The 45-Degree Zone Article Series - Issue 3: Moving up the Zone

In issue 1, we gave you the fundamentals of the 45-degree zone. In issue 2, we explained why moving outside the 45-degree zone can have real, negative consequences.

Now it's time to go deep into how you move up and stay in the zone.

Three lenses of moving up the zone for an organization

Moving up the 45-degree zone creates three, on-going requirements for successfully navigating major change:

1. Clear Pathway to a Compelling Future: The overall direction needs to be sufficiently compelling and appealing to the aspirations and heritage of the organization; to motivate the collective efforts that will be required to get there and to be underpinned by a sound strategy. In turn, the leader and leadership team need sufficient clarity on the major sources of performance improvement. This includes the most critical capabilities required to be able to define an effective sequencing of major initiatives and an integrated agenda in a roadmap which they can commit to delivering.

2. Momentum-Building Progress: Leaders of major change must make sufficient progress in the short- and long-term on both performance and capability building to build momentum and improve prospects for further progress.

‘Building the future one quarter at a time’

As we discussed in the second article, there were clear risks of falling short from either overly focusing on short-term performance without tackling more fundamental issues (‘overheat’) or getting too focused on long-term initiatives without generating the performance momentum or resources to get there (‘undercook’).

3. Sufficient Leadership and Adaptive Capacity to Stay on Course: The breadth of agenda and pace of change involved in working on the organization at the same time as working in the organization (a.k.a. changing the engines while flying the plane) typically overstretch the leadership and adaptive capacity of the organization. The result is often one or some of the following:

• Senior team overload
• Poor coordination across departments on initiatives that are genuinely interdependent, leading to wasted effort and frustration
• Need for down-the-line leadership to drive key initiatives that outstrips capacity
• Increasing conflicts over priorities, exceeding the senior team’s capacity to resolve them (this will be covered in depth in the fourth article)

Diagnosing how ready you are to move up the zone

To go a little deeper into each of these perspectives, we have developed a diagnostic tool that you can use to spot your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to your readiness to move up the 45-degree zone.

Setting Clear Expectations

Clarifying the pathway and expectations, and translating this into action rests on the top team. See below a more granular view of each of these areas to help you pinpoint what needs attention.

There are different ways of integrating these, but one way that our clients have found useful over the years is to use the Strategic Fitness Process (see HBR article) to engage the organization to create deeper alignment and commitment to the direction. During that process the top team defines a strategic and organizational direction and exposes it to the organization to get feedback on it before moving to planning the roadmap and putting it to work.

Gaining Momentum

Gaining Momentum relies on the broader leadership and organization to start making progress. This requires both alignment and empowerment so that progress can be made on many fronts.

To be more concrete, try to be specific in terms of what capabilities you need to build to improve performance sustainably.

Recently I talked to a COO about performance improvement they had made in a troubled factory over the last 2-3 quarters, and asked which capabilities they had built or unleashed to make that happen. His response was that the major constraint they faced were not Direct Capabilities in the factory (see issue one for definition), but rather Organizational Capabilities, such as cross-functional collaboration around the planning process. Once they addressed this, performance has consistently improved.

Sustaining Momentum

Sustaining momentum requires building a true learning organization, where real barriers surface and root causes are found and acted upon.

Finding a way to get feedback from the organization in shorter cycles can improve the learning and adaptation of an organization. As our colleague Johanna Pregmark showed in her PhD thesis, there is a need to act on the feedback on every level. However, she also points out that there is a need to aggregate learning that can be brought to the top team to enable them to adjust the organizational system that can enable improved sustained performance.

We saw an example of this at an organization that institutionalized what they called "Change Journey Teams". These teams took strategic responsibility for four strategic capability areas. In a quarterly cycle they focused on making progress on both performance and capabilities and had a structured process for collecting learning from this in order to draw conclusions that were brought to the top team for discussion and decisions.

Once you have done the diagnostics and created an aligned view of your current state, you have a better foundation for taking the right next step.

Where to start

Being clear on the current state when you are building a roadmap for each of the critical areas you want to progress is a good way to ensure you start from where you are and not creating a plan that is missing the “reality check”. This roadmap assesses the current state of the organization and the business, where you want to go, and what actions need to be taken to get there.

1. To start, tap into where there is energy for change within your organization
2. To create momentum, try to get some early wins to create more energy
3. Lastly, pinpoint the constraints in the organization. The Theory of Constraints explains that a system only have one major constraint at any given point in time; so try to get aligned on where the true constraint of your system (ref. the factory story above) is before jumping into action so that you prioritize solving problems in the right order.

In the next issue of the 45-degree series...

Once you have started to execute your roadmap, there are sure to be barriers and problems along the way. In the fourth and final article we will go into what these barriers are and how you can design a learning and governance system to deal with them and in that way sustain momentum.

In the meantime, check out our?website?for more insights.

Issue 2: The Danger Zones of the 45-Degree

Issue 1: The Concept and Fundamentals

?This article was authored by?Magnus Finnstr?m.