The final of the 7 Ps of evolution/transformation has arrived! We’ve outlined defining a purpose, laying out a general path, benchmarking and monitoring progress, and defining/reinforcing processes. We’ve discussed the need to be both persistent and patient as that work continues. When you’ve completed the majority of the work, it becomes time to pivot your direction from project management to the final P: Production. While this is a small sentence, it’s a huge moment! Take time to celebrate the journey you’ve just undergone, communicate the before/after to the wider organization to reinforce the progress you’ve seen, do a retrospective of what you’ve learned and would do differently, and reset expectations to the new normal. At that point, you have achieved being in Production. Just as a refresher, I defined this phase early on as:
Production: As you get far down the path, celebrate the monumental progress, being to institute continuous improvement, create an environment for innovation, and allow the new culture to continue to develop on your foundation.
As noted above, reaching this point is a big deal! There may not be a clean “finish line” to declare, but once you’ve made significant progress on your journey with the majority of your go forward processes in place, don’t be afraid to declare victory. There is real value in being able to say you’ve completed your evolution/transformation journey – both for your team and for the broader organization. The emotions will range from elation to relief and from determination to keep moving to the desire to have a period of calm. All are completely valid and healthy. They all indicate that your next challenge is on the horizon: creating the new normal (aka your “production” state).
The new normal is really just a revised baseline of where you expect performance to be based on the work you’ve done to transform/evolve. In simple terms, it is just like working your way through school: each year you learn new things and establish a new competence in the material all of which becomes the foundational, baseline knowledge for the next year. And just like school, the that new baseline isn’t permanent – you will begin to build on it relatively quickly establishing higher and higher standards/expectations. This does NOT mean you will always be raising the expected outcomes, instead it could be as simple as process improvements, novel solutions to outstanding problems, increasing scopes, etc.
This mind set makes it clear that there is no and will be no “finish line” to cross. A healthy new normal will be a vibrant environment which is focused on continuous improvement. There are many excellent resources to look into around continuous improvement – the process of continually reappraising your people, processes, tech, and targets to make sure you are optimizing your effectiveness and efficiency. You’ll find that no matter how far you go on this journey, you’ll always have a next mountain to climb. That is perfectly normal and healthy. Just like mountain climbing, you can’t just go sprinting up the hill – make sure you have the right planning in place, the ability to physically execute, and agreement that that is mountain you should be climbing. You’ll need breaks on these change journeys, you’ll need to expect and overcome setbacks, and you’ll need patience and persistence – continuous improvement isn’t much different than evolution, it’s just not an “event” but instead it is business as usual in a progressive organization.
In a production environment of continuous improvement, one thing that you as a leader will need to specifically develop is space for innovation. Not every issue will need innovation – some things are just obvious break/fix or simple solution problems. But as you continuously improve, some problems will require a rethinking approach that likely could benefit from a novel innovative approach different from everything you’ve done before. This true innovation will take time, resources, and allowances for failure. In an organization that is/has transforming or evolving into a continuously improving team, you have to explicit in building the mindset and space for innovation by reinforcing the benefit, encouraging smart risk taking, celebrating the failures as learnings, and the successes as victories. As you scale the mountain of effectiveness and efficiency, these novel innovations will be the best way to drive forward. As a result, if you are not making the space for this work, your continuous improvement process will actually be hamstrung and more difficult. While it may seem counter-intuitive, having time and space for innovations big and small, successful and failures will allow you to move faster and go farther overall. Enabling innovation will be your continuous improvement competitive advantage, if done well.
Beyond all the operational shifting you’ll experience from the above you have one other equally important (if not moreso) task: cultivate the cultural seed(s) you’ve planted. It’s a leadership fallacy to think you can create every facet of a culture as a leader or leadership team: your job is to plant seeds, fertilize and cultivate the sapling as it grows into a tree, and prune the tree as it diverges from the broad boundaries you establish for your culture. Your efforts over the prior months/years during the transformation/evolution process will have seen your seed grow into the trunk/base/foundation of your cultural plan. Trust the foundation you’ve laid and the people you’ve selected to be in your organization to develop the culture well beyond you. That foundation should be strong. You can’t force branches as leaves to be exactly as you’d like, so just focus on those that are clearly not aligned with your vision and address those (prune the plant as needed). As you continue to focus on a cultural tree that is within your broad boundaries the culture will become self sustaining – both while you are there and ideally long after you leave. (And yes, I just snuck a “leaf”/”leave” pun in there.)
To wrap it all up, the process of transformation/evolution will absolutely test you and leadership ability. It won’t go smoothly. It will require all 7 Ps to be successful…and even then, it could still have mixed results. That being said, it is an incredibly rewarding journey when you can look back and see the changes you’ve had a change in creating. Additionally, you’ll be positioned to propel the organization forward through the production phase of your leadership life cycle through continuous improvement and innovation which will reset new normal baseline effectiveness and efficiency regularly. With a culture built to achieve success, you’ll have people in place that will move the team forward without you always having to drive the change. Velocity will accelerate while your personal effort can be shifted once the team gets to the point of self governance. Like much in life, it is not without significant personal and professional risk but has it’s rewards that are often worth far more than the cost.
View from the Middle 