This article describes an 8 step roadmap I have developed for designing and implementing strategy and change. It is applicable for any kind of goal-directed change - whether it is reprioritising how you live your life so you have fewer regrets about how you have used your time on this Earth (click on this link to read my article about that); taking off that extra weight you put on over Christmas; or improving the performance of your team or organisation so you are more successful in the year ahead. Just the scale and complexity will be different depending on the task.
When using this roadmap for more complex organisational change, I combine it with various tools and frameworks from some of my favourite models for strategy design and implementation to help with the “how” for each step. In this article however we don’t have time for that, so I will just cover off on the high level steps.
1. Where are we now?
Creating a common understanding of where you are now is an often undervalued first step in change. Rush over this step at your own peril!
Examining the facts and engaging impacted staff and customers in sharing their experiences and feelings about the current situation is a critical first step to understand the need for and the “why” of change as well as getting an indication of the energy and priorities for change.
If your task is organisational strategy and change, performance metrics used by an organisation give an interesting insight into what is really considered important by leaders. Jack Welch said there are three key performance metrics that really matter for a business – staff engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow. It is amazing how many businesses still have no good corporate measures for the first two and no focus on the third. I recall a small financial services organisation that said customer satisfaction was one of its competitive advantages but had no measure for it other than gut feel. And recently a large utility was using sick leave as its metric for staff engagement!
Taking the time to gather the data and confronting yourself with where you really are now is critical for honestly answering the question of if and why you need to change. This applies whether you are considering KPIs or BMI.
2. What are the possibilities?
This is another step that is often underdone as people jump to their pet solutions. This step encourages you to stand back, think big, engage with people from diverse backgrounds, including strangers, and explore the possibilities.
Apply some of that Blue Ocean thinking, be creative, look outside your normal frames of reference, and discover what others have already learnt or discovered that could make your task so much easier. No need to reinvent the wheel when someone somewhere else has already done it for you and you can use it to accelerate your progress. Combine ideas and perspectives and work with others to come up with options you never thought possible!
3. Where do we want to be?
This is the stage to evaluate those metrics, ideas and possibilities and choose the goal you and the team want to aim for. And my suggestion is - aim high. Aspirational goals are far more inspiring and energising and bring out the best in people. It’s amazing what people can achieve with the right mindset, engagement, empowerment and leadership.
By contrast, playing it safe and going for timid goals, or goals that mean nothing to those that need to make them work, is unlikely to engage people or bring out the talent people have, but so rarely use, especially at work. Mediocrity doesn’t inspire, and so often mediocre goals are not even achieved due to disinterest, when inspirational ones could have been.
4. Getting everyone on board
If you’ve gone about steps 1 to 3 properly, you will have already involved a wide range of both impacted people and strangers. Now is the time to involve an even broader group of impacted people and get input and buy-in to your preferred goal. And this means probably modifying what you have in mind based on their feedback.
About 70-80% of strategy and change fails – usually through overlooking the fact that change is not about having the most brilliant ideas, or the most professional Powerpoint deck, but about being able to put the ideas into action. Often strategy and action plans are developed separate from the real people who need to make them work. This could be due to naivety or intellectual arrogance from leaders or consultants who think good strategy is developed by bright people with Masters degrees and messed up by dumb change-resistant staff. Actually, strategy’s failure is usually the result of practically dumb or inexperienced people with Master degrees developing strategy in isolation of the people who know more than they do about the problem and who are expected to make something work that they have not been involved in influencing in any meaningful way.
Empowering impacted people to contribute to the strategy and change from the beginning is critical for improving your chances of success.
5. Planning for action
In this step, it’s time to get organised and systematic and create a workable and properly resourced plan of action with a governance structure to provide a discipline to track action, learn quickly from outcomes, take remedial action when necessary, and make change happen. Change needs to be leader-led, resourced and rewarded and the structure to support this needs to be set up at this stage.
Have you ensured the right people have the skin in the game and incentives to make this work rather than undermine it?
6. Implementing the plan
Now you may be thinking - this is where it all falls apart. And it certainly is the hardest part and where most strategy and change fails. But a big reason for failing here is that steps 1 to 5 have not set the right foundation for success.
This step is where the rubber hits the road and I am reminded of some research I came across recently that suggested a key differentiator for success in life was not intelligence but rather a quality the researcher called “grit” – perseverance in the face of adversity, determination, resilience, and hanging in there to achieve results. Implementation is full of set-backs, frustrations, and expected and unexpected roadblocks and successes.
Doggedly sticking with an original plan doesn’t work in this stage either. What is needed is an approach that is agile, learns fast, and looks for ways to keep people engaged in achieving the goal, even if it may be by a previously unimagined path.
This step involves tracking results and adjusting your plan for realities, setbacks, or surprising wins that can enable you to achieve your goals even faster than you imagined.
7. An operating rhythm
This step is about building the change of focus and behaviour you want to see into your BAU. Leaders need to create a management cycle of activities that are repeated yearly, quarterly, weekly and even daily which form a predictable rhythm that supports stable expectations for people and reinforces and rewards the targeted outcomes. This systematic approach to managing for results will vary with the nature of the work but is important for shaping habits and creating the operating systems that reinforce the strategy and change you are aiming to achieve. It also shapes the experience and culture of “how we do things around here”.
Your operating rhythm should reflect the change you are aiming to create and maintain in your business or your life.
8. Coaching for results
Successful strategy and change needs to be leader-led which means that leaders often need to change their behaviour, lift skills, and learn and grow to support the change that needs to occur.
People are social beings and look to their leaders for what is expected and to set the example. Supporting change leaders deal with the many challenges they personally face in leading change is an important part of the effective implementation of change. Ideally this support and coaching comes from their manager, but sometimes it needs to be supplemented with external coaching to support leaders become more effective change leaders.
I hope you find this roadmap helpful in achieving some of your goals for the year and I look forward to hearing from you if you would like to know more about applying this 8 step roadmap in your organisation.
Susan Kehoe
Consultant | Coach | Change Leader
Work with Susan
Susan helps design and implement people-centred strategy, transformation and performance improvement. Her work involves challenging mind-sets, shifting culture, and engaging people to improve service delivery and performance. Her approach taps into the enormous unused potential of people in organisations to deliver exponentially better results with the right leadership, engagement and strategy.
When using this roadmap for more complex organisational change, I combine it with various tools and frameworks from some of my favourite models for strategy design and implementation to help with the “how” for each step. In this article however we don’t have time for that, so I will just cover off on the high level steps.
1. Where are we now?
Creating a common understanding of where you are now is an often undervalued first step in change. Rush over this step at your own peril!
Examining the facts and engaging impacted staff and customers in sharing their experiences and feelings about the current situation is a critical first step to understand the need for and the “why” of change as well as getting an indication of the energy and priorities for change.
If your task is organisational strategy and change, performance metrics used by an organisation give an interesting insight into what is really considered important by leaders. Jack Welch said there are three key performance metrics that really matter for a business – staff engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow. It is amazing how many businesses still have no good corporate measures for the first two and no focus on the third. I recall a small financial services organisation that said customer satisfaction was one of its competitive advantages but had no measure for it other than gut feel. And recently a large utility was using sick leave as its metric for staff engagement!
Taking the time to gather the data and confronting yourself with where you really are now is critical for honestly answering the question of if and why you need to change. This applies whether you are considering KPIs or BMI.
2. What are the possibilities?
This is another step that is often underdone as people jump to their pet solutions. This step encourages you to stand back, think big, engage with people from diverse backgrounds, including strangers, and explore the possibilities.
Apply some of that Blue Ocean thinking, be creative, look outside your normal frames of reference, and discover what others have already learnt or discovered that could make your task so much easier. No need to reinvent the wheel when someone somewhere else has already done it for you and you can use it to accelerate your progress. Combine ideas and perspectives and work with others to come up with options you never thought possible!
3. Where do we want to be?
This is the stage to evaluate those metrics, ideas and possibilities and choose the goal you and the team want to aim for. And my suggestion is - aim high. Aspirational goals are far more inspiring and energising and bring out the best in people. It’s amazing what people can achieve with the right mindset, engagement, empowerment and leadership.
By contrast, playing it safe and going for timid goals, or goals that mean nothing to those that need to make them work, is unlikely to engage people or bring out the talent people have, but so rarely use, especially at work. Mediocrity doesn’t inspire, and so often mediocre goals are not even achieved due to disinterest, when inspirational ones could have been.
4. Getting everyone on board
If you’ve gone about steps 1 to 3 properly, you will have already involved a wide range of both impacted people and strangers. Now is the time to involve an even broader group of impacted people and get input and buy-in to your preferred goal. And this means probably modifying what you have in mind based on their feedback.
About 70-80% of strategy and change fails – usually through overlooking the fact that change is not about having the most brilliant ideas, or the most professional Powerpoint deck, but about being able to put the ideas into action. Often strategy and action plans are developed separate from the real people who need to make them work. This could be due to naivety or intellectual arrogance from leaders or consultants who think good strategy is developed by bright people with Masters degrees and messed up by dumb change-resistant staff. Actually, strategy’s failure is usually the result of practically dumb or inexperienced people with Master degrees developing strategy in isolation of the people who know more than they do about the problem and who are expected to make something work that they have not been involved in influencing in any meaningful way.
Empowering impacted people to contribute to the strategy and change from the beginning is critical for improving your chances of success.
5. Planning for action
In this step, it’s time to get organised and systematic and create a workable and properly resourced plan of action with a governance structure to provide a discipline to track action, learn quickly from outcomes, take remedial action when necessary, and make change happen. Change needs to be leader-led, resourced and rewarded and the structure to support this needs to be set up at this stage.
Have you ensured the right people have the skin in the game and incentives to make this work rather than undermine it?
6. Implementing the plan
Now you may be thinking - this is where it all falls apart. And it certainly is the hardest part and where most strategy and change fails. But a big reason for failing here is that steps 1 to 5 have not set the right foundation for success.
This step is where the rubber hits the road and I am reminded of some research I came across recently that suggested a key differentiator for success in life was not intelligence but rather a quality the researcher called “grit” – perseverance in the face of adversity, determination, resilience, and hanging in there to achieve results. Implementation is full of set-backs, frustrations, and expected and unexpected roadblocks and successes.
Doggedly sticking with an original plan doesn’t work in this stage either. What is needed is an approach that is agile, learns fast, and looks for ways to keep people engaged in achieving the goal, even if it may be by a previously unimagined path.
This step involves tracking results and adjusting your plan for realities, setbacks, or surprising wins that can enable you to achieve your goals even faster than you imagined.
7. An operating rhythm
This step is about building the change of focus and behaviour you want to see into your BAU. Leaders need to create a management cycle of activities that are repeated yearly, quarterly, weekly and even daily which form a predictable rhythm that supports stable expectations for people and reinforces and rewards the targeted outcomes. This systematic approach to managing for results will vary with the nature of the work but is important for shaping habits and creating the operating systems that reinforce the strategy and change you are aiming to achieve. It also shapes the experience and culture of “how we do things around here”.
Your operating rhythm should reflect the change you are aiming to create and maintain in your business or your life.
8. Coaching for results
Successful strategy and change needs to be leader-led which means that leaders often need to change their behaviour, lift skills, and learn and grow to support the change that needs to occur.
People are social beings and look to their leaders for what is expected and to set the example. Supporting change leaders deal with the many challenges they personally face in leading change is an important part of the effective implementation of change. Ideally this support and coaching comes from their manager, but sometimes it needs to be supplemented with external coaching to support leaders become more effective change leaders.
I hope you find this roadmap helpful in achieving some of your goals for the year and I look forward to hearing from you if you would like to know more about applying this 8 step roadmap in your organisation.
Susan Kehoe
Consultant | Coach | Change Leader
Work with Susan
Susan helps design and implement people-centred strategy, transformation and performance improvement. Her work involves challenging mind-sets, shifting culture, and engaging people to improve service delivery and performance. Her approach taps into the enormous unused potential of people in organisations to deliver exponentially better results with the right leadership, engagement and strategy.