‘Just drive.’ It’s a great set up for a broody and mysterious film noir. Intriguing, romantic, full of possibility. But it’s a lousy business strategy. Wise business leaders, at least, tend to look elsewhere in their lives for intrigue, romance and undefined possibilities. A well-run business has a clear vision, a boringly sensible budget and well-defined goals.
When it comes to transformational change, those things are all the more important. Without a clear sense of where you are and where you want to be, transformation is just another word for chaos. That’s why it’s important to have a clear roadmap before you even put the key in the ignition. Otherwise, you can easily end up somewhere much worse than where you started. And you probably will.
The larger the organisation, the more damage can be done by ‘transformation’ without a plan. After all, there’s no single driver in the driving seat. Large organisations can have several ‘driving seats’. And if change means different things to different people, they can all end up pulling the organisation in different directions.
Another danger of unplanned transformation is that, in the absence of a predetermined itinerary, people tend to improvise change based on what seems a good direction at any given moment. Adjusting the analogy for a moment, the organisation becomes like a ship adrift at sea, at the mercy of winds and currents. Would this pivot in strategy increase short-term profits? Might that adjustment to operations improve efficiency? And perhaps the fiercest wind of all: would scrapping this safeguard or implementing that bright idea be popular – whether that’s with staff, shareholders or the seething currents of social media?
Taken together, these factors make transformation without a roadmap a very risky enterprise. Risk-taking can be a good thing, of course, but generally with a specific goal in mind! Which brings us back to the roadmap. A clear plan is no guarantee of success, but the lack of one all but guarantees failure.
Of course, there are exceptional circumstances in which you really do have to just get in the car and drive. If the organisation is facing a genuine crisis – and I’m talking Russian tanks, not a shortage of copier paper – it might be necessary to implement changes now, without necessarily having time to put a comprehensive roadmap in place. But in that case, the point is to get to a place of safety, where it’s possible to regroup, take stock and plan for the next stage of your journey.
So don’t ‘just drive’. Ask yourself where you want to get to. And be specific: ‘doing better’, ‘growing the business’, or even ‘increasing profitability’ won’t cut it. Ideally you need a clear picture of what it is you are trying to achieve. Then you can work backwards and develop a useable roadmap that will actually get you where you want to be. And if it’s more of an unpredictable adventure you want, maybe watch a movie?
