Conclusion
Organizational change and, more specifically, transformation seem to have become a fact of life for individuals, teams, organizations, and even societies. As we are writing this book, citizens are protesting in Egypt, voters are calling for splitting Sudan into two countries, and there are conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the business front, Sara Lee and Motorola have each split their companies into two smaller companies; some analysts have Facebook, which was founded in 2004, valued at more than $50 billion; and Chevrolet and Nissan have two electric automobiles in the marketplace. Indeed, corporations are transforming. Our assumption throughout this book is that you want to understand how to successfully lead transformation. The challenge is that there is so much written about transformation that it is difficult to makes sense of what we know about the subject.
The goal of this book was to help you as a leader navigate through the hundreds of books that have been written about organizational change. At the time of writing this book, we did a simple search of books written about organizational change. Typing the words “organizational change” into the search engine for Amazon.com came up with 7,705 books. We have to admit that among us as authors we have also contributed to the massive literature on the subject.
To help specify our contribution to this literature, we have focused our efforts on transformational change. When typing “transformational change” into the Amazon.com search engine, only 292 books came up, which would still take you quite some time to read. Similarly, a Google Scholar search on “transformational change” returned more than 100,000 hits.
To help you navigate through all this information, we used the analogy of baking a cake and provided what we think are the central ingredients for transformational change. The ingredients are vision, leadership, a technical plan, a social plan, and a burning platform. While every transformation has its own nature and character (i.e., changing the political and economic landscape of Egypt is clearly a different transformation project than introducing an electric automobile into the marketplace), we suggest there are more commonalities among transformation efforts than many people think.
So now that you have the ingredients for the cake, how do you bake it? How do you actually create a transformational change? First, we suggest you start with identifying your vision. Remember, a vision needs to represent possibility, desirability, actionability, and articulability. We suggest that you as a leader need to establish a vision that kindles both the individual and collective spirit and ignites passion. The vision needs to not just speak to you—the vision should be you. Said simply, a vision should be an audacious goal with a vivid description.1 Make a bold vision, and communicate it with passion such that it comes alive. Second, after identifying your vision, we suggest you identify the burning platform: Where is the fire? Where is the fire in your life, in your organization, and in your family? We all want our lives to be better (more money, more time, a growth in physical strength), but why can’t we continue the way we are? We suggest the burning platform come second because if there truly is no motivation (either internal or external) for a change, than there is no reason to create a technical and social plan. Think about it: How many times have we seen leaders create grand transformation plans and never execute the first step? In our experience, this is because there was no sense of urgency to do anything beyond business as usual.
The third step is to then determine your leadership capability. Remember, change cannot be managed; it has to be led. Do you (or your organization) have the leadership capability to make this vision happen? In determining your leadership capability, we suggest you create both a transformation design team (TDT) and a leadership team (LT). Recall that the TDT is the team that helps create strategies and actions that will drive the organization from the current reality to the vision. The LT is the group of leaders that keeps the vision alive and communicates to the organization not only the need for change (the burning platform) but also the steps along the way. The next step is then to develop both your technical plan (how you are going to close the gap) and your social plan (how you will enroll others).
Creating a change plan requires the following steps:
- Vision. What do I want? When do I want it?
- The burning platform. Why must I change?
- Leadership. What is my “left-hand” dribble?
- The technical plan. How will we move from the current to the future?
- The social plan. How will I get the help I need?
Throughout all the five ingredients, one activity is vitally important—communication. Leaders need to communicate the vision, burning platform, and the technical plan. Leaders also need to communicate with those who might be supportive and resistant of the plan. In the section that follows, we offer a tool we use to help leaders develop the story they need to communicate to others. We call this tool “the wall.”