Creating a Path to Achieve Your Purpose

As we continue from my last post, the process of significant change can be guided by the 7 principle P’s of evolutionary or transformational change and we are are on to the second principle: Path. The process of creating a different future can be driven by these principles. A brief description for developing a path:

Path: Create a rough outline of the journey you and your team will need to make to get from where you are to where you’d like to be, while being fairly comprehensive in scope but not detail, with prioritized stages so that success is a realistic and achievable within the given time frame.

So how do you craft a path that will get you to your purpose? Not unlike the way your cell phone sets your driving path. It has two givens: where you are and where you want to go. It continually refines the best path to get from here to there, factoring in traffic, weather, potential stops (food or gas, for example), and unexpected you may take as the driver that couldn’t have been predicted.

That’s what our path will be – a rough outline of how we’d like to get from here to there that will change as we go. The end point won’t change, just the journey to get there.

When you build your path, you must be intentional in considering all the necessary organizational pillars: strategy, operations (from org design through execution), people, and process/technology. You need to take the time to deeply understand the current state before you start a path forward – just like your GPS must know where you are to tell you how best to get where you’d like to go. Specifically, focus on the pillars beyond strategy – overlooking (or casually considering) the change journey in the day to day work is the quickest way to ensure you change effort will fail. Miserably. I can speak from hard-earned experience.

Once you have a good idea of the specific changes that need to occur and relative level effort of the changes, you must take time to thoughtfully stage and prioritize the changes with clear prioritization principles. Think of this as a somewhat tactical change path. The prioritization principles are critical when your GPS starts screaming “RECALCULATING!” and your path varies from what you’d expected prior. The staging and prioritizing must ladder to a realistic and achievable path for the overall change required. [Insert your favorite cliche here relative to competing concepts – turning an ocean liner on a dime, turning an ant hill into a mountain, etc.] Overly aggressive or conservatives plans will likely have the same outcome: failure; just for different reasons. You will want to seed your path with quick wins to create, build, and/or maintain energy throughout the change journey.

As you do this, you’ll absolutely want to share your path with the organization (yours and the broader one). You want to create alignment and reasonable expectations throughout the broader enterprise of what will happen and when, to avoid misaligned expectations crushing the project. To that end, you’ll want to smartly seed your quick wins throughout the path, not frontload them – if you do the team going through the change will assume that it’s going to be easy and become frustrated when the harder stages come along; the broader org will see rapid progress and assume that everything will be at it’s future state in weeks or months, when the change journey could be months or years.

Along with your tactical change path, you’ll want to have a cultural change path that is paired companion. This path isn’t as easily defined as the tactical path, but it does have some key characteristics:

• It needs to appeal both the analytical and emotional parts of the brain. Any cultural change plan that neglects to address both parts of the change will fail for a large percentage of the population you are relying on to change.
• Make that a documented tactical and cultural change path that has a clear line of sight to what stays the same to create stability.
• Identify areas that the situation can/will cause resistance in the change journey and openly call those out either for discussion or with description as to why.
• Help your leaders within your team by guiding/scripting the critical decisions with some rules of thumb to help them move quickly, purposefully, and still aligned with the overall path.
  • For example, if you are leading a customer care department you can build parameters such as:
    • Always do the right thing for the customer to create memorable experiences
    • Ensure proper resources exist to enable wonderful experiences (people, knowledge, tools, processes, etc.)
    • Implement simple, repeatable processes and tools enabling customer results consistently improve
    • Create boundaries so empowered employees can create great customer outcomes

You can develop a path that delivers you at your purpose regardless of all the expected and unexpected challenges of the journey by following the above guidelines – and by not being married to your initial (or any) strictly defined path. Create principles to recalculate your path as you go, and you’ll be successful in spite of any obstructions the world can throw at you.