Inertia sets in when organizations focus on incremental changes to successful existing business practices and resist exploring new ways to add value through the adoption of new processes or digital technologies.
Success occurs when companies treat transformations as more than just a side project or discrete event and use them as opportunities to fundamentally change how their business runs. The enduring truth is that the more transformation actions a company takes, the greater its chances for success.
Three core actions during a transformation can help predict value capture and success
- Completing a comprehensive, fact-based assessment of the business to identify opportunities for improvement. The more thoroughly that an organization uses facts to assess the maximum financial benefit it can achieve from a transformation
- Adapting goals for employees at all levels. It’s not enough to set effective and ambitious aspirations for the transformation. People need to understand what these goals mean for their day-to-day jobs and what they will be expected to do differently; if they don’t know how they connect to the transformation, their behaviors and how work gets done won’t change.
- Allocating high performers to the highest-value initiatives. The transformations that come close to realizing their full financial benefit are more likely than others to match their best talent to their most important initiatives. For smaller initiatives, it’s best to involve a wider coalition of managers and employees, which builds broader buy-in