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?