Making Change II: Key Steps, with Help from Rip Van Winkle

The guy sleeps for years and still gets an exercise named for him

In my last post I wrote about how difficult it is for organizations to make big shifts in direction or cultural shifts. The problem usually is that they know where they want to go, they just can't seem to get there—a problem I call implementation failure. I talked about a public media organization I recently worked with and explained that the first key step to avoiding implementation failure is finding the right group to guide the process. Once you've done that, there are two other steps worth highlighting.

II. Start To Define Success

In my media project, the very first time the group met, our discussion was about success. We started with a hypothetical: If you fell asleep and woke up 10 years down the road to find that this project had been wildly successful, what would it look like? And how would you know it was a success? (Yes, I sometimes call this the Rip Van Winkle exercise.) We wanted something that was ambitious enough to be inspirational without seeming pie in the sky. The public media folks developed a basic success statement; it said the organization would work toward a day when it had

Created a unique digital media presence with a broad range of dynamic content that reaches new and existing audiences, vastly increases their engagement, and enables the organization to raise major new streams of revenue. 

Not bad for the first day, right?

Well, the draft changed many times, but that didn’t matter. Even the first success statement began to give the group purpose. It very quickly showed where the organization would need to focus: dynamic digital content, audience engagement, and membership/fundraising. (That's why developing a draft success statement quickly—even a very preliminary one—is so helpful.) Most of the rest of our work was to figure out how to make those focus areas come to pass. Since I’m not writing a book, I’m not going to talk much about the different focus areas. Instead let’s think about one more big idea, possibly the most under-utilized step in combating implementation failure.

III. Do Some Action While Planning—ASAP

In many projects, people come up with a plan, and then they implement it. They divide one step from the other. But when you’re planning radical organizational change, particularly cultural change, there’s another way to go. Get people started during the planning itself. Action while planning means finding small ways for the people doing the planning—in this case the working group I mentioned—to begin to act differently and experiment with the new ideas even while the process is under way. This could be gathering information or actually testing something out by implementing it. (For software junkies, action while planning has some commonalities with agile software development.) The goal is to help people get used to a different perspective while at the same time learning lessons that could improve the change they ultimately make.

For the public media organization, the working group decided that each member should spend time observing part of a carefully chosen set of other web sites and digital media to gather ideas that might be feasible for them. The exercise worked on two levels. First, their own discussions after the Rip Van Winkle exercise led them to look at other sites differently than they would have otherwise and to begin to internalize the ideas of success we’d developed so far. Second, working group members came up with a good list of ideas—some of which became valuable pieces of their overall plan. By completing this and successive action-while-planning mini-projects, we made sure that implementation was well under way by the time we actually put the finishing touches on their plan.