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Is your organization performing as well as it should? As it could?

Do you know? Can you know?

Random notions on the subject:

Notion #1: If you’re confident your organization is performing as well as it could, you’re right by definition. Neither you nor anyone reporting to you will try to improve it because why would you?

If, on the other hand, you’re confident it could be better and you’re wrong, you might do some damage, because if your organization is already doing as well as possible, the best any change can achieve is neutrality. That’s the best outcome. The rest must leave you worse off than where you started.

Notion #2: Benchmarks were popular because an executive could use them to “prove” a recalcitrant manager wasn’t performing as well as possible. They were flawed because they rarely avoided the sin of apples-to-basket-of-randomly-assembled-fruit comparisons.

“Best practices” have replaced them as the flogging tool of choice for those whose closest level of descent is 50,000 feet (15,240 meters if you’ve adopted altitude-measurement best practices).

Best practices are popular because what they prescribe rarely matches how we do things around here. Which means the manager responsible for following less-than-best practices surely deserves a whuppin’.

True story: I once saw a consultant’s PowerPoint slide that promised to “… institute best practices followed by a program of continuous improvement.”

Ahem. If the practices are best they can’t be improved. If they can be improved, continuously or otherwise, they aren’t best yet.

As the KJR Manifesto pointed out there are no best practices, only practices that fit best. Most so-called best practices are one-size-fits-no-one off-the-rack pants. They’re too small for your waist and too short for your inseam, but your boss insists you wear them anyway.

Notion #3: Fixing the root cause isn’t always the best way to deal with a problem.

Imagine, for example, that you, like me, suffer from cluster headaches. Your research determines the root cause is spontaneous activation of nociceptive pathways.

So what. We can’t do anything about the root cause. I don’t even know what the root cause means.

What we can do is take Sumatriptan as soon as a headache starts and wait 15 minutes or so for it to take effect.

Sometimes, suppressing symptoms is the best alternative. Not a good alternative, mind you, but the best one available.

Notion #4: A common and pernicious barrier to organizational change is the Assumption of the Present. It’s the Assumption of the Present when employees are sure a proposed change will fail because otherwise it would have already happened.

The Assumption of the Present is a close cousin of “We tried that and it didn’t work,” only you can suggest the reason it didn’t work is that, “Maybe we did it wrong.”

The Assumption of the Present, in contrast, is circular. And being circular there’s no entry point you can use to rebut it.

Notion #5: Agile isn’t a methodology. It isn’t a family of methodologies. Well, it is, but more importantly it’s a way of thinking about how to accomplish things.

It’s the practical application of Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”

What it means to you: If you want to try to improve how your organization functions and don’t want to risk doing more harm than good, figure out ways to improve it one small increment at a time. As you do, consider that each increment should be:

  • Easy to explain: If it’s complicated it isn’t incremental.
  • Easy to integrate: The increment shouldn’t disrupt how the rest of the work gets done, or at least it shouldn’t disrupt it badly.
  • Contained: Its scope should be limited to your organization. Processes have inputs, outputs, and methods. Incremental changes should focus on methods, unless a source of your inputs or consumer of your outputs wants to collaborate.
  • Non-limiting: To the extent you can tell, implementing the increment shouldn’t close off potentially desirable future changes.
  • Reversible: If it doesn’t work out, you should be able to stop doing it without difficulty.

Last Notion: Some managers are good at operations — at keeping the joint running. Others are good at making change happen — at making tomorrow look different from yesterday.

Neither skill is good enough by itself.

Managers who excel at operations but can’t make change happen will lead a long, slow slide into obsolescence. But those who excel at change without being competent at operations have the opposite problem.

They won’t survive until the future gets here.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

How is Covid-19 like a strategic change initiative?

If you guessed it’s because both are potentially but unpredictably lethal, sorry, no. Unlike COVID-19, change initiative lethality is quite predictable.

The right answer: Fatigue sets in.

It’s dueling clichés: It isn’t the destination that matters, it’s the journey vs This isn’t a sprint — it’s a marathon.

Having only run marathons vicariously I can’t speak for those who do. But for those called on to run one involuntarily: Put me into this situation and I’d say screw the journey. In maybe three blocks fatigue would set in, and all I’d care about is the destination.

Eight months into the pandemic, those who aren’t suffering from mask-and-social-distancing fatigue either don’t wear masks and distance themselves socially, or belong to the Hermits, Recluses, and Anchorites Club.

The rest of us are involuntary marathoners, grudgingly trudging toward our at-last-a-vaccine-that-works destination.

On a more prosaic front, which is to say we’ve arrived at this week’s subject, I’ve been involved, directly or as a consultant, in several strategic, multi-year transformation programs. I’ve helped them progress from broad-but-vague intentions, through rigorous strategy-to-action planning, to the complexities of executing multiple, parallel, interconnected multi-project initiatives.

A constant: After a while the exhilaration that comes from early successes fades and change-fatigue sets in.

If you read Bare Bones Project Management (thank you!) you probably recall the project enthusiasm curve — the sequence of emotional states project teams typically experience over the life of a project: The downslope of Unenlightened Optimism, Dawning Pessimism, and the Pit of Maximum Despair; the recovery period of Enlightened Optimism; the speed bump of Pre-completion Doldrums.

Followed by, we hope, Success.

Project managers go through the same stages as their teams, only they aren’t afforded the luxury of going through them visibly. They help themselves through the tough parts so they can help their teams get through them too.

When the subject is large-scale strategic change, though, the fatigue is both broader and deeper than with project-level change. It’s broader because with strategic change typically comes reorganizations, restructurings, and staff reductions that change the how-to-succeed rules for just about everyone.

It’s deeper because strategic change fatigue can hit an organization’s executives even harder than it hits staff-level employees. When executives enter the Pit of Maximum Despair, here are some of the symptoms:

Tactical independence: “The strategy might pay off years from now. We should be looking for opportunities that will pay off tomorrow — low-hanging fruit, to coin a phrase — even if they won’t do much to move the strategy forward,” one might say.

Many tactically independent efforts really are good ideas the company really should pursue. The problem comes from failing to reserve a portion of the company’s capital and operating budgets to pursue them.

As a general rule, companies should split their budgets into thirds — one third to pay for the strategy, the second to pay for non-strategic opportunities, and the last to, if you’ll forgive the self-indulgence, keep the joint running.

Silo-oriented planning: Silo-oriented planning takes tactical independence to the next level. Where tactical independence might lead to change efforts anywhere in the company, silo-oriented planning results in investments in my part of the company. That’s what I’m accountable for. Gimme.

How to prevent, or at a minimum reduce silo thinking? We’ve covered this topic extensively in KJR. Here’s a partial list from the archives: https://issurvivor.com/?s=silo.

A too-brief summary: Managers exhibit silo thinking when structural factors like the budgeting process and bonus program encourage it.

Defection: Whether the stress of making change happen becomes too excessive, the requirement of collaborating with peers someone neither likes or trusts starts to have too much impact on the old sphygmomanometer, or the longer hours (okay, the hours aren’t longer but there are more of them) needed for executives to get both their day jobs and change responsibilities done means redefining “personal life” to mean “my job and nothing but my job” … whatever the face-value reasons, executives start to bail out and join the competition.

Or, worse, executives who championed the change put an exaggerated account of their roles in making it happen, and of how much progress has been made on their resumes, then bail out before the whole thing falls apart.

If you’re one of the executives responsible for leading your company through a major change, be alert for the signs of change fatigue, both among your peers and within yourself. Dealing with it so it doesn’t derail the program is your job.

If you’re anyone else in the business, be alert to the same symptoms. If you spot them make plans to survive the experience.

Your first responsibility is, after all, to yourself.

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