When you’re standing outside of a transformation, watching project teams beavering away, you think, “Is it really that hard?” When you’re within one of these teams, you’re often thinking, “Why is this so hard?”
I once had a colleague say, in an effort to give us hope, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.
I thought to myself, during a transformation, everyone SHOULD be doing it and while I’m not expecting easy, it should be easier than this.
Here’s what I’ve seen and experienced as the common barriers to Business Modernization.
Barrier 1: Unclear Vision and/or Strategy
We’ve all seen the wordy vision statement on a slide. The kind of statement that leaves everyone staring with a furrowed brow thinking, “What are we doing?” Or in my case, “Those are words…”
For those who have a clear vision statement and strategy, I often see a gap between the statement and the work happening on the ground. Senior execs are left thinking, “How do they not get it?” As for the people on the ground, they’re left wondering “What does all the work amount to? What’s the common thread that stiches it all together? What does it mean for my program?”
What causes this? Let’s talk about barrier #2.
Barrier 2: Leadership Gap We put out a vision statement and activate project teams. Before you know it, there’s a plethora of slideware with all the trendy terminology. You’re being told this is going to change how your division conducts business. You look at the slideware and think “… but how exactly?” Of course, you don’t say it out loud. You’re middle management and everyone expects you to know what you’re doing. So you keep going assuming you’ll eventually figure it out.
Multiply this experience in each business vertical.
Modernizations are cross-functional by nature. The degree of complexity and number of variables make it such that the traditional top-down leadership model isn’t sufficient.
We need a distributed leadership model. Or said differently, we need middle management playing an active leadership role, starting by unpacking the vision statement to a greater level of granularity. Once each vertical understands how it impacts their program, they can work together to stitch the narrative and lead their teams.
Barrier 3: Tech First Approach
Tell me if this sound familiar. Someone gets excited about a piece of tech. They spin up a project to jam it in. Months if not years later, when it’s finally implemented, we wonder what that entire project was for. More often than not, it was a solution looking for a problem.
Tech implementations are all consuming. They’re too often heavy and bureaucratic. They’ll consume the bandwidth of the most talented executive. It’s easy to lose sight of the business problem you’re trying to solve.
But the business problem must not only be the start point but the only point.
Barrier 4: Unclear metrics of success
Amazon launches a project by releasing a press release internally through their governance. They imagine being in the future when the proposed idea is fully developed and implemented.
And they write the press release. They start with the answer to the question “What does success look like for the customer?” Only if the story is compelling, do they get the green light to proceed.
More often than not, projects launch either without clear metrics of success or alignment amongst leadership on what success looks like.
Barrier 5: Barriers to Adoption “You’re expecting resistance. Why?” “That’s just how they are.”
When I press, I get responses like, they’re unionized so we can’t touch them. They’re unmotivated. They’re too comfortable.
But why? Say more. There’s a tendency to take the first answer at face value rather than digging into the root of resistance.
For example, teams are unmotivated. Ok. How many layers of bureaucracy do you have? Do you have a culture of belonging? When was the last time they were asked their opinion? Have you created a situation where they feel like a cog in the wheel? If so, we need to solve for the cog.
Get to the root. Everything else is just symptomatic to the problem.
Barrier 6: Skills and capabilities gap It would be odd if you could modernize your organization based on the existing set of skills and capabilities.
I was once advised, when you look at the business strategy, what about it will be hard for people? In that answer are the breadcrumbs you need to follow to surface skills and capabilities gaps.
What do I mean by capabilities? Here’s my unsophisticated definition. To knock it out of the park, what do you need to be able to “do in your sleep”?
Knocking it out of the park for anyone in a customer-facing role if not today, definitely in the future, means anticipating their needs. That takes analytical skills. Insight-generation capabilities. I need to be so good at getting insight out of data, I could do it in my sleep. Not right away of course, but that’s the learning path.
Barrier 7: Weak Communications
Our calendars are full of meetings but too often, I sit back and think, “Do these people talk?”
I once had a client who felt out of the loop, despite leading a critical component of his organization’s transformation.
In one of our meetings, he voiced his sentiment that updates and information were being shared in watercooler conversations. If I were to go back in time knowing what I know now, I would tell him to join the watercooler.
Leaders of transformations need to talk to each other and their teams. And really talk. Come out of a meeting and ping someone. “What did you get out of that? What did you hear? What should we be making out of what was shared?” Start your day with a 15 min. check in with your colleague in another vertical. “How’s your team feeling? What’s bogging you down? Any ideas on what we can do?” End your day by checking in on a team member. “How are folks feeling? How are you feeling?”
Talk. And then talk some more.
Does it sound like a lot of work? Yes. But it takes more brainpower to navigate a transformation in ambiguity loaded with assumptions, than it does to have a few conversations.
Barrier 8: Culture gap I’ve spent time helping organizations become data driven to increase the quality and speed of decision-making. We invested in technology solutions and mobilized project teams. But we mobilized within a culture of:
Hoarding information
Relying on gut instincts and distrusting the digits
Risk aversion fueling a closed by default architecture; which bleeds into behaviors
The assumption is we can maneuver around culture to achieve goals.
But we can’t.
There’s a reason why the catch phrase “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” exists.
Barrier 9: Overambitious scope
We’ve all seen this. We secure massive budgets and launch enterprise-wide transformation. Why? We optimize for cost efficiency. We commit to a big scope to avoid rework. The logic: “If we’re going to solve this, let’s solve it once.”
The alternative? Optimize for risk. Break the big scope into smaller parts. Focus on what you can do to deliver value in the short term. Do you risk rework? Sure. But the momentum you create by delivering value in the short term counters whatever rework you might have to do.
Barrier 10: Business/Tech Divide I had a client organization undergoing an enterprise-wide transformation (classic pitfall 9 situation.) One of our verticals was particularly excited about the technology being implemented. They had a business requirement that presented challenge in delivering in the current state. They mobilized Subject Matter Experts to gather business and data requirements and identify new processes. They packaged months of work and presented it to IT.
IT looked at in and delivered the hard news. The solution being implemented wasn’t designed to handle transactional data, which this program needed to meet their requirement. After months of work, it’s not surprising that the reaction from the business was “Well, what value is this then?”
How did they get into this situation? By working in isolation. By thinking you can toss requirements over the fence and say “Make it so.”
Is it hard working with IT departments? My friend, that’s a whole other article. Suffice it to say that working in isolation to avoid the hardship isn’t the answer.
I’m a History major. I believe in learning from the past to avoid the same mistakes in the future. If I’m sharing this, it’s because there needs to be greater transparency and discussions around failed transformations. We need to collectively learn from these failures so we can better position ourselves if not in the present, at least in the future.
Let’s course correct on Pitfall #7. Let’s talk.
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