The importance of visioning in change management
Last week I wrote about how change is often seen as binary. The illusion of change as binary also has the potential to create ‘otherness’ – you’re either in or out, on the bus or getting off the bus.
The reality is, we and our organisations are always changing, always adapting.
It is also limiting in terms of how it positions both the purpose of change, and the timeframe.
If you’re either one or the other, that means you can’t be many things all at once.
It means your vision has to be (by default) different to who you are today.
It means your organisation needs to be different from today (by which I mean – decision-making, structures, capability, people, footprint, customer base).
It means your performance has to be different from today.
And perhaps that’s all true.
In which case, you’re in need of true transformation, that starts from the ground up and re-imagines, redesigns and rebuilds almost everything. How many times have you found that to really be the case?
Seeing beyond the now to the vision
I’ve often found that leaders think they need one kind of change (or one set of things to be changed) when in reality the situation is quite different.
How many times have you been in situations where the Executive Team or the client says?
we don’t seem to be able to deliver critical programmes quickly enough, yet everyone says they’re really busy; or
the people we have in these jobs aren’t able to do what we need them to do, so we need to refresh our people; or
its costing us too much to deliver these services, we need to be more efficient in our business processes and how much time our people spend on them; or
we need to reduce spans of control so leaders have more time to be strategic.
In many cases, ALL of these are true at the same time!
So, a change approach focused on delivering improvements to one of these today issues will never be a solution, it will always be a temporary bandage to a bigger set of challenges.
It will also always be a missed opportunity.
This kind of approach often serves to limit the vision of what is possible. That ‘box of today’ you inadvertently start off in is often purely temporal – comparing what you want to what you have today – and it can be purpose-limiting. The vision is linked to what you believe in today, why you work in this way today, the current management of your workforce.
What if you put all that aside and did some real visionary work?
And by that, I mean thinking 10-20-30 years ahead and working backwards…
Let’s put it in an organisational context.
What if you facilitated a series of exercises with the Executive Team, the Board, the people working in your organisation, the customers, where the exercise was not ‘how can we improve on today?’ but
‘what value can we add to the future?’
The value exercise enables and invites questions, co-design and constructive debate about the kinds of topics that we rarely discuss:
Is this organisation adding any value, outside of self-perpetuity?
Is the value of this organisation time and contextually limited – whether on purpose or by accident – do we actually have a role 5, 10, 15 years hence?
Could the purpose we currently espouse be leveraged for any greater good?
Is it the structure (roles and hierarchy) and the capability (skills, processes) that need to change, or is it more fundamental?
In an ideal world, the outcomes of these conversations would be a clear articulation of a shared expression of value for future generations:
e.g. for a network of aged-care facilities their purpose may be: providing elder services in which the lived experience of getting older is a joy
e.g. for a national education provider: delivering personalised learning where systemic failures have been designed out and systemic success designed in
e.g. for a farming conglomerate: providing food for humans through processes that nourish the earth and safeguard biodiversity.
With value-based expression, the job of deciding what and how you may need to change or adapt your organisation is much clearer.
What change approach do you need?
Being clear on the value you want to add to the future, enables you to hone-in on what needs to change, and that answers the question of whether you need:
transformation
a new operating model design
a bespoke redesign of your people management framework and practice architecture
entirely new decision-making mandates and structures
a rethink of what capability you will need
to invest in green fields process and tech design programmes
new measures to check distance to realising the future
evolution
targeted change in specific areas of the business
streamlining and efficiency in your HR and leadership practices
maturity in decision-making and governance
a capability-uplift programme
to upgrade and update your existing business processes and technologies
measurements of progress against adapted metrics over time
Neither of these approaches are easy – they take hard and sustained effort. And they’re not mutually exclusive – evolution may require new decision-making frameworks and bespoke design of jobs for example.
It’s also important to know how you’ll measure achievement:
If you want joyful elder care services, the performance of the organisation is measured in joy quotient, the JOI (joy on investment).
If you want an education experience where systemic failures have been designed out, the measurement of progress is not how successful the system is for most, it’s how many of the conditions that enable failure and allow inequity have been exorcised.
For regenerative farming, you’ll need to measure not what you can take out, but how much the earth and non-human species receive.
But it is a worthwhile, critical use of time and energy to work out your value and time horizon, and then design your change approach from that.
Because a change that doesn’t achieve sustainable improvements and a better experience is just activity that keeps people busy and on edge.
Just like a change that aims to problem solve today’s issues is already out of date.
A change that isn’t positioned on the path for something 10-15-20 years out is a missed opportunity to get closer to achieving the value you want.
And as a change leader, understanding the end outcome enables you to:
tell compelling stories
prioritise the must-haves
design for sustainable practice from the start
and deliver more value than the original ‘scope’ may have implied.
Check out the JHA Consulting Services page for more information on the support available for strategic approaches to change.
Listen to the humans at work podcasts to hear other humans share their work and life stories… on Apple, Spotify and Google, or at www.humansatwork.org/podcast