The Four Building Blocks of Transformation

Many business leaders are sick of transformation. Anyone who has gone through a conventional top-down restructure – complete with cost-cutting, tech overhaul and often, with very little change to show for it afterwards – knows how difficult it is to achieve the intended results.

Yet in most industries today, disruption is rife and business models are regularly challenged, often by digital upstarts with nimble business models. If you’re a business leader facing this kind of pressure, a major transformation of your company may be inevitable. How then can you overcome the odds against success?

An article in strategy+business, ‘The Four Building Blocks of Transformation,’ byPwC colleagues Al Kent, David Lancefield and Kevin Reilly, reports on an analysis, undertaken by organisational change experts at PwC, of successful transformations during the past five years. What they found, despite differences in industry, region, circumstance and leadership style, were four essential building blocks pivotal to transformation success.

1. Create a strategic identity

“Articulate a single desirable future for your enterprise and focus all your efforts on achieving it.”

It’s easy to underestimate the importance of a clear view of where your company can go in this new world. This is not about building a brand or a simple vision, but a comprehensive identity “in which the company’s value proposition, core capabilities, customer and employee experience, and culture all reinforce one another.”

This new identity must incorporate many factors, not least of which is what the business wants to be known for. What challenges do you expect to tackle, based on the strengths you have and the capabilities you can build? How can this identity help you forge new partnerships, raise your reputation, and attract and retain employees who will support your new way of working?

2. Design for trust

“Develop ways to attract and deserve the commitment of everyone related to your enterprise — particularly customers and employees.”

If you want people to trust the initiative, you have to focus on how it makes people feel. Transformations are tricky, and often confronting. There are many moving pieces, and not all of them will result in pleasant outcomes. However, if people see reason for hope, they will “trust the enterprise to deliver what it has promised”.

Trust is created by your company’s behaviour over time: hence the need for careful planning, diligence and care. This means being strategic in how you set up your transformation initiative. Design each move with the awareness that people are generally more willing to change than you expect, especially when they recognise the value of the transition.

3. Master the pivot from sprint to scale

“Test new practices in an intensive, experimental, startup-style manner. Pick the approaches that work, and rapidly implement them throughout the larger system.”

Internal innovation is difficult. It needs to be protected from the traditional practice of an organisation to be truly novel, yet at the same time, ideas must be integrated enough to be able to become reality. As the authors note, “It takes a great deal of on-the-ground skill to resolve this paradox.”

An agile way of working can help, combining the speed and experimentation of a startup with the execution capabilities of an established business. Agile development brings together small teams of diverse, cross-functional people who are given a finite amount of time to devote to a problem. Teams build and prototype ideas – incrementally testing and refining quickly, moving forward with the parts that work.

4. Treat your legacy as an asset

“Save the best of your past, divest the rest for advantage, and use the income to fund the future.“

Transformation does not need to throw the baby of your best practices out with the bathwater of your old bureaucracy. After all, the company has survived to this point. It’s important to allow your company to evolve, while managing the legacy of the past for the greatest possible advantage.

In other words, maximise value even as you remove the bits that no longer align to your new vision. Being strategic about restructuring, thinking through costing and divesting with care at the appropriate moments will be crucial. Ensure that people wedded to the legacy brand don’t feel as though their work has been for nothing; balance nostalgia for past success with the prospects of future innovation.