Transformation initiatives are crucial yet notoriously ineffective, with a staggering 70 per cent failure rate. In my experience, no reason for this dismal statistic is as common as overlooking what I call “the enablers.” Like a car in your blind spot, enablers come in many shapes and sizes, and yet you ignore them at your peril.
Understanding transformation enablers
Enablers are the pre-existing motivations, capabilities or systems that your transformation initiative depends on, usually subconsciously.
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Let me illustrate the experience that first taught me this lesson.
In 2011, I had the opportunity to triage a major workplace change program for a national bank in Australia. The stakes were high: a brand-new landmark building, a solid business case for asset optimisation (most days, 70 per cent of the desks were empty), immense uplifts in environmental and social sustainability, months of preparation, and an in-house team built for the job. And yet, over the first year, mere hundreds of the organisation’s 40,000 staff had transitioned to the new way of working. Resistance was vehement.
To start, I had to diagnose why such a well-considered and resourced program was struggling was failing. Directed to several key resisters, I went in with an open mind. “I see through the ‘BS’ story that I’ll be more productive floating around with a laptop!” one of the senior and influential “nay-sayers” told me. “They are just trying to push me out. I wish they had the guts to say so.”
With a bit of care, I got him to share, “There’s no way I am getting rid of my notebooks; I simply cannot type fast enough!” His pushback – and that of dozens of staff – came down to something as rudimentary as typing speed. He felt shamed – anathematised – for typing with his index fingers.
Here they were, brilliant minds spending millions of dollars on a state of the art building saturated with mobile technology, yet nobody had assessed whether the workforce had the skills to take advantage of this investment.
That man’s commitment to his job was interpreted as sabotage. The failure to shore up an assumption – that people could touch-type! – set an inherently win-win workplace transformation on a battleground.
Relevance and sustainability were pitted against expertise and loyalty. Who in their right mind would want to be in that war?!
Importantly, this assessment – let alone touch-typing training – was in nobody’s scope or budget. An understandable oversight that could have proven fatal.
Shortly, touch-typing training was de-shamed and widely available. Numerous other enablers followed. We were able to convince the bank’s leadership to approve a course correction, reinvigorated and retrained the implementation team, and launched a redesigned transformation program in a way that advanced its aims while healing incurred wounds.
In the twelve months that followed 9,000 staff transitioned to the new way of working. The rest followed suit the next year. The sustainability dividend from that transformation has enhanced that bank’s social impact ever since.
Case-study take-aways
- Enablers are often overlooked in project inception and planning.
- When not in scope of the transformation, enablers pose a risk.
- While holding the power to sabotage, rarely do enablers relate directly to the primary .goals of the transformation, such as sustainability.
- Enablers are revealed through curiosity, attention and empathy.
- Triage and complete redesign took only three weeks. That is the power of enablers.
Enablers as hidden obstacles to transformation
Transformation cannot be neatly contained to the changes directly precipitated by your solution. Rather, it pulls on, pushes against, and otherwise, creates havoc within the status quo overall.
Ignoring this interplay – let alone shaming it – is a sure way to sabotage your impact. Put another way, transformation sheds a floodlight onto a whole mishmash of imperfections within the system. The attention your transformation requires will illuminate everything in its range: the path and the landmarks as well as litter and obstacles. It behoves you to pay attention, addressing the hazards or rerouting your path.
Whatever your sustainability intervention, it likely requires enabling projects. Good news: if identified early, they can be built into the overall program. Furthermore, their benefits yield far more than smooth the transition, amplifying positive impact across the board.
If people impacted by your initiative are getting away with the bare minimum, feel no pride in the overall outputs, avoid accountability, shun anybody who is different, and cannot have difficult conversations – patterns that are not within the direct scope of your transformation – your efforts will only shed a floodlight onto all of that while you stumble over one obstacle after another.
Where to look for enablers
Here are several areas where enablers of your transformation may be lurking:
- Personal effectiveness. Data shows that most of us struggle to maintain, let alone increase, our productivity in the age of technology and information overload. Furthermore, remote work, data capture and storage, and social impact goals demand new skill sets.
- Collaboration capability. Collaboration is a skill that tends to be scarce in many professions and within older demographics. This may be because, in the post-industrial era, individual achievement was prioritised over cooperation, as reflected by the drastic shifts in the primary education system over the recent decades.
- Wellbeing. Burnout, anxiety, depression and the damage they cause to all vital systems of the human body have increasingly – and rightfully – come to the forefront. Such systemic dysfunctions are likely to get irritated should you throw transformation into the mix.
- Alienation. Our organisations need to accommodate increasing diversity effectively and elegantly. However, most established organisations (and even some new ones) demonstrate implicit bias against any number of cultures and faiths, forcing countless people to live in hiding or in defense of who they are. Transformation programs will aggravate such wounds before a cohesive, nurturing, and collaborative culture can be established.
- Social hierarchy. Social creatures, humans create status structures. These are especially common among professionals who endure a long and unglamorous climb ‘to the top’ (surgeons, pro `fessors, attorneys, researchers, journalists, etc.) and curious because status gets represented through symbols bizarre to the outsiders and, thus, too often carelessly discarded in transformations. I experienced this keenly while transitioning journalists to activities-based working (the case study of an earlier column). Rigidity and overflowing desks were often their only reward for covering war zones for little pay, and we would have failed had we not meaningfully reimagined that status system.
What does this mean for your project?
Blaming a sustainability transformation for poor knowledge management or absenteeism is like blaming the moving company for how much junk you’ve accumulated in your house. Flip it on its head, however, and transformation programs become an immensely effective vehicle for uplifting the overall system.
- What assumptions about motivation, capability, or systems are you making?
- Ensure that your scope includes a thorough diagnostic of the extent to which those conditions are, indeed, in place. At a minimum a batch of risks into your risk register, this may amount to a multi-week phase that must be completed before you can scope, plan, and cost your project.
- Shore up lacking enablers through target projects OR reroute your initiative to avoid them.
- Assess who and how can pay for the enablers. This may lead you to extra education, advocacy, and alliance building.
- Ensure team expertise aligns with enabler requirements.
On the success of the sustainability movement
As I have stated, the sustainability movement has been astoundingly successful. Rather than beating the odds, I think that is due to the relentless gumption of sustainability-focused changemakers, who keep trying until they succeed.
However, this takes a grave toll on people; a toll I’ll address in an upcoming column. As such, we must continue – together – to diagnose threats to regenerative transformation and demand ever more effective tools for envisioning, planning, and implementing it.
What next?
An architect does not have to spell out that her design will require a foundation or plumbing.
Essential to the overall success of the project, those – using my terminology – are considered “enabling projects” that are automatically triggered when an architect specifies, say, a bathroom. In fact, a plethora of other professions – surveyors, engineers, plumbers, electricians, etc. – are automatically involved in the development of a new building.
As I said in the introduction to this column, I hope to see change-making similarly recognised as a profession within an ecosystem of transformation, with countless other experts coming to the fore to shore up our work.
Until then, our success depends on our ability to track all that may be required for success. Fair? No. Necessary? Yes. At least for now. So, I will continue to work towards these goals as well as to share diagnostic, planning, and implementation tools pressure-tested to make regenerative ideas a reality.
