When Excuses Become the Starting Points for Change
We're kicking off 2023 with a “Top 10” list. Not of resolutions or bucket list travel destinations. No, we're catapulting into a new year with a catalog of some of our favorite excuses. Because while cracking open a fresh calendar can feel like a terrific opportunity to (finally!) say yes to organizational change, there's no shortage of reasons why teams don't jumpstart their transformation journeys.
However, these familiar excuses only have teeth if someone uses them as a substitute for saying “No.” The “excuses” I place under a microscope in this article are all grounded in organizational realities. They represent valid obstacles people face and experience all the time — but they aren't reasons to do nothing. I propose that these rejections and objections instead be framed as genuine starting points for transformation work. Your words reveal where to begin. That's a big win!
Let's look at some of these greatest hits, see what they can teach us about what might be happening inside an organization, and then examine ways to unblock them.
I'm guessing some of these sound familiar, either because you've heard people say them or because you yourself have uttered them to buy time and give yourself breathing room before embarking (or not) on a transformation journey. Regardless, these excuses can be used as catalysts for larger, more meaningful change if we explore the organizational tensions lurking beneath them.
Let's dig into our top three excuses and see what teams can do to turn them into on-ramps instead of roadblocks.
Greatest Excuse № 3: “We need a transformation roadmap. Unless we can provide leaders with one, we can't start the work. We like your approach to emergence — but we need to know what's going to happen, too.”
The Tension: People have become accustomed to creating PowerPoint decks to satisfy the CEO, the leadership team, or other stakeholders and prove that a transformation effort will be successful — and that hiring consultants won't pose a risk to the organization. The desire for plans and detailed roadmaps is a big part of the need to change. If a transformation team concedes at this point, the entire project could be defined by evaluating progress against pre-planned actions. This can descend into a game of keeping the metrics green rather than doing meaningful work and embracing a situation's inherent complexity.
The Fix: Don't give in to the need for a plan — but don't ignore this tension either. Instead, ask “What's the way to marry the need for certainty with dynamic steering?” An answer: Aim for clarity on two things:
- The immediate future: One form of a plan is to co-create a set of outcomes for the first four weeks of the engagement (the “what”) alongside an agreement on what the ways of working will be (the “how”). Outcomes are statements about what the work wants to achieve within a specified timeframe, like “We’ve reduced time spent in meetings by 1/3.”
- The initiative's enduring principles: Enduring principles help connect the immediate future with what comes after. These principles clarify things that will remain true to the transformation work regardless of its specific outcomes and allow us to make choices and guide behavior by making team priorities clear. Four or five clear, co-created principles will equip everyone with shortcuts to know what's “right” at any moment, even in unpredictable circumstances. Some cool principles to get you started:
- We do challenging and meaningful work
- We do not settle for easy wins
- The status quo is not our friend
- We work transparently and in public
- We default to working in duos
The clarity that comes from knowing where you're going to start feels like a roadmap but is better. It's not constrained to the point of suffocating critical thinking and innovation, nor is it loose enough to cause jittery feelings. The focus on the desired future state (not what you're going to do), plus explicit statements about how you intend to work toward outcomes, gives those desiring a roadmap a more mature version of certainty.
Greatest Excuse № 2: “We need to wait until the new CXO is onboarded. It's inconvenient for anything major to happen, because they might change it back again or do something different.”
The Tension: This points to a pattern of deferring to leaders for big decisions. You may recognize this as “a lack of empowerment” from the leader to the “subordinate” but that simplification reinforces the notion that leaders are the only ones with the power to gift authority in the first place. This excuse also assumes the incoming leader is likely to disagree, reverse decisions, dismantle projects that don't fit their agenda, or put a stop to transformation efforts completely. This belief could indicate that an organization doesn't welcome taking swings or making bets in service of an improved future.
The Fix: Get yourself a mandate and just do something! Weigh the risk of embarking on transformation work versus the risk of being seen to have done nothing during a period of uncertainty around new leadership.
I can hear your question through the screen: “But how?”
Work with reality. What needs to happen to make a meaningful but manageable piece of work safe-to-try for current decision-makers? (Safe-to-try means an action or change that's reversible and won't cause lasting damage if it goes wrong.) By designing a bold yet safe-to-try experiment, you can usually get the mandate to do something. This something, even with constraints, provides a chance for learning.
Create a proposal outlining what you intend to do and why, and keep the experiment within a maximum 12-week timeframe. This can feel more palatable to even the most skeptical of stakeholders. Keep the proposal short and boil it down to a succinct hypothesis. Try a format like this:
“I propose that we [your brilliant suggestion here] with the expectation that [your assumptions about what the impact of the change will be] as measured by [a simple yet clear method or metric to demonstrate the impact of your suggested change].”
If the powers-that-be accept your proposal, you’ll then need explicit consent from relevant stakeholders concerning the decision rights needed to carry out the proposal’s actions. These decision rights are constraints that serve all parties involved. Break down the types of decisions you expect will need to be made into these categories:
- Sole decision right: You have the right to decide without consulting others.
- Decision right with advice: Before making a decision, you agree to consult with those who will be directly impacted by it. You have to listen to their advice — but the final call is yours.
- Decisions by consent: For high-stakes decisions that require input from experts or the group that will ultimately be responsible for any mistakes that occur.
There is power in starting by starting. Waiting for an unknown person to join and assuming a lack of alignment curtails work before it begins. Reframing your experiment as an opportunity to do something within a restricted timeframe is an approach that can be replicated in any situation with unclear authority. Carve out your transformation playground and start making things happen.
Greatest Excuse № 1: “We’re doing a transformation/another project that will figure out what the future holds. There’s no bandwidth or appetite for something else. People are stretched and under a heavy workload.”
The Tension: There’s a fixation on the what instead of the how. Not considering the how is resulting in overload, stress, and probably low morale. There isn’t capacity for extra projects on top of the zillion things already in motion and that’s the problem that needs addressing: too many people doing too many things and seeing zero results. This is both unsustainable for the individuals driving the work and has limited impact for the organization.
The Fix: Employ new ways of working to figure out what the work is and instantiate new approaches to getting it done. These elements are complementary. Knowing what you want but having no clue how to get there is pointless, although many organizations find themselves in this situation. Change doesn’t just happen because someone puts together a sexy slide stack. Balancing both the what and how is required.
Defining the transformation’s overall intent is the first step. Answer the question “What’s the tangible result we want in the next 12–18 months?” Then, define the buckets of work and create teams around each one. You could call these SLAM (Self-Managed, Lean, Autonomous, and Multidisciplinary) teams. At this point, the unit of the transformation work is the team, which, if kept to a small number of participants, will create more space and reduce workload by allowing each team to do their thing well.
But what to do with a bunch of fresh teams? Straight into the work, right? Wrong. This is a mistake people fall into as they seek to leverage speed as the multiplier for results. Speed only comes once a team knows more about itself. So do some team chartering, where the group co-creates its purpose, accountabilities, decision rights, and working agreements.
The team must also decide its own cadence of meetings to coordinate and reflect on the work and what set of tools will enable it. This is where the organization has to walk the walk on the autonomy piece. If members have been in the familiar pattern of replying-all on an email merry-go-round, then new tools are needed to make the teams’ communication and collaboration more dynamic, transparent, and trackable. A must-have is a board that serves as the single source of truth for its shared work.
When there’s too much going on in an organization, there’s likely trouble around prioritization, too. Nothing is important if everything is important. Building a set of heuristics for filtering the important now from the important later from the not-actually-important will increase focus and help manage workloads. A set of questions by which every task, incoming request, or project is assessed can help lighten the decision-making load so teams use their time together to get stuff done rather than talk endlessly about what needs to get done.
Here’s an example set of heuristics:
- Is this directly related to our current intent?
- Is this directly related to our outcomes for this period?
- Does this have an outsize impact on the work and/or form the foundation for future work?
- Do the people that will complete this have capacity and interest to do it right now?
If a team can’t answer yes to at least three of these questions, then the work should be added to a backlog or rejected outright.
People underestimate the value of spending time upfront to make decisions about who teams are, what they’re for, and how they’ll progress toward their purpose. At the beginning of a transformation project, or when any new team is established, this is the work. Surfacing assumptions and reaching some common understanding is essential and will save time down the line. But a word to the wise: This isn’t a one-and-done situation. New ways of teaming, communicating, and prioritizing should be assessed on a regular basis, so emerging tensions can be named, processed, and dealt with collectively before they grind work to a halt.
From Avoidance to Action
The habit of leaning into the tensions or obstacles standing in the way of what you want to do is powerful. If you can change each “We can’t do that because…” into “We can look at why X is really holding us back…” then you’re more likely to make progress. In other words: Don’t shy away from the sticky work. You can chip away steadily to enable continuous improvement, learning, and high-impact work. If you really don’t know what’s holding this work back, just ask the people doing it — because they 100% know the answer 100% of the time. Does this effort require building a new set of organizational muscles? Absolutely. But it also might lead you toward the most fulfilling and enjoyable work experience of your life.
A version of this article originally appeared in The Underlying Project’s collaborative effort “Unpacking Organizational Culture: Or how to stop defining culture and start designing it.” Download the free e-book by visiting at topvoices.co.
The Ready is an organizational design and transformation partner that helps you discover a better way of working. We work with some of the world's largest, oldest, and most inspiring organizations to help them remove bureaucracy and adapt to the complex world in which we all live. Learn more by subscribing to our Brave New Work podcast and Brave New Work Weekly newsletter , checking out our book , or reaching out to have a conversation about how we can help your organization evolve ways of working better suited to your current reality.
