Working with a client on a new corporate strategy last week highlighted the importance of simplicity in business generally and change in particular.
The focus of the work is translating a new corporate strategy and business plan into action through creating a number of competitive strategies and divisional plans. In addition to writing and executing these new plans, we also identified a number of supporting activities including: new recognition and reward systems, new performance evaluation needs, some degree of process design and improvement leading to the specification and selection of a new enterprise-wide IT system, the upgrade of the IT and network infrastructure to support the new systems, re-branding, internal and external communications, project and programme management, training and education programmes and so on.
The scale and complexity of the work was clearly a worry, which is where the need for simplicity comes in. I am unsure of the original context, but Albert Einstein said: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”, which is a helpful statement. There are clearly a number of threads here, and they need to be woven together into an integrated programme, and while urgency is a necessity for successful change, it shouldn’t preclude thorough preparation ( I hesitate to use the word ‘planning’ because it is too prescriptive when there are many unknowns and unpredictable events).
A statistic that is often quoted to illustrate the risks of change is that 70% of all change programmes fail to deliver the anticipated benefits. The interesting statistic therefore is that there must be a third of change programmes that get it right. The excellent book: “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half Truths and Total Nonsense” by Pfeffer and Sutton, which is scrupulous in seeking evidence for statements merely says that “most organizational change efforts have a high failure rate”, but in a quote that takes some inspiration from Oscar Wilde, I suspect, they quite correctly conclude that “the only thing more dangerous than changing an organization is never changing it at all.” So, how do we minimise the risk and emulate the minority of programmes that succeed?
One conclusion is that we must learn from both the successes and failures of past change efforts. Two things can help here; one is to accept that every project, programme and organisation is a work-in-progress that can always be improved. The second is that allowing people to learn from mistakes requires first that those mistakes can be recognised through discussing them openly without fear of retribution. It is not good to repeat mistakes, but every new idea has to carry a risk of failure and, therefore, in a truly innovative learning organisation, failure should be something that is accepted as business-as-usual.
Returning to the opening theme, it is reasonable to assume that failure occurs more often in complex situations than simple ones through the simple existence of many more variables. So, to give a change programme a reasonable chance of success, in addition to encouraging open discussion and acceptance of mistakes and a process for continuous refinement and improvement, some effort at the beginning to prepare well, by critically evaluating every planned activity and task to ensure it absolutely necessary then removing or deferring those that aren’t will be a major factor.
Keep the change as simple as possible, but no simpler. Thank you Albert.
