Create a successful change strategy

Develop a clear vision of where you are going

Richard Hall

Overview

Knowing where you want to get is the big breakthrough. Following this is a recognition that you will have a battle with people if you try and change things. Because fact: we hate change. Change strategies are hard to execute, let alone create.

‘If you don’t know where you’re going it doesn’t much matter which road you take.’

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll should have been an entrepreneur. Nearly all of them have a clear idea where they are going. But it all goes wrong when they are successful and scaled up and the bureaucratic stuff starts and spoils everything. It is rather like a fog descending.

The key issue in business is people and how they feel and think. These people are consumers, customers, employees, leaders, stakeholders, suppliers and the media. A few years ago, there was a view that removing the erratic human interface in customer service would have breakthrough benefits. Replace it with voice recognition robots, they said (try talking to BT to see how this works). In our dreams, artificial intelligence may, one day, replace moody call-centre operatives, but not yet. Not for a long time yet.

People in business sometimes say they like change. But they are lying – they do not like it because human beings dislike changing the status quo. Take moving house, which, in the stress level league table, is up there with death, divorce and being fired. Why? Because it is disruptive change; it takes you out of your comfort zone and you cannot find anything.

All change is stressful, awkward and, all too often, seems a fruitless exercise in moving deckchairs.

But, once we understand that deep-rooted hatred of change, we understand why so many change strategies fail. Deep down, a lot of people want them to fail so they can (as they describe it) ‘get back to normal’.

In addition to empathising with people, any change strategy needs three things:

1. Hard thinking about where you want to go and how you want to get there (and do not forget the importance of emotion – strategies devoid of feelings seldom work).
2. The creation of a brilliant, simple and compelling strategic statement, an action plan and a route map for the journey with tangible milestones.
3. The drawing up of a clear, executable communications plan within which the ways of specifically inspiring and managing the team set up to undertake the journey are explained.

All winning change strategies will contain these ingredients.

Context

You do not like change? Well, look around you at the pace of change, at the broken paradigms and at the companies that have disappeared. As General Shinseki of the US Army said: ‘You may not like change, but you’ll like irrelevance even less.’

Anthony Muh, one-time head of investment at Citibank (Asia), said, ‘Uncertainty is the only thing to be sure of,’ and Tom Peters foresaw it all when he wrote Thriving on Chaos in 1987. Because, in the 21st century, normal is chaos, messy and uncertain.

The world, despite the occasional determined attempt by terrorists to prove the reverse, is becoming richer, safer and more pleasant. Advances in medicine, technology, engineering, surgery and logistics is roaring ahead, but the management of people and understanding of the human mind is lagging behind, especially in managing the human reaction to change.

Because all business nowadays is about change and people do not like change.

So, we had just better get used to it. And get used to setting out a clear route plan showing where you want to get, what you want to change and how to make that journey safely, swiftly and successfully.

The context in which we operate today is one of:

• A global society – what happens in China, Indonesia or the Arabian Gulf affects all of us – the oil price is global, as is the price of all commodities.
• English – but it is taught virtually everywhere as the key foreign language and it is the language of business and the web.
• Mobility of labour – increasingly people go where the work and money is.
• Ageing populations – all the more developed countries are ageing.
• Consumer promiscuity – the tendency to switch brands and migrate from old favourites is increasing; the good old days of brand loyalty are fading.
• An explosion of start-up businesses – more and more people are starting their own businesses, aided by concepts like crowdfunding and by an urge to be their own boss; in the UK alone, 581,000 new businesses were registered in 2014.
• An increasingly well-educated and sophisticated generation Z – less obedient, more concerned with values, more broadly educated, more open minded – a management challenge (and opportunity).
• A reduction in the cost of entry for innovation – 3D modelling and other advances in technology help prototyping and save costs and time.

In formulating a change strategy it is important to remember just how many moving parts there are in the world around us. It is impossible to create a robust strategy without factoring in some of these external change factors.

Challenge

Your biggest challenges are stakeholders – what they want, feel and think. Creating a really simple, clearly expressed strategic idea with sensitivity to the speed of competitor response is a huge challenge. But your stakeholders need it, so get thinking.

Three of the biggest challenges of a rapidly changing world are:

1. Stakeholder engagement – there are so many stakeholders in all businesses nowadays that sometimes I am surprised anything happens at all, given the multiplicity of communication needs. Just produce an up-to-date stakeholder map and you will be astonished. In covering all these stakeholders, you willll be practising what one-time Tory cabinet minister R. A. Butler called ‘the art of the possible’ – the ultimate in pragmatism.

2. A real simplicity of ideas – why, what, who, when, how much? In creating the strategy, the biggest challenge of all is to boil down the key idea of the strategy to a few very simple words. This is where brands matter – brands that (when done well) stand for one simple thing. If you cannot explain what you are doing and how you want to move forward to an eight-year-old, then it is probably too complex.

3. Competitive response – because the competitive context in which we operate is so complex and aggressive we need to be very aware of whether we are maximising our competitive position. Recently, Joseph Joseph – the innovative kitchenware manufacturer – said it took three years to develop a new product from scratch and it took a pirate competitor three months to knock it off. As a result of the amount of business being stolen, they have become ultra-careful about restricting knowledge of their new product development programme to a very tight circle.

And the practical issues in writing the strategy are to:

• have thought about and researched the subject very thoroughly;
• be open, clear, straightforward and realistic about the problems;
• be patient with people, their opinions and their conservatism;
• set timelines that are achievable, communicated and met.

The biggest challenge of all is involving and inspiring people around you. All too often, strategies are dull, dry and rational things. They need to sizzle, too.

Key development approach

This section shows how to write that plan and tee it up so as to maximise the chances of success. The first question is, do you know who you are and what you stand for? Big issues are here. These include the importance of emotion in creating a strategy – no emotional engagement, no chance and a big question: do we need revolution not change? Is change radical enough in the 21st century?

Companies like Ben & Jerry’s, the ice-cream masters who sold to Unilever, clearly know what they stand for and where they are going. They showed this when, in a killing-two-birds-with-one-stone advertisement, they mocked the idiocy of management-speak mission-statement language with a strike to the jugular of their values. The ad read:

‘MISSION STATEMENT: To make nice ice cream.’

So, the first question you must answer is this one:

‘What do we do that makes us competitive?’

In a world of increasing commoditisation, the brand that clearly differentiates itself wins. Look at Apple. Look at Zara.

How to define and create that clear vision

‘If you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going wrong.’

Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

First of all, decide where you want to be. That will not be a number, top or bottom line; it will not be a story just built around money. Profit is the consequence of what you do, not an end in its own right.

It will be about why on earth you come to work every day; it will be about what turns the people on from the top to the bottom of a company; it will be about sustaining the passion that got the business going in the first place and it will be about writing a story about the exciting and impressive situation that you want your business to be in some five years from now.

Because a vision is about a dream of the future

You create a vision by asking yourself about the future:

• What will be different from now?
• What does this business stand for?
• How does it feel working here?
• What does it look like?
• What sort of things (especially new things) is it doing?
• What are people saying about it?

If you are still wondering how to visualise, listen to John Lennon in the words of ‘Imagine’ about dreamers.

The ability to imagine is what distinguishes inspiring leaders – and you are, indeed, not alone in wanting to be one.

Five key steps to successful strategy creation

So, you have a vision – a clear and simple description of what the future could and should be. To make it happen and to allow those around you to follow the recipe for this delicious vision you have created, you need to go through the process of writing it all down.

Here is a format.

Step 1: Rationale

• What is this new change strategy for?
• Why is it happening?
• What is the destination and how long is the journey to get there?
• What is the size of the prize at the end of it?
• What will it specifically change?
• When it happens, what will the knock-on effects be? Remember that change in one place always changes things in other places – often unexpectedly.
• How difficult will it be to pull off this strategy – what are the challenges to overcome?
• How popular/unpopular will it be overall?
• Why do you think it is, essentially, such a good idea? (This will force you to revisit and refresh the passionate enthusiasm you have for the plan… Do not hang back.)

Step 2: Research

Understand the task before anything is set down – before anyone starts building, they employ an architect, a chartered surveyor and lawyers to do searches; plans precede foundations and reconnaissance is never wasted. So decide:

• Who do you ask? People within the company who will be your champions of the strategy; people in other companies who have been through similar situations.
• What do you ask? Questions related to how to make all this work.
• What do you study? Do not shy away from all the data, market research and background reports that must exist. Become a voracious reader.
• How long have you got? This is the pragmatic question. If this is an emergency that needs quick resolution, be realistic – the time you can spend on research will be limited, so just focus on the important stuff.
• How will you involve, inspire and engage the people on whom the strategy will impact at this early stage? You need them onside now, not when you present them with a fait accompli.

Step 3: Outline definition of the strategy

Aim for simplicity and clarity, we said. An example of this comes from South West Airlines in the USA, consistently the most successful airline in the world. Herb Kelleher, who once when pressed to refine his strategy for the company, said: ‘Yeah, we have a strategy here. We make things happen.’

He was talking about his idea of an airline to a friend over dinner in 1967, not just another boring airline but one focussed on the key Texan cities, which the major airlines were under-servicing.

He drew the idea as a triangle with three points in Texas – Dallas, Houston and San Antonio.

It was that focussed. It was that simple.

Today, it has revenues of over $18.5 billion, 46,000 employees and 3,500 flights a day. It is the world’s largest low-cost airline and is thriving. Strategies that are going work need to be rooted in the real world and not just on paper and in theory.

Step 4: The detailed plan

Produce a final strategy, that (should you, sadly, be eaten by a tiger) has the stand-alone merit of being able to be picked up and implemented by someone else. It does not have to be long, but it does have to be clear and thorough. But beware taking this whole process too solemnly. Rachel Bell, founder and CEO of Shine Communications, said, ‘Paper plans are paper planes’. Plans on paper are necessary, but the heart of strategy creation is with real human beings talking together and reacting to ideas.

It must include the following:

• Our thoughts and feelings:
  • What do we think? These will be clear reasons to believe.
  • What do we feel? These will be emotional and more to do with soft values.
  • What do we want? What we want may be market leadership and fame.
  • What do we need? But maybe what we need are increased margins and an improved return on investment – these are obviously not the same thing.
• The five-point format. See above for content. How you achieve this piece of work is also important. Historically, you might have gone to the top of a tower, put a wet towel round your head, thought for a bit, written it down and passed it to Moses to take down to the people.
  The most powerful way of generating content is to make an event out of its creation at a strategy workshop, where you involve a lot of key people to make their contribution and feel involved. Done well, you end up with a change strategy that people feel they own, as they are already signed up to it.
  The chances of doing it well are enhanced by intense preparation and brilliant facilitation.

Step 5: Implementation and measurement

Draw up a very clear, simple step-by-step plan showing how the strategy will be implemented:

• Timetable – be clear about what needs to happen and when. Strategies or any project need a sensible timeframe of what happens and when.
• Resource allocation – unless money, space and people are invested in success, the strategy will not be taken seriously and it will not work.
• Organisation – a change strategy is just that. So, what are the organisational changes that are likely to be entailed?
• Measurement of change – set in hand a three-stage piece of internal and external research to assess where you are now and, say, in six months’ time and in a year’s time. This will allow you to benchmark the success of the strategy. Keep it simple but include within it the sample of all stakeholders, which must be large enough to be meaningful but not so large as to be unwieldy. The point of this exercise is to assess not just numerical success but also how it is perceived to have gone.

Mike Tyson, the ex-heavyweight boxing champion (not generally rated for his intellect, but what a surprise he often is when you read what he says), said something particularly brilliant:

‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.’

Success

How will you know your strategy is a good or bad one until it is too late, until it has succeeded or it has failed? This book is about understanding the end-to-end process of the creation of a change strategy and beyond that. But the real test of success will be the way people engage with and talk about the strategy. If they were thoroughly involved in its creation, chances are they will be more supportive.

But the acid test of the strategy creation lies, ultimately, in the answers to the following questions:

1. Has it been properly thought through? Are you, yourself, and your team really confident about it? The need for you to own your strategy, live for it and with it is critical. But it needs more than just thought. You need to feel right about it and have an emotional, not just an intellectual, commitment to it.
2. Has it got the green light from all or, at any rate, have you avoided a red light from any of the stakeholders and people who are mainly affected by the strategy? The key to a successful strategy is engagement, endorsement and belief on the part of everyone involved in its implementation and not just the key team.
3. Has the vision been sufficiently vivid and inspiring to work its magic on people? (But beware, because there will always be cynics who will see a catch or downside in everything).
4. Do you have the stamina to keep at it? I was going to call this paragraph ‘setbacks, betrayals and cock-ups’, but it seemed too melodramatic. Nonetheless, the reality of a change strategy is it will cause trouble and, along the way, you have suffered all of these. Be patient, be calm and be cheerful. Whatever else you do, do not lose your temper.
5. Can you actually remember what has been said?

To help you, here are the key headlines that you need to keep in mind:

Measurement matters

You need to be able to measure the impact of your strategy, not just numerically, but in the round. You need to able to learn from what you do – both successes and things that did not quite work out as you had imagined. Set up a longitudinal study (that is a piece of research repeated every six months) so you can check out what happens, how people feel about what happens and how embedded the change strategy is.

Checklist

Do you feel more confident about creating a vivid strategy supported by a thrilling vision of the future?

• Understanding the critical role of emotion in strategy. If you think you are a lean, mean thinking machine immune to emotion, think again. But you do not really believe that, do you? Click here to review.
• Anticipating debate, objections and resistance from stakeholders. Getting people to agree about anything is hard enough, but covering all those disparate stakeholders and persuading them to follow you is a mighty task. Click here to review.
• About simplicity and clarity. These are the two things that really matter in creating a strategy that has convincing appeal. No jargon. No acronyms. No gobbledegook. Click here to review.
• Do you feel like a human dynamo? Energy is the key to organisational success. If you can speed up the way you work and get things done, you will create more thrilling strategies. Click here to review.
• Hey, Che Guevara, how about a revolution… or is that going too far? Things are changing so fast, with so many companies that had been a fixture forever dying (remember Woolworths). Maybe a change strategy is not radical enough, maybe we need to push the boundaries back further, maybe we need to shake people and things up. What do you think? Click here to review.
• Be a brilliant communicator or fail. Communication is increasingly the critical function in any organisation. Do not embark on a change strategy without having a great communication plan and a great communicator in place. Skimping on communication is a sure recipe for failure. Do you agree? Click here to review.
• Is competition getting faster, better and cheaper than us? If so, help. We live in increasingly competitive times with global competitors who are faster, better and cheaper than us, potentially. All over the world people like you are writing brilliant strategies trying to disrupt you. Are you fully attuned to the competitive realities of today? Click here to review.
• The real speed of change. The world is changing faster and faster. Paradigms get smashed. Normal is history. Are you a student of how things constantly fragment and transform? Do you love the excitement of change? Click here to review.
• What do you feel and think about what you want and need? Do you agree that creating strategy is a complex process where you use the whole of your brain – the emotions and rationality? Do you understand that all around you there will be people wanting things, which may not be what the business needs? Do you realise the art of strategy creation is in energy, pragmatism and compromise? Click here to review.
• Know where you are going. Can you remember what Lewis Carroll said? Being clear about your ultimate goal is the real key to a successful change strategy and a compelling vision. So do you think your sense of direction is working? Click here to review.