The Magnificent Seven: Strategies for Successful Change

publication date: Oct 24, 2006

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author/source: David Ollerhead (October 2006)

David Ollerhead is a director of Decision Focus, a professional services consultancy that specialises in rapidly delivering performance improvement through process

Part I

Remember the movie The Magnificent Seven? A besieged village seeks outside help to relieve itself from bandits. It winds up being helped by seven talented gunslingers, each with a different reason for responding to the villagers’ urgent call. Business organisations, besieged from all sides by competitive pressures, can sometimes seem a lot like that village. But what your organisation needs is not seven magnificent sharpshooters, but rather, seven magnificent strategies for success. Once you have them in place, you can start drawing way ahead of your competition.

 The truth is that almost every organisation can do what it currently does more efficiently and more effectively and can give its customers a better deal.

 Precisely what this ‘better deal’ for customers means will vary from one organisation to the next. But the very fact that you are thinking about what it means shows you are on the first rung of the ladder to ensure that your organisation becomes as successful as it can possibly be.
 What you really need here is not reams and reams of guidance but, instead, a concise and focused game-plan.

 Here, I’ve boiled down your game-plan into these Magnificent Seven Strategies for Success. Implementing them will give your organisation a superb chance of becoming the world-beating organisation you want it to be.

The Magnificent Seven Strategies for Successful change are:
1.     Embrace Change
2.     Engage your stakeholders
3.     Put your customers first
4.     Prioritise your effort
5.     Work together
6.     Devise a road map for change
7.     Remember that it’s people who make change happen

The First Magnificent Strategy – embrace change

If everything were perfect already, nothing would need to change. We don’t live in wattle-and-daub hovels any more because people wanted to live in better houses. All the changes that have occurred throughout history have been designed to be improvements even if not every single one has turned out to be.

 Change is, by definition, the supreme creative force because the very act of creation involves an act of change. Growth is an act of change and so is every positive development at your organisation.

 Asking yourselves questions such as how your organisation can improve what it does and how it can offer customers a better deal and win more loyalty from them are not questions that need to involve you in a frustrating period of introspection. Instead, they are questions that will prove to be the crucible for the fire of your organisation’s creativity and appetite for improvement. It’s very likely you will already be aware of some areas of what your organisation does that could usefully be improved. Let these only be the starting-point of a creative initiative to change what needs to be changed.

 Precisely what you will first want to look at when you are contemplating carrying out change will depend on what your organisation is fundamentally in business to do and what your visions of your future are. You need to clarify that vision if you are to achieve the maximum amount from change.

Clarifying the vision is only the beginning; you need to be sure that everyone understands and buys in to your vision and that the performance objectives are clearly agreed, articulated and communicated. To do this, you need to employ the second strategy.

The Second Magnificent Strategy – engage your stakeholders

Every organisation has key stakeholders. These will include, but not be limited to, all of the following:
•    the Board of directors
•    shareholders
•    investors
•    managers
•    customers
•    the staff who deliver the process
•    suppliers
•    anyone else with an interest in the organisation generally, and in its processes particularly

An organisation is never going to be fulfilling its potential if it is not looking after its stakeholders’ interests. Any process of intervention directed at maximising an organisation’s potential needs to look hard at who an organisation’s stakeholders are and develop ways of understanding and meeting their needs more effectively.

 This will not be easy. The fact of the matter is that most people inside an organisation regard change with fear. They will usually see it as a threat to their job security and/or to their comfortable little niche within the organisation. In fact, if all they want to do is to continue doing things the way they’ve always done them, it may well be true that change is a threat to them.
 External stakeholders may also regard change as a risk. They need to be told tactfully, and also maybe shown, that the change will lead to a significant improvement at the organisation. Generally, of all an organisation’s stakeholders both inside and outside the organisation, about one-quarter will typically be receptive to change while another quarter will be positively hostile to it. The remaining 50 percent or so of people may very likely sit on the fence, which means that they may be amenable to change and may perhaps even support it if approached in the right way. Show people how change can minister to their own self-interest and bring those receptive to change on board early on. Try to inspire those people who are currently resisting change to embrace it.

The Third Magnificent Strategy – put your customers first

All organisations – including, in these enlightened times, public sector ones – have customers, whether these are people buying goods and services, end-users of a government facility or agency, or even an electorate. Organisations exist, by definition, to meet the needs of those customers.

Or at least that’s the theory why organisations exist. The trouble is that after a while, organisations tend to lose their focus on customers. In fact, it may be that organisations enjoying some success are more likely to lose this focus on customers because they are not impelled by financial desperation to work out what they are doing wrong.

Accepting that your organisation must focus on the needs of customers is really only another way of saying that your organisation must embrace change. The reason for this is that the agenda of the customer, and the needs of the customer, will change.

Similarly, the means by which you can address the agenda and needs of your customers will also change, as new technology and new methodologies become available. Sometimes it is difficult to see whether change is being driven by the fact that customer needs change, or by new technology and resources becoming available. Perhaps the true nature of the driver is less important than the benefits your organisation is offering its customers. After all, billions of people around the world use personal computers every day without being troubled by whether the introduction of PCs stemmed from changes in technology or changes in the nature of what people wanted from computers.

Ultimately, an organisation’s processes exist in order to deliver certain things to customers. Pursuing a policy of focusing your organisation’s processes around your customers’ needs is a rigorous discipline that can so often very constructively cut away superfluities and inefficiencies from your processes. It isn’t usually enough simply to change the front-end processes which govern the direct interaction between the customer and your organisation’s staff. Effecting change there and leaving everything else as it always has been is like putting a slick, streamlined, high tech cockpit onto a biplane and expecting it to fly properly. The customer-facing processes are only part of the equation and they need to be supported and directed by other processes that themselves must be regularly reviewed.

Look out for Part II of the Magnificent 7 in October’s FX&MM, in which David takes us through the remaining four strategies, including Prioritizing Your Effort, Working Together, Roadmap for Change, and last but not least, the importance of remembering that it’s people who make change happen.