Does Your Company Need a Change? Allow Vacations to be Your Guide

If you are not there now, you’ve been there at one time or another. Something in your organization needs to change. Growth may have brought a need for scalability and maturity. Competitive pressures may require new ways of getting things done faster. It may be that processes or tools need to change.

?The rate of change continues to increase at a breathtaking pace, showing no signs of slowing down. More importantly, organizations that fail to change may also fail to survive. This is frightening when McKinsey estimates that 70 percent of change programs fail to achieve their goals*. Given this rate of failure, successfully managing change is a competitive advantage. So, how can you influence the success rates of the changes in which you are involved? To get assistance at work, we don’t have to look any further than the place many of us go to take a break from work—vacation. To be more precise, I am talking about the classic road trip.

Successful change management is a competitive advantage

It is fun to think about vacations and to plan where we will go, what we will do there, and what we will want to have along with us. When you plan a vacation, you also plan for the travel, especially when a road trip is involved. This preparation is all about the travelers, not the destination. The longer the journey, the more preparation that goes into planning the trip, especially if you are taking children. You need to be sure there is entertainment, things to stop and see along the way, snacks, and drinks. There will need to be breaks and places to stretch or rest. These rest stops are sometimes unexpected and cannot always be planned because they depend on the traveler or how much coffee they drank. All of this is done to make traveling as enjoyable as possible. After all, the travel is part of the vacation, not just the destination.

When planning a road trip with family or friends, we intuitively understand that the travel experience is sometimes as important as the destination. Even if you are going to be in a different car, when people are following you, you often drive a little slower and keep an eye on the rear-view mirror to be sure they aren't getting separated. You check in occasionally to see if they need breaks, gas, or anything else.

The longer the trip, the more miserable the travelers are going to be if you haven’t planned appropriately for the time spent traveling. The travel experience can set the tone for the whole vacation. Often everyone is drawn together by the travel experience, or no one is getting along by the time you arrive at your destination. Travel is not about the destination; it is about those who are along for the ride.

This type of travel preparation and consideration of our fellow travelers comes naturally to most of us when on a road trip. Yet, when it comes to the work environment, this awareness and focus are often missing. Change is a journey. If you are planning to make changes in an organization and are only talking about the destination and not paying attention to those taking the trip, your change journey is at risk.

?Traveling is not about the destination; it is about those who are along for the ride

?Too often, the travelers on our change journeys feel like they have been given an address, thrown a map, and told to meet at a certain time or else. No one wants a trip like that. Traveling together is supposed to be half the fun, or at least gaining the shared memories of endurance or the unexpected things that happened on the drive.

When you are leading a trip and the travelers are completely grumpy and complaining, most of the time it isn't the travelers' fault. It is the fault of those who didn't plan the trip appropriately in consideration of who they are traveling with and how far away the destination is. When journeying through change, we often focus far too much on the change, the importance of the destination, and the practicalities of the drive, and far too little on the people who will be taking that journey. We too often equate telling people how to do things and giving them information about the drive with taking care of them, but on a successful road trip, we must be equally concerned about the comfort and needs of the people traveling with us.

Just like on a road trip, we need to relentlessly focus on the experience of the travelers and take our cues from them. When they show signs of discomfort or the need to take a break and stretch, we need to adjust our plans, not keep forging ahead. You may say, "But we can’t slow down or stop, or we won’t get there on time." That may be true, but unless it is an emergency situation, this is an indication that you did not allow enough time for travel, and now your travelers are going to pay the price for that lack of planning.

If their reaction or dissatisfaction reveals that something was overlooked, adjust and improve their travel experience. When the journey is long, you have much more time to recover, and people will remember how you heard them and made the trip more enjoyable—but you can't keep telling people to keep quiet in the back seat and stop complaining, to just drive faster and keep up with your car, or to trust your navigation when they feel like a wrong turn has been made. When things happen, and they will, the longer it takes to address them, the worse the travelers will feel and the more vocal they will become. At some point, if your travelers have a choice, you won't be far from a mutiny, and they won't be willing to go on a trip with you again.

Successful change requires a relentless focus on people and their experiences along the journey

What do your travelers need? Are you checking in with them frequently to make sure they are comfortable on the ride? If not, the only solution is to stop driving, apologize, find out what they need and want, and restart the journey aligned—even if that means taking a detour to a place they want to stop along the way. After all, the trip itself isn't about the destination; it's about the travelers.

? 2022 Todd P Heath All Rights Reserved

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*?Changing change management | McKinsey ??