Whether you’re embarking on a personal change, financial goals, project objectives, or organizational transformation; your intentions should drive the outcome.
Transformation is not intention, it is the path, the means to an outcome. What is your intended outcome? Does your team know it?
Why are we transforming? What are we transforming?
I, too often, see organizations make investments and target technology implementations for technologies sake. Of course, technology continues to advance and organizations must make decisions to keep advancing with it; but let us not invest in vain and blinded to the target outcomes.
Transformation efforts must be driven by value based outcomes.
Have you defined a problem? Is your business falling behind in the market or failing to meet customer demands?
Technology does not solve business problems, the manner in which you leverage technology does. In fact, sometimes a transformation of how you do business to solve problems may not involve technological choices at all but instead, changes in procedural elements, customer engagement, or even a pivot in market strategy.
Regardless of your path, make sure your intentions are well defined and communicated. Refer to your intentions often when faced with decisions of change and use these rules to stay on target:
- Intentions are desired outcomes. Transformational efforts are what you do to get from where you are to where you intend to be.
- Make sure your intentions are well known. Discuss them often. Provide the opportunity for your team to ask questions and clarify when your intentions may not be clear.
- Empower your people to make decisions. If your intentions are clear and well communicated, don’t stand in the way of progress. Put your trust in your team members to make decisions and move forward with your intentions in mind. Let them know that the path to the outcome may change and that’s ok but standing still is not.
- Check yourselves periodically against your stated objectives and intentions. Have the choices so far remained inline with your intentions or have the efforts deviated? Experiments that render unexpected results are not failures, they are discoveries. Treat them as such and learn continuously.
