The truth is change is coming to a theater near you and soon, but how it comes is entirely up to you. That is the measure of control you do possess. Change can come incrementally or manifest itself as the Big Bang!, and the latter will be much more disruptive than the former, we promise you.

Very often in our line of work we’ll hear someone in IT / IS or Corporate services say, Thank goodness that project is finally finished, as if one particularly pesky piece of business is behind them and it’s smooth sailing ahead. Well, no. If you don’t want to go through the Big Bang! experience (otherwise known as when the wheels fall off), this is not the mindset you should cultivate. Each and every day we at TAG spend considerable energy helping organizations become comfortable with the concept of incremental or continuous improvement. Why? Because if you’re constantly improving, you rarely suddenly arrive at the Big Bang! crossroad.

You can either be the Changer or the Changed, but it is better to be the actor than the acted upon. Change will not be denied. If you choose internal stasis through passivity or inertia, external agents will force you to change because the competition and market won’t take your everlasting comfort into consideration. . .and then what? Right. You’ve got the Big Bang! to survive, because staying where you were allowed the competition and the world to pass you by.

We know change is difficult, so we won’t belabor the point. Nevertheless, if you put the following conditions in place, it won’t be quite so arduous:

Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein said, “Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”  Since change is (ironically) a permanent state of being, leading an adaptable organization focused on steady, incremental improvement is vital. If change is anticipated and implemented without fanfare on an ongoing basis, the hysteria of the Big Bang! will be kept in check.

Goals ► Priorities ► Outcomes ► Initiatives

Do your organizational goals sound something like this: Foster talent by building a culture that maximizes opportunities for growth. Sounds nice, right? But how would you measure that? How would you know when you’ve achieved it? The truth is, it would be next to impossible. Whether you’re creating goals at an organizational level or at an operational level, here are some tips for improving them so that you can demonstrate their achievement.

Describe the outcome.
The trick is to describe the result you hope to achieve rather than the activity. Measuring an activity can result in meaningless metrics. (It is also wise to stay away from words and phrases that cannot be measured such as maximize or more efficient.) Here’s a possibility: Growth and innovation will increase through training, mentoring, and creating time buffers around scheduled projects.

Studies have shown that goal specificity and level of difficulty have a direct impact on employee performance: Goals that are specific and challenging (but not unreasonable) lead to better performance by motivating employees.

Create line of sight.

Just as important, a clear line of sight should exist between corporate objectives and the goals set at the operational level—employees should be able to grasp their roles’ importance in the larger picture. In order to achieve this, it is helpful to include different levels of the organization in developing the goals to ensure consensus, cooperation, and realistic goal-setting.

Define the measure.

Once your goals have been determined, you will be able to think about how you will measure the outcome.

• What are we trying to achieve?
• What behavior are we hoping to encourage? (Key Performance Indictors)
• What will success look like?

Performance measures should be as explicit as your goals, and answer the following:

• What change is being measured?
• How will the change be quantified (generally a number or percentage of something)
• What is the starting point or baseline measure?
• What is the target performance? By when?

It is an old saying but true: you cannot manage what you do not measure. Measuring tracks the specific activities and conditions necessary to support your goals and provides the means by which you communicate to the organization what is important. Measuring also presents the opportunity to identify problem areas and affords employees the ability to monitor their performance and see themselves comparatively. It is therefore vital that you measure the correct things—not the easy things because they exist or because you’ve measured them before—the right things. If your goals have been delineated with specificity and the outcomes you wish to achieve are clear, chances are you will know what they are.

Indecision rarely leads to anything positive. In my 35 years of experience working with clients, I have seen enough snafus, courtesy of a reluctance or unwillingness to make a decision, to know that any decision would have propelled the organization forward or at least broken the log jam. If you are one of those hesitating or hugely disinclined to make a mistake (as we all are), here are some pointers I give my clients:

YOU DON’T NEED ALL THE INFORMATION TO MAKE A DECISION. Very often you have enough information based on experience (knowledge gleaned from past mistakes and successes) and objective data. If 20% of a problem isn’t well understood, go with the 80% that is. Today’s competitive market isn’t conducive to lollygagging.

IT MAY NOT BE ALL UP TO YOU. SOUND OPERATING PRINCIPLES SHOULD DIRECT YOUR DECISION-MAKING. Most organizations have a Mission Statement and Operating Principles that support it. For example, Starbuck’s Mission is to “ inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time,” and their operating principles focus on quality in their product, diversity and respect among their partners, and making their cafés a haven of humanity as well as contributors to the community. What are yours? What are the Operating Principles that will create the culture and guide the behaviors leading you to your goals? Here are some ideas to consider:

• We focus our resources on activities that differentiate our organization
• We use all resources efficiently and individuals to the best of their abilities
• We continually seek better practices and processes
• We challenge each other to achieve excellence
• We encourage the exchange of ideas and perspectives from every level of the organization, and use conflict as an opportunity for creativity and innovation
• We encourage and support risk-taking among team members to facilitate professional growth
• We recognize, value and reward collaboration and teamwork

If sound operating principles are developed and agreed upon, 90% of the decisions facing an organization will already be made.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A BAD DECISION, ONLY A MISINFORMED ONE. Once better information comes to light, take corrective action. If you have based the initial decision on the 80% known and your Operating Principles, the fix should be an easy one.

Finally, make your decisions REAL by assigning responsibility and accountability. Set milestones with deadlines and consequences for missing them. . .otherwise, decisions are merely good intentions, and we all know where those lead.

Making decisions means risking what is known for what is not. In my line of work, I have seen many organizations mired in keeping the status quo because the bogeyman in the hall is whispering, what if you’re wrong? The irony, of course, is that by not making a decision—right or wrong—you end up doing nothing, and this poses a far greater risk because your competition is certainly doing something. ​

Fear of the unknown and fear of being wrong are formidable inhibitors to decisive action. There are others, such as a reluctance to be held accountable, but even that is anchored in fear. Another inhibitor is being overwhelmed by the number of factors involved: the people who will be affected, the processes that will change, available resources, and so forth—aspects I call the “what.” The “why” of a decision is the part usually easily identified; Something has driven the case for change. It may be an eroding top line, a dissatisfied customer, excessive overtime, the competition, or staff malaise. But how to address the “what”—that becomes the immovable object stopping many decision-makers from acting quickly and decisively. Often, they feel compelled to have all the answers before embarking on any course of action. Unfortunately, seeking those answers, they usually consider the internal ramifications—conditions within their control—and neglect those coming from external sources such as the market, competition, technological advances, etc. And those considerations don’t wait.

This is why Change Management is an important weapon in your arsenal against indecision and inaction. Change Management builds the business case by objectively assessing what is versus what should be and engages the organization in why it is good for them. It garners the right sponsorship and builds coalitions; it demands commitment and ferrets out resistance; and it focuses the entire organization on a singular goal. Change Management is grounded in communication—communication that is clear, consistent, and candid. Change Management champions intellectual honesty and trust, and encourages open dialogue and debate that fosters buy-in and mitigates the possibility of decisions being undermined.

Theodore Roosevelt got it right: “In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” Decisions should evolve; they should never be made in a crisis. Making decisions is a daily event. If you don’t make the small ones today, you will have to make a big one tomorrow—chances are, it won’t be pretty.

Now the truth is if you start with a structural reorganization, it’s like going on a crash diet. Everybody knows the naughty non-foods you can cut out, just like everybody knows which low-performers could be eliminated or how work could be shuffled around to immediate effect. So you lose a few pounds by cutting out “empty calories” and get rid of some of the obvious encumbrances at work—a quick fix that’s very gratifying. But what happens after that? Usually all the weight comes right back (and then some) and the reorganization doesn’t really change a thing—everything reverts to the way it was. Why? Because the underlying behaviors are still the same.

A diet that relies on simply cutting calories is bound to plateau or fail because there’s considerably more to maintaining a healthy weight and body that includes exercise, eating complex carbohydrates, drinking plenty of water and getting plenty of rest. It is a lifestyle change. Likewise, restructuring an organization is much more complex than focusing solely on getting rid of problematic players or reshuffling the team. The key to sustainable organizational change is to look at the organization holistically and to define the operating model and its various components: roles, processes, governance, sourcing, services, and then structure, and how these are interconnected and measured. Are the right people in the right roles? Are there processes that could be simplified, platforms that could be shared? What does the Business want from you in terms of capabilities and services? What are your differentiating (core) activities that would be at risk if anyone else performed them? What core activities do you monitor and measure?

Whenever we have a client who wants to start with a structural reorganization, we encourage them first to map their capabilities to their services and then to identify those services that are differentiating (core) that would be at risk if someone else (i.e., a contractor or vendor) performed them. Once you know what is core and what is non-core, then you can begin to understand where staff spends most of their time. What we often see is that the majority of the organization is bogged down supporting non-core activities, e.g., enhancement, maintenance, and support. They are held hostage to these activities because they are the only ones who know how the processes work and their managers have come to rely on them. Usually people inherit processes and, as a consequence, documentation is scant or non-existent. This lack of documentation is another reason resources remain where they are rather than shift to new core activities/services.

Changing structure won’t change the fact that the most of the organization is performing non-core work instead of focusing on perfecting the services that are core to IT and your company. Evaluating what’s core and non-core is often the best way to demonstrate why changing the structure or moving the parts isn’t the answer.

Has your organization ever attempted a reorg before understanding the underlying issues? How did it turn out?

Over the next few months members of my team and I will be writing about:

• IT Maturity
• Capacity for Change
• Operational Effectiveness
• Measurement and Metrics
• Governance
• Portfolio Management
• Change Management
• Leadership and Organization Development
• Vendor/Service management
• Communities of Practices
• Innovation (my personal favorite)

Where to start? For me it all begins with a good understanding of who you are, where you are, and where you would like to be. And, just as an annual physical exam uncovers potential health issues, we insist on a “IT Health Check” too. After all, how can we know what remedial measures to take without an initial assessment?

Now, it seems pretty obvious that getting an annual check-up is smart and generally contributes to better health, right? Well, how many IT organizations put off a yearly exam and try to self diagnose? Worse yet, how many IT organizations have never even had an exam—you know, an independent review of how they operate? Interestingly, when we do a “Health Check,” we find that most IT organizations today are similar in two respects.

First—and to the seeming surprise of Business—IT is made up of human beings who have the same issues as everyone else: lack of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, inattention to detail, and indifference towards results. Having been in the business some 30 years I can tell you without question that these “soft” skills are just as important as “tech” skills to the success of IT initiatives and operational effectiveness.

Second, today IT stands poised at a crossroad. On the one side are the Business demands: compliance with internal and external regulations, security of information and assets, maintenance of IT architectural integrity and stability, and the delivery of innovative technology. On the other side are the obstacles to fulfillment: a rapidly changing workforce, a lack of leadership expertise, budgetary restraints, the shifting of non-core activities to external resourcing partners, and the fact that every department can make individual hardware and software decisions. The resulting tension and stress on IT cannot be overstated.

Considering these problems along with the scant resources spent on infrastructure, i.e., leadership and management training and development (that soft skills stuff I mentioned earlier), it is no surprise to me that most IT organizations are running full bore and still unable to meet the myriad Business objectives. We refer to this phenomenon as “no capacity to change,” and it is this very inability that is misconstrued as a lackluster attitude toward innovation, the very “innovation” that is supposed to save our beleaguered economy.

The challenges facing IT are complex; I won’t deny that. But they are not insurmountable. And, because this is my first blog, I feel compelled to tell you how deeply committed I am to helping IT employees and organizations work differently and maturely so that every individual and organization as a whole can deliver its very best. I want to give them the tools to work in new ways that are uplifting and rewarding. But most of all, I am determined to help IT gain the capacity to change and to attain its rightful place at the center of business driving innovation. By the way, this is what our consulting firm is all about.

Please check in from time to time. I’ll be here sharing my thoughts and specific ideas about specific issues—it would be great to hear from you too. For now, my parting thought is this: Get checked-out sooner rather than later so that you and your organization can begin to focus on innovation. After all, we have an economy to save.