Success in transformation requires companies to be outcome-focused. In other words, they need to become doggedly focused on achieving outcomes, rather than doing activities. It sounds simple, but as organizations try to change, they often get blinded by a focus on executing the activities of transformation, rather than the outcomes they set out to achieve. When the activities don’t yield results, transformations get stuck then abandoned.
Not All Outcomes Are Equal - Through research we’ve conducted over the last 5 years, we've identified three primary outcomes that have a disproportionate impact on transformation success.
Be More Customer-Centric
Companies that prize customer value over all other metrics are rewarded in the marketplace. Move from optimizing around internal processes and company objectives, to being more customer-centric, where decisions are made on what will provide the most customer value. Customer centricity looks like creating clear customer journeys, assigning experience owners, and aligning teams around experience, experimentation, and customer value measurement.
In real life: We helped a large telecommunications company stand up experience teams in the business. We gave them small agile scrum teams which allowed them to build fit-for-purpose technology solutions to customer experiences resulting in partner onboarding reduction from 20 days to 1 hour, proposal generation from 3 weeks to1 day, and internal NPS improvement of 70 points.
Go Faster
Speed is of the essence in today’s fast-changing world. Rapid changes in technology, ever-shifting customer preferences, and increasing complexities in the marketplace require a greater focus on speed and agility to succeed. A focus on speed looks like rapid iterations, testing and learning, pushing decision rights down, reducing hand-offs, prioritizing agility in tools and technology, and embracing change.
In real life: A large car manufacturer created a Kanban board of their ideation to production technology processes and identified the average time projects spent in specific stages of the software development lifecycle. They are now investigating the bottlenecks and creating ways to reduce the time in each stage. Their goal is to continuously decrease the time between Salesforce deployments.
Work Better Together
People power your transformation success. Building alignment around a common purpose is an outcome that will supercharge all your efforts. A focus on working better together looks like creating clear team agreements, holding each other accountable, maintaining psychological safety, collaborating across groups, and reducing fear of failure.
In real life: A software development company we worked with made a team agreement that people would share honest feedback and candid concerns if their managers would be open and supportive when they receivedrecieved bad news. Historically this wasn’t the case which caused problems to fester, missed deadlines, product quality issues, and relationships to suffer. The company provided training around the new behaviors, engaged in check-ins and debriefs, and rewarded early adopters. Product quality immediately improved. Deadlines were met. And most importantly, the team flourished—all because people started working better together.
Take Action
Shape your strategy, set up your team structures, define your processes, build your technology, and create your customer experiences with a dogged focus on these three outcomes. Since transformation is less a one-time project and more like taking a thousand first steps, the trick is to take the next best step in service of these outcomes. Those that stay focused on Being More Customer-Centric, Going Faster, and Working Better Together will see a steady and successful transformation.