could make and motivate meaningful change.
- We first needed to realign what good looked like with what we were trying to achieve.
- Secondly we needed to investigate what the internal need and want was. This helped us set our scope and the level of ambition right for the organization.
- Third we needed a map. It’s very hard to navigate when you don’t know neither the landscape you are in nor its climate (3). We used our external and internal insights to create this.
- Fourth we used the map to cocreate our strategy, how to deliver on it and when (roadmap).
- Sixth we developed the measures to motivate the organization and deliver on the transformation.
Below are some of the most important steps in our process.
#A. Create a shared understanding of the situation that leads to a need for change?
Our first task was to understand the external situation pressuring the organization to change. To do this we analyzed a large volume of internal and external research reports, included our company wide community of experts and expertise from some of our largest markets.
Instead of a summary, scoring, spreadsheets or infographics we decided to identify the most important questions to answer in order to describe the biggest influences on the situation we were in an then answering them for the current state and our desired future state.
The 13 questions were:
- What influences and enables our customer?
- Who / what does the customer impact?
- How do we win?
- Who does the customer show up with?
- Where does the customer show up?
- How and where are we serving the customer?
- What is the nature of our relationships and loyalty?
- How are we ensuring diversity, equity and inclusion
- What describes our insights and sensemaking
- What describes our data quality
- What do measures lead to?
- What is the customer ecosystem (technology)?
- How do we deliver on the customer + AI
Having answered these questions we knew the situation, our level of ambition within it, the direction we wanted to take and what we still needed to learn. We could now identify why we were doing what we were doing and the direction we needed to go.
#B. What people need?
Next we needed to understand what ‘the customer’ meant to our co-workers, and how this related to the meaningfulness of their roles and responsibilities.
We already knew the customer was cascading through the entire organization. Our early work in 2020 had demonstrated that once you help a team become customer centric they start asking new questions demanding new data, technology, skills, ways-of-working and measures to be more efficient and effective. Giving someone the power of ‘the customer’ is like putting a Ferrari engine into an old Fiat.
We asked people across the organization who their ‘customers’ were, how they felt their work delivered them value, how that translated to value back to the business and finally how they knew they had been successful.
Our assumptions were confirmed: people across the entire organization desire a line-of-sight from their own work to the value it created for the customer. And this wasn‘t only the feedback from the first-line employees, it was from everyone. Everyone wanted their work to be meaningful by delivering value. But nobody had sight of how their work did that or what good looked like.
People across the entire organization desire a line-of-sight from their own work to the value it created
This was great news, because it meant that the situation we were solving for was not merely operational improvements*, but to help an entire organization become better at serving its customers — together.
*We wanted to understand if the ‘customer’ meant something to everyone and wasn’t just an operational responsibility. Our research confirmed our assumptions.
C. How does the organization work?
With everyone focused on the customer we needed to build a map visualizing how the organization coordinated and collaborated in order to co-create valuable outputs and outcomes.
We mapped the mechanics (hard parts) and dynamics (soft parts) of the organization that led to the production of different outputs and outcomes.
With this map we could see the organization not as a one-dimensional assembly line, but a coordination of competencies across four layers: the experience, data & technology, strategy, culture & leadership.
With a map we could identify how different improvements could influence the organizations ability to deliver value. We matched this map with our current and desired future situation (the 13 questions above) in order to identify our potential improvements, prioritize and plan them in a roadmap.
D. Creating the roadmap
Most of our priorities and improvements were cross-functional (stretching across the different layers of our map). We invited the organizations talent to help us understand how and where we could make new capabilities, improve old ones or simply remove waste.
E. The measurement
Getting to a strategy, plan and a roadmap for the transformation is an Herculean task, but it won’t be more than good storytelling if the organization fails to adopt new measurements and incentives motivating the change.
Our work had demonstrated how to deliver on an important message from a former CEO:
“Customer value is business value” — Ken Frazier
If we could identify what the customer valued, at scale, and prove the causality between this value and value to the business, we could start holding all our capabilities accountable to these values.
Summary
Looking back at the process it becomes increasingly clear, even more now than I knew at the time, that this was a people first process. Not only the people behind our customers, but first and foremost the people behind our employees.
Growing up doing the work (being a subject matter expert), it’s increasingly clear that the talent in an organization sits with the expertise in both its ability to understand the past and make assumptions about the future.
The question is how do we effectively and efficiently include the expertise and be led by i? Which is where I think our project excelled. At turning the transformation process on it’s head. Not leading with the need for new technologies, but the people’s needs for new outcomes.
Sources and links:
(1). Bain & Company, Peter Slagt et. al, The Three Common Transformation Talent Mistakes and How to Avoid Them, https://www.bain.com/insights/the-three-common-transformation-talent-mistakes-and-how-to-avoid-them/
(2). Mary Parker Follet, The Giving of Orders, https://180360720.no/_resources/mary_parker_follett_the_giving_of_orders.pdf
(3). Simon Wardley, On being lost, https://medium.com/wardleymaps/on-being-lost-2ef5f05eb1ec
