Transformation Blues - Fighting the nice-to-have cave of pain with Must Have and Case Studies

My clients are often frustrated that their transformation isn’t taking off despite promising results (e.g., outsized outcomes and speed by leveraging agile ways of working in a strategic initiative). 

One path that leaders often take is to follow initial promising results with a mandate to follow new ways of working throughout the organization. This is the classic playbook, and many consultants are happy to oblige (there’s lots of money in training and coaching large swaths of the organization quickly, where it’s clear the organization cannot tackle this on its own). 

This brute force approach can work in some environments but more often stalls. I talked quite a bit about this a decade ago. I suggested considering the transformation landscape as a market and applying crossing-the-chasm principles and techniques - recognizing early adopters, the chasm, the need for a full kit product, etc. One concrete approach I started using and formalizing was an invitations-based approach to change (see this guidance article for an example of how to apply this in the scaled agile world)

Over the years, I’ve helped leaders implement this approach, and it has created more sustainable transformation, but it’s far from perfect. One frustration is that if you don’t mandate, people don’t change. I’ve always talked about the need to market and nudge, connecting the potential benefits/outcomes to the needs of the organization, but there was still a missing piece. 

Rob Snyder has some brilliant content on Product-Market Fit (Paul Stansik at ParkerGale Capital recently interviewed Rob on the Private Equity Funcast). One of the key insights is that demand is actually your product being THE way to address THE top priority on the customer/buyer’s to-do list. It needs to be a must-have in their specific context/situation, or there won’t be strong demand (and you cannot create demand, but you can meet demand). 

If we apply this notion to the transformation demand context, the insight is that as long as the transformation you’re trying to “market/sell” internally is nice to have, you’re not going to have much success. You will be stuck in the “pain cave,” struggling to convince people to transform and tempted to use brute force. 

So …

To follow Rob’s advice, find the case studies inside the organization where the transformation addressed a must-have to-do list item. Use these case studies to sell/market the transformation and look for similar opportunities where it could potentially be a must-have. Pay close attention to what’s on the enterprise “to do” list. Whether it is product initiatives or business transformation and look for those with high complexity and cross-functional integration where you can show, based on past case studies, that your approach is THE way to get this complex critical thing done. It might take more time than brute force, but after a couple of home runs on critical opportunities, your constraint will be keeping up with demand… 

Yours

Yuval