What We Do

For most of my career I've had trouble giving a simple, clear answer to the question "What do you do?" A few years ago I came up with the answer "I create powerful conversations that allow people to address what matters most." Not bad, but it makes me sound a bit like a therapist, which I'm not. Over the last few weeks, Stefan and I have revisited this question, and here's what we've come up with. Your feedback would be appreciated.

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We work for leaders of large or critical business transformation programs. Complex projects. Projects where you have to keep the business going at full speed while at the same time changing the way the business works. Kind of like changing a flat tire while driving at sixty miles an hour.

Leaders of these programs strive constantly to balance competing agendas and incentives, to keep an eye on too many moving parts, and to keep everyone - including senior management - committed until success is achieved. That’s a tall order. No wonder most business transformation efforts don’t meet their goals.

But some succeed, a few spectacularly. We believe that one factor, above all, lies at the root of successful business transformation. In the successes we’ve seen, the people accountable for running the business were also accountable for the transformation. They did not create a separation between doing business and improving how they did business. The person “driving the car” was also in charge of “changing the tire.”

In our experience, many business transformation efforts are done for and to the business, not for and by the business. Accountability for transformation lies with someone other than the manager who’s accountable for the running the business that’s to be transformed. In these situations, the business “driver” supposes his job is merely to drive the “car,” and leave the “repair job” to the “transformation mechanics.”

At first glance, this seems a logical division of labor. But in practice, it creates an “us versus them” culture that becomes increasingly divisive over time. This “us versus them” mindset can -- and does -- undermine even the best laid plans.

We foresee that more and more companies will adopt the successful model of holding one person accountable both for “driving” a business process and for continually improving it. Managers will no longer be stuck with the ineffective practice of delegating process improvement to others.  

How can you decide if you want to make this kind of shift in managing change? And how would you actually execute such without creating chaos?

That’s where we come in. We facilitate the conversations that need to happen to ensure that accountability rests where it belongs. The first visible result of this process is a manager who takes accountability both for the daily operations of a business process and for its continual improvement. The second visible result is a cross-functional transformation team that functions as a collective “we.”

We bring deep domain experience in facilitating those conversations. Sometimes people get stuck in adversarial relationships, think they know a better way, avoid responsibility so as to avoid failure, or seek scapegoats to deflect blame. These are all symptoms, in our view, of avoiding essential conversations. We create the “missing” conversations. Through that process people gain confidence that they are capable of breaking through the seemingly intractable issues they face.

In short, as facilitators of conversations, we serve as catalysts for accountability for total ownership of processes: to running it and continually improving it at the same time. That’s a recipe for real progress.