 Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, Three Essentials of Successful Organizational Transformation Journey, Making Sure Change Goes Right. And I would now like to introduce our presenter today, Ron Carucci, Managing Partner at Naveland. Okay. Well, hello, everybody. Thanks so much for joining us today. It's great to have you here. And thanks for coming to join what is obviously a robust and difficult topic. So it's a pleasure to be with you. My name is Ron Carucci, and I have spent the last 30 some odd years of my career working in the business of transformational change for organizations of all kinds in small startups, mid-cap companies, and large global powerhouses. And I've seen up close and personally the beautiful things and the terrible things that can go wrong during transformational change. So it's going to be a fun for me to spend time with you today sharing some of what I've learned over those years. I'm going to ask you, as we journey through our conversation, to be thinking about, or if you are in the middle of some type of complicated big change, or if you're about to start one, or you've just recently had one not go so well. Keep that story in your mind as we talk. Keep the faces of leaders in mind. Keep the things that didn't go well. Keep the things where you struggled personally in mind so that they serve as a backdrop to the content you can be applying what we talk about as we go. So as you heard from Lucy, the goal today is to talk about the essential parts of transformational change and how to make sure change goes right, which often people fail to realize happens on the very front end of change. So many of the seeds of failure of change are sown way before the change effort even begins. Most people associate failed change with the implementation part of it. We had a great idea, but something went wrong later in the process. But the reality is that change is often conceived poorly from the very beginning and is set up to fail before it even starts. Here are some of the reasons for that. In my experience, we've heard plenty of statistics around the fact that somewhere between 70-75% of all major change efforts go fail and when they're transformational efforts, sometimes those can't even be higher than that. So from the very beginning, if there's not a clear sense of vision or reason behind the change, there's not a real case for change. It's some leader's whim or it's some pet project. Or there's a scope of change mismatch to how you approach change. It's a much major bigger change, but the efforts you're applying are much smaller. There's not the right level of commitment. So we have a fairly significant set of resources allocated to change, but leaders aren't as committed as they need to be. One of the most common ones is fragmentation. So we're launching many, many change efforts all at the same time that are uncoordinated. Poor implementation planning, we lose energy. So these are some of the most common reasons. I'm not going to read all of the slides to you, but you'll have a chance to have them in the recording afterwards, but you get the sense that there's a lot of things that can go wrong with change, which means that making it go well takes a lot more work than most of us think it does. In our experience, you can look at transformation from three different lenses. Transformation within how we lead ourselves. So the ideas, the thoughts, the biases, the formative patterns that shape how leaders think and coordinate with each other. There's change between the relationship between leaders and their functions, the relationships of the scenes of their relation, and then transformation among the systemic levers of change. In our experience, the most challenging part of transformational change is that you actually have to do all three of them well. So be thinking about the changes you've been through and the ones that contrast the ones that didn't go well from the ones that did. And see if you can't detect or diagnose where it was in one of these three areas. My guess is that it was at least one of them where you either didn't have sufficient work done or have any work done. I've seen organizations construct brilliant transformation journeys with having done two of these exceptionally well, but ignore the third, and that will still make transformation fail. It's one of the unfortunate risks that comes with trying to create large-scale change, that it requires a lot of work to do all of the well. So we're going to talk, so our goal today is to talk through each of these three separately, and then we'll have a chat at the end about your questions. So each of these has a set of questions that go with it. So leading between, leading within personal transformation, do we know what our triggers are? Do we, do we just understand what biases and perceptions shape their actions? Do they know what moral compass or values compass they're navigating with? Do they know what their own strengths and weaknesses are that they bring to change? Transformation between, do people understand how relationship happens? Is there a way for conflict to be resolved? Does the organization value relationships and authenticity? Is it a highly fragmented or silent organization where people and adjacent functions can't coordinate well? Systemically, do we understand how the organization fits together? Is the strategy aligned to how the organization is built? Is it overly political or competitive? Are there cultural forces that are in place to undermine transformation? So all three of these together require thoughtful, well-constructed change in order for transformation to actually stick. Let's look at each one separately. Transformation within. So leaders in their operative narratives have a set of biases and tapes that inform how they act. You know, we all have that made the expression, gosh, he really pushes my buttons. These are often messages or templates that navigate the world at a very subconscious level. We fear, leaders fear obsolescence and a loss of control. They sense that they may be irrelevant during the change. And so in order for us to create transformation by sticks, we have to understand what are the current norms that are driving leaders' behaviors? We call this the operative narrative. The things that underpin why we see the world the way we do. They're built in very formative experiences. We all have origin stories. And if we don't know our origin stories, they're going to define our behaviors in ways we may not want. So we work hard to get at the roots of leaders' origin stories and their operative narratives. We make them identify what are the buttons that get pushed? What are the triggers that make them behave in ways they don't want? We've all heard leaders say, why do I keep doing that? Well, our answer is, well, you should wonder because there's a reason for it. We work with one executive who is an incredibly gifted leader leading a massive transformation of one of the most iconic brands in the United States. But he had these moments in executive team meetings where he would get triggered and get very angry. And sometimes they even get up and storm out of the room and confuse his team. And in some deeper work with him, we detected the fact that when people on his team would treat each other in ways he didn't respect, or in ways that belied his own values, when they would want up each other, when they would call each other out on behaviors that they weren't willing to change, he had his buttons pushed. And we dug up that his trigger was hypocrisy. And he couldn't stand on his team behaved in ways that belied the values they expressed. It took a long time for us to dig that up. But it played a major role in helping him not be credible during certain moments of change. So by identifying that narrative and rescripting it to something else to understand how to address his concerns, he was able to change. So part of our job as transformational leaders is to identify what are the things that push people's buttons? What are the events, the past stories, the transference moments where we're transferring past events onto current events? And the kinds of stressors that push us to our worst behavior, to the worst version of ourselves. Because these narratives, they fight for their survival and they're very difficult to change. And during massive transformational change, if you're asking leaders to behave a certain way that belies the origins of how they're conditioned to behave, it's going to put a lot of stress on them. And eventually, they will regress back to what they know. So the way you rescript operative narratives is to really get clear on the formative events that shape behavior. That could be somebody's impatience, somebody's indecisiveness, somebody's competitiveness, somebody's fear of their own voice, somebody's inability to be assertive. It could be their inability to collaborate their own sense of individuality or their proclivity to hide behind others and not be set apart. Whatever the tape is, whatever the proclivity is, if it's going to conflict with the change you're making, you have to help leaders identify it and then script what you want the desired narrative to be. So what are the success factors of change within? That you have a culture of psychological safety that people can admit and be vulnerable about their own shortcomings or places where they struggle. There has to be ways for leaders to get feedback. There has to be ways for people to hear from each other directly how they're experienced so that they can actually act upon their behavior. It has to be an environment where asking for help is okay. People can't have to hide their shortfalls or have to be afraid that asking for help will be seen as weakness. And most importantly, you have to be able to be honest about past change failures. Given the rate of change failure in the world, it's highly likely that every organization has some pile of past failed changes behind them. And if we're not honest about why those things failed or even that they failed, it's more likely that we're going to repeat those failures. So examining what were the conditions under which past change efforts didn't go well helps us within ourselves understand how we contribute to future success. So that's transformation within. Let's talk about transformation between. So think about the times in your organization where you've seen functions rival, the classics, sales and marketing, R&D and operations, finance and supply chain, HR and a lot of people. There are very predictable places in organizations where conflict happens, where you've seen two leaders perhaps rivaling for the same job, conflicted. Places where the organization fragments, where centrifugal force pulls it apart, our places are killers of transformation. So how do we impose centrifugal force? Or organizations by their nature as they grow and scale pull apart, they fragment, the silos are a more natural conditioning part of how we grow. So in order to have cohesion, in order to impose centrifugal force, we have to understand how to stitch the seams, how to create connectivity. Leaders have to understand how they attach, how they build authentic relationships, how they create trust. Because otherwise, led to their own devices, seams will naturally cause divisional loyalties at the expensive enterprise loyalty. In one transformational project we worked on, it was a major innovation project. The leader was tasked with launching 40% of the new revenue for the following year to come from new product launches. Well, that was unprecedented for this company. They had never been that successful launching new products. And so he had to bring together the seams of R&D, and this is a food company, R&D, the marketing and consumer insights folks, and the operations folks where products were manufactured to understand how to create an innovation community. Well, historically, some of the product failures were the result of the fact that this was a very fear-based competitive culture. So the consumer insights folks were always afraid to share the honest results of their basis tests that showed that the consumers did not like the products. The marketing and branding people had never been able to create content messaging that positioned products well in the competitive set of this company. The R&D folks were at war with the consumer insights folks trying to detect what did the consumers actually want so they couldn't create products that actually would commercialize well. And the operations folks, their manufacturing footprint of this company have been outdated for a very long time. So being able to create small batch productions of new products to test them quickly was impossible for them. So when this leader of innovation realized that with all these war on factions, how were they ever going to get to that place where they could actually launch products that nobody believed was possible to get 40% of revenue in the next year from new launches. But he locked these three sets of people in a room for days to help them work out all the disconnections that there seems. And over time post that major event, we had many systemic issues we had to address. Competing metrics, you had things that marketing was rewarded for, I measured on, I conflicted with the things that R&D was rewarded for. So it wasn't just that they didn't get a long well, they were designed not to get a long well. We had to recreate the organization in a way that allowed it to coalesce very differently than it had in the past. And the following two years, they were in fact able to launch a number of new products that got them to at least 28% of new revenues coming from new products. But it took a lot of work to stitch those seams. Along the way, there were many operative narratives, many deeper from our last section, where leaders had biases about one another, about reasons they didn't trust each other. We had to dig those up as well. So transformation between, you have to have healthy relational attachment. People have to team well. You have to onboard people from outside the organization well. Learning has to be valued. You have to know who your stakeholders are. You have to be able to prioritize relationships in a way that allow you to spend the most amount of time with the people who rely on you for success or whom you rely on. Open descent and healthy conflict has to be valued. We can't be pushing conflict underground. We can't be colluding. We can't be transmitting faulty information to make decisions. We have to be open. Diversity and inclusion efforts have to be more than cosmetic. We can't just look for the clip art picture of a diverse workforce, but we don't really value diverse thinking. And community and belonging have to be cultivated. We have to have a sense that my contribution matters. So that's a successful transformation between. So transformation within, what are the operative narratives that shape our behavior? Transformation between, how do we stitch the seams and create a sense of trust and relationship between leaders and among functions? Lastly, let's look at transformation among the systemic nature of organizations. First, we have to look at understanding a model of organizational change. So this is a very common systems model. It's the Nader-Turchman congruence model. You've probably seen your own version of a systems model, but it's an active model of how organizations actually work. So here you have a strategy. That's our intent. This is our identity. This is who we want to be. I can't tell you how many times I walk into our organization and I ask them, well, tell me about your strategies. And I get all the counterfeits. I get a mission statement. I get the value statement. I get a product quota. I get the value, the cultural values. I get the next year's AOP goals or our product launch goals, but I don't get a sense for how are you different? Why would somebody choose you over somebody else? What is the way you're designed to win and what will give you that right to win? The strategic identity of an organization is often very confused. You can go around to your senior team of your organization and ask them what's our strategy and you can get as many different answers as there are people in the room. Well, from the very outset, then, if your identity is fragmented, your organization is not going to be transformable. But that strategic intent is put through a machine and out there beside comes the results, our enterprise results, our team results, and our individual results. That machine in the middle is called an organization. And that organization has hardware and software. The hardware, this middle vertical here, where you see work and formal organization. Formal organization isn't just the structure. It's governance. It's roles and accountability. It's information systems. It's processes. The work are the clear activities that set the organization apart, the truly evaluated activities that make you competitive. And the software, the culture, the norms, the beliefs, not just the values on the wall, on the poster and the lobby, but the real things that shape behavior. And people, their skills, their preferences, their competencies, their aspirations. And keeping it all glued together is leadership. Most important part of this picture are the arrows, the things that keep the hardware and software glued together. That's what creates alignment and that's where things tend to break down. So you have to examine your transformational change looking at all these things. But too often, people set out trying to pursue major change by pulling one of these levers. So in the formal organization, they'll do the reorg. They'll just rearrange the org chart. In work, they'll add some technology to make things more efficient. People, they'll run everybody through training of some kind. Or culture will change the values. The problem is systems fight for their survival. So if you only pull one of these levers, the rest of it's going to, you know, regress back to what it knows. So when you're constructing systemic change, change among, you have to look at all these pieces in concert with each other in order to make sure change actually sticks. Another model of change is looking at what we call the three systems of how work gets done. Your operating system is your day-to-day work. It's the people at the front lines who are executing and processing your raw materials into products you sell. Those are often associated with front-line employees. There's a close correlation to hierarchy here, but not exclusively. The coordinating system is the people in the middle. They're the ones translating strategy into daily actions. And then the strategic system is the top of the organization that actually is looking at the future, is monitoring competitive trends, is keeping their eye on the outside of the organization. Too often in organizations, you have people playing too low. So you have people in the blue system playing in the green, people in the green playing in the yellow. And so you get what we call compression. So imagine this pipe, you know, with a big sag in the middle where you've compressed things too low. You know, when you hear people saying, wow, we're so micromanaged that we're not trusted or we're not empowered, that's a good indication that these systems are not aligned. So again, if you're creating change among, you have to make sure that all three of these systems, which each play a role in prosecuting your organization's work, are actually working the way they're intended. Otherwise, you're not going to be able to get changed to stick. So what are the success factors of change among? Integrated and coordinated. That means that first model, the hardware and the software all have efforts that are coordinated with each other. Reward systems. So you have to make sure that the way you're rewarding performance is consistent with what you want to change. You can't be trying to get more collaboration if your reward system only rewards individual behavior. You can't be trying to get more transparency when your information systems don't allow people access to information they need to make decisions. You can't say you're trying to create a more empowered environment if there are levels of, you know, endless levels of approval to get things done. You have to make sure what you're rewarding matches what you say you want. Governance is transparent. So you have to make sure that the right leaders are gathering around the right tables to make the decisions that they're empowered to make and that they have the resources to do it. You can't have all decision pathways floating to the top. You have to make sure that decision rights are distributed to the closest possible places to actually get decisions made. And people have to know who gets to make what decisions. You have to make sure people are modeling. So if you have a set of values in your organization, you have to make sure people are held accountable for modeling those values. And when they're not, they have to be held accountable to change their behavior. And you have to make sure that your strategy is you are being who you say you are, that you understand the basis of what you, on what you compete and when the way you differentiate from competitors and everybody in the organization has to have a clear line of sight on how their work aligns with that, that, that strategy. You know, if you haven't read some of the stories, you know, Microsoft is undergoing a major cultural transformation right now. When I met with Kathleen Hogan, she's the chief people officer there a few weeks ago to interview her about all the different levers they're using to transform the organization. And, you know, she described all the people practices that they've overhauled to reward very different behavior, all of the learning practices, all of the, the, the strategy processes by which, by which strategy gets to form and executed, all the communication practices and all the engagement practices, they're pulling so many levers, but they're doing it in a very coordinated way, which is why they're seeing the results they're seeing. So change within the operative narratives that shape our behavior and shape how we see the world. Change between the seams of the organization, how we connect leaders in relationship and how we connect functions and regions and divisions into relationship and change among how we systematically see the organization, how we understand how the pieces fit together and how we create a cohesive approach to change by making sure that the system is built to deliver the change we want. Those are the three levers. And again, as I said at the outset of this, you actually have to be good at all three of them. When you construct your change, look at each of those three categories and ask yourself, do we have work that's coordinated under all three of those categories intended to get at the change in each of those domains? Because if you only do two of them well, your transformation will still fail. So change within, change between, change among. That's the content I have. I'm looking at our time. So we have about half an hour in. Let me just close with this slide and then I'm going to open up to your questions because I love for you to bring your stories of change, either successful stories or stories where you're struggling and see if we can't apply some of the content to the changes you're leading. The good news is transformation can be successful. Despite the high failure rates, they don't have to fail. They just require a lot more work than most of us understand. And you have to see these journeys in years. So often I hear very well intended but naive executives say things like in the next 90 days, we're going to, or they try and put out these false mile markers or false compass headings that convey that change is going to happen much quicker than it is really possible. The problem there is you create cynicism because nobody believes it's really possible. So now nobody takes your message of change seriously. You have to look at these journeys measured in years. They require work in all three domains, within, between, and among. Be thinking about the one that you're least inclined toward or your organization might be least inclined toward. Maybe it's within. Maybe you don't like to get touchy-feely or personal. Or maybe you're very, very within oriented, but you're not very among oriented. Maybe you're not between oriented. Maybe you don't care about cohesion and teaming or collaboration. It's highly likely that your organization is predisposed. You do one or two of these very well, but you're also probably predisposed to ignore one or avoid one. That's the one where you're probably most vulnerable to failing. If you're leading the transformational journey, prepare yourself physically, emotionally, relationally, these are grueling journeys that require far more of leaders than most leaders ever expect. So make sure you have a personal set of colleagues around you to advise you, to encourage you, to kick you in the butt when you fall short, to keep you in the game. Make sure that you're learning. By default, if you've never led one of these before, or even if you have, the one you're leading is not entirely like ones in the past, there's some part of this that you will have to learn and change for in order to lead it well. If you only lead according to your past successes, that's as far as you'll get in this transformation and it probably will fall short of the aspirations you have. And lastly, keep the vision of a transformed state in mind at all times. You've got to keep your eye on the prize. When it gets hard, when the organization resists, when the cynics throw darts at you, when people tell you it's not going to work, when people tell you that they politically put pressure on you to not change, you've got to be prepared for that and you've got to keep your eye on the prize. Because if the pain of change is not greater than the pain of the way things are, you'll look at the world you came from and think, well, maybe it wasn't so bad. And that's one of the first signs that your change is going to go into a slow death. So remember that when you set out on these journeys, you've got to stay at the course. And at all costs. Now, you should ignore signs of failure. Don't be single-mindedly ignoring the fact that there may be things you have to course correct for. These are not straight-line journeys. They're quite traversing of lots of curves. So be ready for those. But stay at the course and keep the vision of where you want to be in front of you at all times. So that's the content I wanted to share with you. I'm going to open it up to questions from you now to see where you're faced with challenges of change or what questions I can from the content I can review for you or anything you want to offer. So I'll open it to you now. Jacob wants to know, what role does leadership continue to play in this? Does it depend on individual leaders or can an organization sustain change irrespective of individual leaders? That's a fabulous question, Jacob. And I would tell you that what obviously depends on who the leader is. Certainly, if it's an enterprise transformation, if your CEO is not credible or not a role modeling, it's going to be very difficult. So I think leadership plays our role. It plays more of a role in causing failure than causing success. Because at the end of the day, it's leaders who are going to prioritize the initiatives that are the change between and change among work. So leaders have to make sure they're picking right because if you looked at the position you want to change, you could probably identify hundreds of places for a change between within and among to happen. You have to prioritize right once because you can't impose more change on the organization that can actually absorb. So it does require leadership to monitor the absorption rate. The bigger challenge, I think, for leadership though is when there be own behavior contradicts the change and they don't take responsibility for that, it quickly creates cynicism and undermines the long-term success. So I do think that the role of leadership is important, but it doesn't require perfect leaders. I think as long as leaders can own the fact that they're imperfect and they have things to learn as well, the change can go fine. The flip side of that, Jacob, is that when you only focus on leadership, so change within, at the expense of between and among, that won't work either. So if you overemphasize or overindex on leadership at the expense of systemic issues, you're also going to fail. And we have another one. Thank you for your presentation. Who should play the role of managing transformation? So it's an interesting question. There's a lot of debate these days about that. I think some of it depends on what the transformation is designed to do. So if it's cultural, maybe it's your CEO and your CHRO in tandem. I've seen a lot of companies creating what I've seen called the Chief Transformation Officer as somebody who in the C-suite designed to guide this. It's a great role if you have a large global company. If you're a mid-cap company or you're only three, four, five thousand employees, you certainly don't need that. But I often find that that's not to have it be one person. I often find that when you pair executives together with a transformation team, especially if you're doing major design work that's designing the whole enterprise, a design team that has multiple levels of diverse folks on it, maybe seven or eight folks, paired by a pair of executives who are forced to own it together, that I've seen get the best results. I think when you have one person who's the face of a transformation, it's a high risk. Job, it can be done. But the risk, of course, is that if that person is incredible, doesn't inspire people, isn't able to rally a cross-section of the organization, you have the organization going to this uneven level of change, where some parts are changing faster than others. And that's a risk. So I think when you have a pair of leaders whose influence spans the whole enterprise, it goes better. All right. Ellen is from Northern Germany. She does a lot of transformation processes, mostly in the field of company succession of small and medium-sized companies. I found out that it is always a good idea not only to ask about the past, the present, and the future state. I work sometimes with the customer on the natural impacts of the change after the desired change has successfully taken place. What do you think of that? I think it's critical. It's a great point. Metrics, it's one of the things Microsoft is doing very well. They take daily pulse surveys. They have 140,000 employees. If you're not measuring, people think that we announce change, we unveil a change, we put the new technology in whatever, and then change is done. It's not. In the first year of change, I recommend quarterly. At least quarterly metrics have not monthly metrics. You have to know what will tell you the change is doing what you wanted to do, or if it's going into heart failure. Some set of quantifiable and qualitative metrics that are getting data on an ongoing basis, at least very regularly in the first year, and even at least quarterly in year two and three. Otherwise, you will look at the moment of change, the moment the change is in place as a success, and you'll be declaring premature victory. You've got to monitor on an ongoing basis, measuring what it is you said the change would do, and when it's not doing that, have a feedback that allows you to course correct. All right. Perfect. Jesse has a question. Our senior executives are not managing change well between departments, and departments are still very competitive. How can I trigger change? I've got an HBR article called How to Permanently Resolve Cross-Departmental Rivalries, and it's our scene process. You can look. Maybe that article might give you some sense for the tools we use when that happens, but depending on what role you're in, certainly, if you can get people to acknowledge your highly fragmented siloed organization, my guess is that I would find reward systems that reward very individual behavior. I would find governance processes that don't have any cross-functional alignment on them where people are forced to cross boundaries. I would build coalition. I would find a way to get a call, because somewhere in your organization, horizontal work is required, and it's probably impairing performance in some way, product quality, customer service, something is suffering because of your inability to coordinate horizontally and over vertical orientation. I would find a way to get a coalition of folks from across boundaries to bring them together to talk about, because somewhere, somebody doesn't like it, right? Even at Microsoft, in the days where they were hyper-competitive internally, people still didn't like it. So somewhere, somebody's in pain over the fact that there is a competitive culture where the rivalries between departments are somehow impeding somebody's ability to succeed. If you can find out where that is and get those people in a room to talk about that, that'll at least help you build some coalition around how to get people to sort of break down some of those barriers. Okay, perfect. I think you just covered this next question, but I'm going to ask just in case. Sandy wanted to know what recommendations do you have for change agents within an organization? So depending on what your role is, if you're in a support function, like strategy or finance or HR, where you're a practitioner of change, certainly make sure you understand how the business makes money and make sure that how it is, your role contributes to change. If you're a leader or an executive in a line or heading up a function, I think part of your job is to make sure you know the boundaries of the change you're leading. So often, either people underreach and they overly narrowly define the boundaries of change or they overreach and they politically upset people. So make sure that if you're leading change, the boundaries in the scope are clear. Leading transformation is skill set. If you come to our website, navelin.com slash transformation, we have a free ebook on leading transformation. And it's basically the ebook on the content of this presentation. So if you come and download that free ebook, navelin.com slash transformation, you can get a whole playbook on everything we talked about today. Fantastic. We have another one coming in. How can we manage leaders in transition, those whose contracts are coming to an end in the middle of change? Ouch. Long before the contract ends. So if you know there's going to be a handoff to the, I think Jacob's the only question about the role leaders play, a leadership transition doesn't have to undermine change. But the organization has to be really clear that if a leader is exiting and they want the transformation to go on or the change that they began, many organizations begin changes with one leader and finish it with another leader. That's perfectly fine, but there has to be a handoff period. So you want at least three or four months of time for the leader who's exiting, even if their exit is not known, to have some set of people around them, to whom they're passing the baton, to whom they're planning the continuity of change with so that when they leave, the continuity of change is not disrupted. If you wait until two weeks before the leader is going to go, you're going to have some disruption and continuity. So the planning for the handoff very, very early, months in advance is really important. Okay. Speaking of that, in a world where speed is crucial, why measure success of transformation in years, not months? So just for the sake of honesty, right? I'm not saying there aren't milestones you can hit. So there are certainly things you want to be looking for to have happened in the first six months, so the first nine months. And also obviously depends on how big your organization is. If your organization is 4,000 people or 5,000 people in a contained region, obviously you'll see change much quicker. But if you're 100,000 employees operating around the world, it's just going to take much longer. So what I'd say is when you talk about progress of change, talk about it for what it is. So often we try and over embellish what we've accomplished in 90 days or six months as being far more than it really is. And so we miss signal to the organization that we're further along than we really are. So my only point is simply understanding that change that really sticks where you really are truly a transformed organization is not going to happen within the first three or six or nine months, but certain things will happen. And it's perfectly okay to talk about those things and even celebrate those things when you see them as long as you position them as means to an end. These are signals. These are indicators that were on our way to what we said we wanted to go and celebrate them as that. They're not evidence that we're finished. So that's the only distinction I make. Okay. And given how long change can take and the short term tenure of senior leadership, doesn't this just encourage people to wait out the leadership team to avoid change? It absolutely does. Every organization, who especially if you had a lot of failed change has what I call a this too shall pass club. And those are the people who set them aside lines. They've seen it happen before. And they assume this is just one more, you know, silver bullet attempt at change and, you know, we'll wait out the next guy. And those are hardcore resistors and they have there has to be consequences. If if not, if if change becomes a volunteer program where my requirement to change is optional, rest assured people are not going to volunteer to change. The only people who like change are wet babies. But beyond that, most people don't want to sign up for this kind of journey. So a leader who's determined to see change through has to address directly those people who are sitting on the sidelines. And if there are not consequences for them, the entire organization sees it and assumes that this is a volunteer program and it's optional. All right. And what is the role of PMOs managing transformation? I would love to see PMOs become transformational changing and so often they're technical offices. And so their version of a change ready for a PMO is training or it's messaging. I would wish for PMOs to truly become much more transformational and systemic in their understanding of the human side of change, the relational part of change, the human behavior and behavioral science part of change, not just the technical and project management parts of change. I think so often those are separated. Right. So PMOs are managing the implementation of a new enterprise resource system or a new technology or a cloud based change, or they're managing the building of new plants to manufacture new products. And they're doing a phenomenal job of managing many complex parts, but they're not doing the behavioral and cultural and strategic aspects of change that we're talking about here. And I would so love for those worlds to marry in the future and become one integrated source of change. I think when that happens, PMOs will be not only be very powerful and really fun places to work, they'll be far less frustrating jobs and they'll have a lot more fun. All right. This is a good one. Should culture change be led by HR? We often have HR called people and culture. Having this structure seems back-footed rather than active. Is there a change management structure set up that dissolves once transformation is complete? So it's a two-part question there. Let me start with the first one. HR should absolutely not lead culture change. They can't. And with one of the questions I asked Katherine Hogan and Microsoft, and she would be the first to say as a CHRO there, there's a role for the CHRO to play in helping construct a cultural change. But if the entire executive team is not engaged, they built what they call a culture council, a culture cabinet that was made up of many vice presidents and directors to come and synthesize and evangelize the culture change there. Culture change has to be owned systemically by a lot of leaders. So HR can play a role, but if they're playing the role, it's probably not going to go well. Two second question about transition structures. Absolutely. There needs to be a transition structure in place scaffolding the change that cannot go on in perpetuity. So whether that's a year or two, or it absorbs into the PMO if there are ongoing work, but if there are aspects of change that have to find a home, they have to find a home. So if the change is standing up a new technology platform somewhere in IT or somewhere in operations or somewhere in supply chain, that new technology has to be absorbed. So somewhere into the existing roles or newly created roles, the work has to be absorbed. You can keep it in parallel to the organization forever. For a season, certainly, maybe that's a year or 18 months, but at some point that has to get disbanded and absorbed into the organization. All right. And what are your thoughts about building a new organization with new skills, culture and capabilities within the organization and then integrate some companies select this approach? It's tricky. If the transformation you're constructing is that radical of a departure from the world you have today, certainly it would seem easier to just go in parallel to the organization, build it out here and then migrate to it. The challenge, of course, is that everybody out in the existing organization sees it happening and feels left out. So now you have this old guard, new guard, often into that parallel structure, you're importing a lot of outside new talent who then come in and indict the organization with their diagnosis. Oh my gosh, people, how have you survived this long that you hear all that? So you create this we-they mentality. That's the risk of it. People assume that what that approach will do is make things go faster. It may, but the risk is if you don't start constructing the migration pattern of the old to the new from the very beginning, that's where it goes wrong. And where I've seen that process fail is when you go over here and construct this whole new world, the incubator, whatever it is, this special new world, and you have not started it from the very beginning thinking about how are these people over here going to get there. You sort of sail off on your own and then the gulf between the two worlds is too big. So in very rare occasions, I think that's an approach for change that should be reserved for very special and rare occasions where the current world is so broken and so regressed back to a time where it's, the leapfrog is too great, but you haven't got, you have an old business model, you have to keep going as a cash cow to fund the new world. But you have to accept the fact that once you launch off to build the new world out there over here, the difficulty in migrating the old world to it is, is significant and you're going to have to really make sure you're planning for it early. But it's an approach I would recommend only for very, very special occasions or very special circumstances under which there's no other way to do it. All right. Do you bring in competitors or unsatisfied clients into the process? That was a question. I think the more you can ground the transformation in the external world, it's critical. Competitors, customers, former customers, the voices of the marketplace have got to be the primary grounding of this transformation. It has to be a means to that end. If it's only a means to some internal end, it definitely will fail. So in the change within, who are my competitors? Who are the people I touch? The change between how we build the capabilities together to serve the marketplace and systemically, how are we changing our competitive positioning so that we continue to win long term? You have to ground this externally. The voices of the people you serve, the voices of your suppliers, the voices of those you compete with are vital voices. So on your upfront, you know, if you're beginning a transformational journey, you're probably going to start with some hopefully very robust diagnostic work. We call it an MRI. When we come into organizations, we do a very robust MRI of the organization. That diagnosis should absolutely include the voices of people outside your organization because they bring a very different perspective from people inside. All right. And what do you do with those who do not want to change or to accept the transformation in spite of the benefits identified for the major part of stakeholders? That was question. So as I said before, there have to be consequences. Certainly people resist change for many reasons. Sometimes mostly that they fear being obsolete. They fear change the exclusive. They fear that they don't have the capabilities to succeed in this new world that you're going to. So certainly, you know, if you have legacy talent or 10-year talent you want to preserve, you want to give them every chance to succeed in a new world, whether that's coaching or whether that's skill development or retooling that they might need, you know, certainly you have to help them migrate. But the reality is it's unlikely everybody can make the journey. There will always be casualties of transformational change for the people who are never going to be able to succeed or who are refusing to try and succeed. You can't keep them. You just can't keep them. If you keep them around, they serve as a symbol that we don't really mean change. And so when there are hard decisions to make, don't avoid them. It's not cruel. It's actually cruel to keep them in place when everybody knows they can't succeed. It's not unkind to help people transition to something else or to some other organization where they can be more successful. Okay. So how do you integrate differently and excuse me, how do you integrate different and diverse experiences of elderly and youngsters? Would you focus on this integration as a success factor? Absolutely. I wrote a book many years ago called Leadership Divided. It was about generational differences. It was who's actually research on the emerging millennial generation before we even call them millennials. And there's a blog post on our website called Better Together about the relationship between generations of change. They're actually, first of all, they're far less different than we think they are. But secondly, at the core, what we see, we almost view as conflict between generational differences is what I call the conflict between legacy and potential. So older workers, resisting younger workers, because they feel their own obsolescence and younger workers feeling older workers because they feel being muted. In fact, they're not getting their chance. But the reality is, outside the emerging professionals' future, there is no legacy for older workers. And outside the legacy, their potential is never going to be realized. So they need each other. But you have to build that bridge. It's not a natural coalescence of generations to come together. But when you create conditions under which they can work together, they actually enjoy collaborating very, very, very well. And they do it very well. And they really begin to realize quickly how much they have to offer each other. And the older workers have as much to learn from the younger workers as the younger workers have from the older workers. And when you create that mutual playing field, it's actually a beautiful thing. Great. If a person is not a leader, what is the best way to present her own idea of organizational change? Such a great question. So often, individual contributors feel marginalized. They feel like, you know, in the hierarchy of the organization, how do I get my voice heard? How do I get my idea heard? And so the first thing I recommend is that you really make sure your idea is vetted out well. That you have a clear sense for what the change is, that it's not coming from your own personal sense of preference or bias. And make your case. The second thing I would do is shop that idea. So before making any kind of formal presentation, I'd go test your idea. Find trusted colleagues in other departments or in your own stakeholder list who could most benefit from the change or who might be, who might share your frustration and the need for change and begin to build a sort of informal coalition that might get support for the change. And when you have enough, and then also with those folks who refine your idea, right, so those people will have perspectives and inputs and data that can help refine your thinking. And then once that's done, once you have a sense for, you have a real case for change here, find a leader that can help you champion it and begin to move it into the organization in a more formal way. Great. Do you see agile methodology and transformational change initiatives? Sure. I think agile is a great, you know, it's, if you look back in the origins of continuous improvement and re-engineering and all the early quality work in the 70s, we've evolved into a place where being more adaptive and being more adaptable is critical. I think the spirit of agile should be built into every transformation, meaning you can't make any, you can't have that many fixed assets. And so, you know, the lean agile technology, certainly for manufacturing organizations, for high tech organizations, where you have to ramp up processes quickly and then revise quickly, agile is a great set of tools. But it has to be seen for just that it's a set of tools. When we try and create, use agile as a way of life, where it becomes this almost cult-like following of everything we do, it gets a little bit overextended. I think the spirit of agile is that we all need to be adaptable. We all need to be able to flex quickly. We all have to have our minds changed. We all have to see the world through new lenses. I think that is really important for any transformation. Great. And if we take strong performers out of business to nominate to projects of long duration, we've had some issues reintegrating them back into business after the project. It makes it difficult to recruit champions. Do you have any best practices? Yeah, such a, oh, what? I love that question. So, first of all, I work out on the front end, right? So, if they're going to be, if they're going to be a, have a two-year journey leading a major transformation, make part of that transformation, building their new job, right? So, don't start with the assumption they're going to go back to their old role, or if that's really what they want, commit to them that they can, right? Commit to them that they can, they'll find a place back. Don't let your best talent set out to champion change, having to carry the anxiety of an unknown future, because it's just, you know, you won't get the best talent leading the change and you want that. So, either commit to making part of the transformation they're going to lead the creation of their future role, which may have to be discovered. I've seen that work very, very well. Whenever we do major or design projects, our design teams, inevitably, at least half of them watch themselves design themselves out of a job, because the design process usually takes away some of the roles in organization and creates new ones. So, we talk about it. We were very open about that in our design process, so that people can talk about their anxieties over watching their future go away, but they handle it very well. And often, the people on the design team process get the best jobs, because they're the ones that know how the new design is supposed to work. So, I would handle the decision about the future of your best champions on the front end of the process and not ask them to launch on into the anxiety of the unknown without that. Perfect. So, I think that does wrap up our Q&A session. We're about out of time. Ron, do you have any final closing remarks for our audience today? Yeah. So, first of all, thanks so much for your questions. They were fabulous. They were rich. I can tell you're all thoughtful leaders who have thought a lot about change. So, you know, regardless of the role you're in, you can have an impact regardless of where you sit in the organization's hierarchy or functionally or regionally. Just know that your voice is important. You have something to offer. Don't hold your voice back. Don't hold your impact back, because we all know how painful and how wasteful fail change can be. And to the spirit of the question about agile, change is a constant now. Used to be a change was something that was episodic. You go through change, then you go through stability, then you go through change. But now, transformation is an ongoing way of life. So, we have to get better at it. We have to become more skilled at it. And so, if you're all in roles where you can help your organizations get better at change, then do it. Doesn't matter where you sit. Your voice and your ideas matter. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Ron. And thank you to everyone that attended our webinar today. On behalf of Brightline, thank you again. I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend. And, Ron, we can't thank you enough. Bye, y'all. And thanks so much for having me. And good luck to y'all.