Leading Through Transformation - Patience

I like to do home projects…

What does this have to do with transformation? Funny you should ask.

I use the 3:2 home project rule. Any project I do will take me three times longer than I planned and (at least) two trips to the hardware store. I'm pretty handy and a good planner, but no matter how hard I might try to anticipate all the things I need and all the potential issues, something just always seems to come up.

This is the same in transformation.

It's not that we don't have smart people or that we don't take time to plan. Most transformations have some fancy roadmaps. The mistake we all collectively make is applying the rules of change unevenly. To draw the home project comparison…changing an outlet is not the same as changing the plumbing.

The long pole of any transformation is not the process or the technology (though tech implementations are complex for sure). It's the people that need to use these processes and systems. Specifically, it's shifting the beliefs of those people. At least sufficiently enough to create a movement. See last week's post.

When we understand the total timeline of transformation, we can calculate the true costs, and returns. Then manage the expectations of our stakeholders more effectively.

The mistake we make is not that the fancy new bathroom sink doesn't work. It's that we spent all of Sunday getting it to work, when we promised it would be done on Saturday.

Change takes time. Give it time.