Navigating Transformations:Eight Essential Insights

With a background in leading product development and engineering teams, I’ve learned that successful transformations require deliberate planning and execution. This guide outlines eight key considerations to help leaders drive meaningful change.

  1. Establish Purpose

Why change? The more people understand and buy into the need for change, the greater the momentum for a successful transformation

  1. Successful change is a team sport

Change-agent heroes can be very lonely. Invest in creating a winning coalition.

Effective transformational leaders need creativity, need to understand system thinking, need passion about working with people and the ability learning from difficult circumstances.

  1. Define the baseline

Know where you are coming from particularly in terms of the metrics that you want to work on and improve.

  1. Look below the surface

Avoid curing only symptoms. Frequently, what is visible on the surface may not tell the full story or give enough insight into understanding the root cause of your problems. It’s important to analyze and understand sufficiently what needs to be fixed so that the intended and sustainable change will happen.

However, also bear on mind not to get stuck with analysis paralysis.

  1. Understand the system

Be mindful that often things to change depend on each other.

E.g., troubled teams rarely follow mature processes, produce great products,  built with compelling design and architecture. So, if you want to se one particular outcome, you may need to consider other changes as prerequisites.

I found the B-A-P-O principle (Business à architecture à process à organization structure) useful that suggests the following:

Start with the intended business outcome. Next, define the architecture and product design that supports this goal. Then, establish the processes needed to execute. Finally, organize teams to implement the plan.

  1. Think big!

… but start small!

Having a clear picture on mind of where you want to go and being able to express a compelling vision inspiring the people implementing the change can be tremendously helpful. However, the big picture may miss the view of critical details or rely on unrealistic assumptions. Hence, encourage running small experiments, run such experiment frequently, carefully evaluate their results – and learn from them by utilizing “inspect-and-adapt” cycles for the transformation itself.

  1. Show progress

Establish key metrics and track the progress – or failure – to encourage continued focus on the change

Seek to identify and nurture developing lighthouse(s) – such as teams, locations, functions – for change

Celebrate success, encourage further engagement.

  1. Strive to improve something always!

Seek leaving the organization, product, engineering teams – and as result the business – in a better state than what I found upon joining.

Transformations are complex but rewarding. By focusing on these eight principles, leaders can guide their teams through meaningful and sustainable change.

What motivates us

If you look at the science, there is a mismatch between what science knows – and what business does. Check out one of my favorite TED talks given by Dan Pink, where he explains the relevance of autonomy, mastery and purpose for the “Drive” of humans:

Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation

Pre-requites checklist for Organizational Agility

Are you ready to start your journey of implementing agility within your organization? How do you know that you are really ready for this?

Many organizations are actually not really ready for their agile journey for various reasons. As result, most agile transformations fail.

Luckily, Simon Powers and I, have spent considerable time putting together a list of all the things that we have seen organizations fail at!

We then turned this into a positive list of prerequisites that you can check off to make sure you don’t end up in the same situation.

You can download the list here for FREE!

You can watch our original webinar introducing the topic here, also for free: https://youtu.be/VmZo0_rabwo

And finally we have just launched a new free video series going into much more depth on the prerequisites and you can watch the first one (again for free) here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6XXwSf4NJY

The second one here:
https://lnkd.in/dT5yjEa

We have created a playlist for the entire video series:
https://lnkd.in/dUVBtxF