Creating a flexible plan
The past year on my new job consisted of: 1) studying our organizational culture and 2) creating an action plan to address some of its challenges.
This action plan covered every major theme we uncovered with over two dozen initiatives. Trainings. Workshops. Communication plans. Task forces. It was comprehensive.
But it didn’t feel right. Two dozen initiatives is a lot of change to implement at once. This was confirmed by many studies we read on change management. Between 60-80% of change initiatives fail.
We didn’t want to become part of this statistic.
So after some pondering, it hit us:
We could have the strongest culture plan in the world — well researched, buttoned up, and advised by the best of the best (it’s not, but let’s pretend for a second).
Even with a plan of that caliber…success always comes down to execution. Executing our plan would mean implementing two dozen changes at the same time.
That’s really hard for an organization of 600 people to swallow.
So before we implement any major changes, we decided need to get our teams comfortable with change.
So we pivoted. The main component of our plan is now a laser focus on adaptability. We’ll be teaching our people the skills necessary to become more adaptable.
These skills include but are not limited to: empathy, self-awareness, self-management, resilience, listening, and mindfulness.
Our hypothesis is that this plan will result in two positive outcomes: 1) the ability for our people to be receptive to and energized around new org and culture initiatives, and 2) an improvement in organic risk taking and innovation.
We’ll see how it goes! More updates down the road.
