To Create a Sustainable Transformation, Pilot the Program First

We’ve all seen it happen: An organization hits a dry spell with sluggish growth and high turnover leading to poor morale and reduced productivity. Leadership knows they need to inspire a change so they get together, create a fully-baked initiative but within six months nothing has changed and leadership is at a loss as to why. The outcomes were explicit, the instructions were explained thoroughly and the metrics were clear. So why didn’t it work?

Change movements in work cultures are often viewed in big picture terms; seeing the final transformation and reverse engineering it. While it’s important to know where the organization is going, creating a program from on high and expecting everyone to fall in line is the first and most critical mistake leadership often makes. When changing behavior, every individual must find their  own path to success. That takes much trial and failure, and time. In “Pilots for Change: Exploring Organisational Change Through Distributed Leadership”[1] it is argued that using a sequence of pilots is the most effective means of bringing about these kinds of changes in an organization because of the ability to review and revise as the process occurs.

We call this “getting it right somewhere before you get it right everywhere.” While that may seem intuitive, the need to start small and iterate from there is also often overlooked but there are steps to follow that will improve the chances of long-term success and our current work with the World Bank Group is a great example of how to pilot a movement of change.

First get it 30% right.

Patience is not a virtue in the modern office, but when creating a pilot it’s important to understand that the group will be creating and iterating the program. What’s important when designing the pilot is to get the right group of people who bring the necessary diversity of thought and experience to launch an inclusive program. In the case of the World Bank Group, this meant assembling a small but representative group that could voice the needs and concerns of the Bank and its sister organizations IFC and MIGA, as well as people working in the field with the clients, for a 360o view of what they would need to be successful.

Still one of the biggest hurdles we had to clear was the desire to do more than what the group was capable of. When tasked with creating a program, it’s natural, (and sadly wrong), to want to be experts immediately. The desire to have all the answers had to be replaced with knowing the questions that would be solved by the pilot participants.

Remember, if you feel that you have defined 30% of your change movement, you’re on your way to success. The participants will define the rest of it, and they will define it iteratively.

Clearly, and narrowly, define your pilot criteria.

To that end, it’s important to have a well, but narrowly, defined pilot criteria. I call it the “killer question:” Which fewest people changing the fewest behaviors will create the greatest results?”

Let’s break apart the killer question into its components.

• Define the results of a successful pilot. Before you can know what and who should change, you need to know where. It’s important to set a goal that is challenging enough to inspire co-elevation, but achievable within the structure of the pilot. And it is important to define success at a high-level. Getting too granular will impact the agency of the pilot participants in creating their own solutions.
• Define the fewest behaviors needed to be successful. Once you know what you want to achieve the next step is to identify both the old behaviors that are holding you back and new behaviors that will unleash change. We call this X>Y>P, with the old behaviors being the X and the new behaviors being the Y. What’s the P? Those are the practices your pilot participants will develop to shift people from X to Y. It’s important not to define P for the participants. The pilot is meant to define them in practical terms.
• Identify the participants. By working backwards you’ve also started limiting the people who will make up your pilot. Before we started working with WBG, they identified the broad cohort that would become the pool of participants. With each subsequent session, the group became further refined based upon factors like location, program impact and organization until a 10,000 employees was reduced to a group of around 50.

Selecting the pilot cohort.

Once the individual components of the killer question have been answered, the final, critical step to creating a pilot is to define the participants. At this point it’s important to have as few people as possible who represent the different departments, disciplines and expertise needed to create a well-rounded group. Project managers and directors have similar responsibilities that can look very different in practice so make sure there are diverse voices creating the results.

The important thing to remember about creating a successful pilot for organizational transformation is that it will never be 100% perfect. There will always be room for improvement and changes, but by creating a small and dedicated pilot, organizations will create the template needed for the pilot to grow and expand and become its own movement of change.

[1] “Pilots for Change: Exploring Organisational Change Through Distributed Leadership” Steve Kempster, Malcolm Higgs, Tobias Wuerz, Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 2014

To learn more about our approach, click here. To get further research and practices click here to sign up for the newsletter.

Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash