Digital transformation, and indeed any change management process, have frustratingly large failure rates. Indeed, they’ve had frustratingly large failure rates for decades, despite no shortage of books, models and theories on how to do change better.
The latest of these comes from INSEAD’s professor of strategy and innovation Nathan Furr, who has joined forces with Kyle Nel and Thomas Zoega Ramsoy to write Leading Transformation: How to take charge of your company’s future.
They propose three steps to help companies take charge of their future and transform more effectively.
1. Envision your future
The first step revolves around science fiction, and it’s easy to dismiss this part, and potentially the whole process from this point on, as losing touch with reality. Indeed, I’ve been critical of many futurists for projecting futures so far in advance that there is no real grounding in the present day.
The authors argue however that science fiction has one core benefit: it helps us to overcome the narrow thinking that encourages us to think of improvements incrementally. They believe that using science fiction can help to bust us out of this mindset.
They also advocate the use of animation and comic books to help create a strategic narrative that underpins this possible future, with the narrative designed to inspire people and dispel disbelief.
2. Break bottlenecks using decision maps and archetypes
Decision maps and archetypes do sound rather like the kind of buzzwords beloved of consultants, but the authors believe they are crucial to ensure that the stories told during the first step are actually useful in driving change.
They propose a number of tools that have a basis in behavioral science to both identify and overcome bottlenecks. The tools help to understand the culture and type of organization you work in, the language you use when communicating and how decisions are made. This helps to create what the authors refer to as a ‘decision bottleneck map’.
These then underpin the archetypes that describe the roles that decision makers play, and their position in the decision making process.
3. Using applied neuroscience and future key performance indicators (fKPIs) to navigate the unknown
The use of buzzwords continues and the authors describe the creation of an artefact trail, which contains small and observable success stories to keep enthusiasm for change high. These are quantified using key performance indicators that are used to create defensible measures of your progress towards the ultimate end point.
Applied neuroscience is proposed as a way of understanding things that people perhaps don’t even understand themselves. In a transformational context, this involves understanding four things: engagement, emotion, overload and attention.
Whilst the approach is interesting, it’s hard to really say whether it has wider implications as the list of case studies used by the authors is rather small. It does however provide a fresh perspective on a well worn topic.
