The seeds of our own destruction | Claverton Consulting

Sowing the Seeds of our own Destruction

When Mark Twain said, “every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all” he could well have been describing a typical business transformation programme. Every programme cansucceed, however many underperform as a result of the most common failure of all – us, we the people. The seeds of our destruction are often sown right at the start, as we commit avoidable but common transformation initiation mistakes. Inefficiency or error during the programme initiation phase will cascade into subsequent programme phases (see Fig. 1), elongating implementation and deployment, driving up costs and delaying outcome realisation.

Fig. 1

In this blog post, we examine the recurrent challenges faced by transformation programmes during their discovery and planning phases:

1. Leaders need to lead

Effective leaders in all walks of life employ teams to perform the specialist activities that they themselves do not possess the skills or experience to do. Instead, they provide leadership to a company, division, or a team and listen to and embrace the experience of experts they employ, valuing their input and proficiency. Leaders provide the vision, transformation experts support the preparation of the strategy and approach, and programme experts provide delivery expertise.

Unfortunately, we constantly witness blurring of these roles, with leaders seeking to micromanage and set artificial constraints upon the initiation process. The drivers behind these behaviours vary but include a leader’s personal work ethic, their personal preferences, and perceptions about pressures they are under to deliver results. An effective leader will simplify: setting the broad planning objectives and a time horizon, empowering the team to discover and plan the programme, being readily available to guide, inform and challenge where necessary.

Another leadership trait which undermines the early transformation stages is misplaced self-confidence, which can be interpreted as arrogance if key staff are poorly engaged. It is important for leaders to admit what they don’t know and allow themselves to become informed as the discovery team gathers planning inputs and produces the transformation roadmap.

A key element of transformation leadership is to engage stakeholders, giving them a voice and ensuring they feel valued. Successful engagement will better achieve your objectives by empowering the transformation team to take ownership for key activities, deliverables and dates, etc. Poor stakeholder engagement is commonly associated with leaders who ‘do’ as opposed to ‘lead’, as this type of leader often underestimates how much time they must spend maintaining stakeholder relationships and keeping their objectives aligned to those of the transformation.

2. Employ experienced transformation leaders

An inexperienced team will commit many of the planning mistakes on this list, so Programme Directors and Managers as well as Project Managers should have ideally worked on similar transformations in the past. When assembling a team, it is best to look for broad experience in key roles at the top of the programme, particularly as you form your vision, operating model, strategy and road map. At this point, broad transformation skills are far more important than the technical skills (e.g. in business processes, customer experiences, or specific solutions) which you should expect subject matter experts working at the level of the project teams to possess.

Additionally, broad transformation skills are also far more important for these roles than industry experience. The best transformation experts spend their careers crossing industry sectors, adapting and bringing a wealth of different experiences and challenges to the table – this is invaluable in avoiding groupthink and simply mimicking competitors.

3. Rushed planning

Planning can be complex, time-consuming, and frustrating for leaders who want to start pushing change forwards. Some perceive planning as a lack of progress when, in fact, it is the cornerstone upon which successful transformations are built – poor quality planning outcomes inevitably lead to suboptimal transformation results. Therefore, it is important to give planning the time to complete properly, considering the adverse consequences of not doing so, such as :

There is no validation or confirmation of the roadmap, which means continued uncertainty
The team may not be clear what it is doing, leading to inefficiency, confusion and missteps which require time consuming rectification
Continued uncertainty means continual planning and reaction to unexpected events – both of which undermine delivery and implementation expectations
Continued planning activity overlapping project delivery will result in people inefficiently context-switching between planning and doing which can, in extreme cases, mean that planning is never adequately completed – transformation programmes in this situation commonly face ‘spiralling delays’ (see Fig. 2 below for illustration)
You have no baseline for contracting with 3rd parties, meaning you are exposed to an increased risk of change leading to unpredictable cost variation
Unplanned activities consume additional human resources and, where urgent, will lead you to sacrifice either money (to pay for additional resources) or planned tasks (where people have to be diverted from other activity). Delaying planned tasks increases risk, with knock-on effects which can create delays and further cost.
Planning is the basis of transformation budgeting; weak planning means budgetary ranges will be wide and imprecise

Fig. 2

Effective planning phases will remove risk, enhance certainty, build executive confidence, and demonstrate the achievability of your transformation journey. It is worth the investment to reap the rewards of planning, which often go unseen, forgotten or underappreciated:

Market commitments: when plans are poorly formulated, dates presented to the market represent a risk to the C-suite who must manage investors’ expectations
Customer impact: transformation programmes which offer products, services or solutions to customers require solid plans to support customer commitments, marketing campaign timing and a raft of quality expectations. Date pressure can compromise quality and result in major embarrassment, e.g. product recalls
Team morale: a team works at its optimum with clear vision, direction, plans and certainty. Anything less than this can undermine confidence and create a vicious circle of underperformance
Resources: will be assigned across the programme in line with plans to support constituent projects. Weak planning means managers often have to react to competing short-term demands, leading to inefficiency, conflict, delays and costs
Supplier contracts: greater planning certainly reduces contractual risk. Transformation programmes are complex, as are the supplier relationships which accompany them – changes to statements of work are amongst the most burdensome, expensive aspects of managing transformation successfully
Confusion: miscommunication between team members, managers and executive stakeholders creates stress, work and confusion. The more that plans react to events, as opposed to setting the agenda, the more inefficient the transformation programme will become

At the end of a planning phase, you should possess a sense of what it will feel like to go live. The team should be able to demonstrate that the desired outcomes are a function of executing the plan so you can validate that the transformation is going to achieve its objectives with high quality results.

4. Unclear definition of success

A core component of a transformation is to clearly understand and communicate targets, in the simplest terms possible. In some cases, this involves communicating sensitive information such as new, market-sensitive products, services for customers, or internal restructuring. It is important to be transparent internally about the definitions of success, with clear, credible targets defined.

Upon completion of the transformation initiation phase, the transformation leadership team should all be in a position to communicate success criteria and articulate, confidently, how executing the road map will result in their achievement.

5. Optimism & heroism

Unfortunately, large change and transformation programmes are notorious for overrunning, overspending, overpromising and under delivering. One driver for this is that people are over-optimistic during the initiation phase – pressure to go faster is common, some leaders want to appear heroic by delivering a tough challenge. However top-down optimism often ends up in bottom-up disaster. Why might this be?

No matter how well planned a transformation programme is, they are lengthy, complex beasts which are difficult to manage and control. When you factor in changes in their operating environment, personnel, suppliers, scope and so on, they become even harder.

Against this backdrop, optimism is rarely well placed, but it remains the norm, overriding more realistic viewpoints. Some overly optimistic leadership phrases to watch out for are:

“It can’t take that long. Just shave off a month.”
“I could do it myself in half that time.”
“We don’t need contingency. Nobody will approve it anyway.”
“I read about Project Management in the Sunday Times last weekend………”
If you can’t do it, I can easily find someone that can

Optimism arrives in many forms, a pivotal one being to ignore an organisation’s track record of delivering change on time, on budget and within the confines of the original business plan. Being honest, if your organisation habitually struggles to deliver change then your transformation programme will have to do something substantively different to buck that trend. Is that likely? Step back and ask yourself: have we truly created the conditions for success?

6. Everybody knows what they’re doing, right?

Something you learn when recovering failing programmes and projects is that, oftentimes, people don’t know what they are doing, or why they are doing it, but are afraid of appearing stupid…….so say nothing. No matter how many times a plan is socialised, someone will still be trying to unravel it in the spaghetti of their mind.

Assigning leaders to each section of the plan and having them work closely with the individuals doing the tasks is the best way to surface uncertainty. Creating a networking environment where people can ask questions, without fear of judgement is vital. Daily stand up meetings for workstream leads, and weekly stand ups for each project team may seem like meeting for meetings’ sake, but if focussed and sharp, they will surface questions and keep everyone on track.

7. Weak change management

Transformations possessing strong governance typically maintain strong scope control from the outset. It is important to start as you mean to go on as many initiation phases are subjected to pressures to include scope items which have no place in the transformation programme, for example:

Pet projects
Unnecessary requirements
Maintaining existing processes or systems which should no longer be required

In our experience, programmes which do a poor job of locking down and enforcing scope control during the initiation and planning phases will continue in the same vein until the cash runs out and the transformation leaders become unpopular with their bosses. The best thing for all concerned is to control scope early, resulting in a well-defined, tight set of project and programme plans.

8. Perfect knowledge doesn’t exist

There is an art to knowing when to stop planning, typically where Pareto’s Law kicks in the point at which you have 80% of the required information, where the remaining 20% will add diminishing value. Beyond this point, programmes waste considerable time and money seeking planning perfection instead of delivering transformation results.

Programmes which delay until they possess ‘perfect’ planning information will typically exhibit related behaviours throughout their lifecycle – for example, the leadership style of such programmes is often likely to continue to want more and more information to support decision-making; they demonstrate a lack of the pragmatism and rapid decision-making characteristics which mark out those transformations which are truly successful.

During programme turn-around initiatives, we regularly see leadership teams facing decision-making paralysis. In many cases, they originally possessed the ability to make well-informed, rapid decisions but that ability was eroded over time due to both transformation and wider business pressures.

9. Changing your mind

The easiest way to undermine a transformation roadmap is for the leadership team to change its mind about what it wants. A successful initiation requires the vision, strategy, operating model, business process end state and the organisation design to have been thoroughly thought through, validated and tested. If they change constantly, the plan will have to be unpicked and revised. In some cases, we witness planning processes taking months when they should have taken weeks, purely because the direction keeps changing.

Remember, to increase certainty is to reduce risk so we advocate something that few transformation initiation programmes successfully achieve – to validate and the Target Operating Model (TOM) before triggering the roadmap. A simple validation exercise to confirm that:

Achieving the TOM will release the expected benefits
All of the core activities to realise the TOM are in the road map and programme plan
An example business process area, when delivered, will result in the desired outcomes
All key stakeholders are agreed on the core principles which underpin the roadmap
A simulation of what it will feel like to go live when the roadmap is complete takes place, and results in validation of the TOM

These exercises need not be complex and the investment of a couple of days to achieve a heightened level of validation and confidence is well worth it. The validation part of the process will drive out any potential for ‘mind-changing’ and table it overtly so that it can be addressed before delivery starts whereas, if left, it has the potential to disrupt the programme with adverse effects on time and money.

Conclusion

We rarely talk about ‘speed’ when discussing transformation initiation, rather we use the term ‘velocity’ because it is a vector, requiring a clear sense of direction before pace can be applied. Any team can move quickly – however, doing so without clearly understood targets and a sense of purpose can result in people simply rushing around in circles, achieving nothing. Creating the right balance requires broad transformation experience – too little planning exposes you to high levels of risk and uncertainty; too much costs time and money with diminishing value-add and potential longer-term behavioural consequences.

If the seeds of our destruction are sown during programme initiation, they are realised as they grow and spread their tendrils through the implementation journey, hampering progress, creating chaos, consuming time and money. Top performing transformations understand this dynamic and weed them out early using some of the techniques we have described here. Doing the right things in the right way begins during programme initiation – get this phase right and the rest of your journey will put you at the top of transformation performance.

Happy transforming!

To find out more about how Claverton can help and support you through your transformational change programme, contact us at info@clavertonconsulting.co.uk or call on 0117 325 7890.

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