The Minimalist's Guide to Strategic Change

3 Simple Concepts That Will Change The Way You Change

Happy Friday! This week is a little longer in form. We dive into 3 simple but crucial concepts that will save you A TONNE of time and money when you’re designing and running your strategic change initiatives.

But for those short on time - here are the key takeaways:

• The larger and more complex the project, the more likely you will be exposed to catastrophic risk. This WILL undermine the target benefits you’re looking for. If you don’t have to solve the world, don’t.
• Honestly ask “What is the bare minimum we can do to make this a reality?”. It’s not lazy - it’s strategic.
• Tighten controls on the strategic levels of your change initiatives, while allowing maximum adaptability through the tactical levels. Your ideas of scope and plan will almost certainly not be correct at the start. Allow room for learning.

Ok, let’s dive in!

So, You Find Yourself Needing To Change Things?

Great! Welcome to the status quo of 2024. Change has become a necessary lifeblood of every organisation. Chatting to leaders this year, I’ve noticed two main camps of people:

Camp 1 - The About To Embark:

This group are staring down the barrel of a transformative program of works in their teams and/or across their organisations. Sometimes the works are already underway and they’ve inherited the head seat. Other times they’ve been hired in to themselves catalyse the change. The future holds significant uncertainty, but they’re typically excited, optimistic and full of ideas.

Camp 2 - The Battered:

This is the group of leaders who are battered and bruised from years of pushing change through their teams and organisations, and are now talking about ‘post-transformation’ - - in particular “how do we make change and evolution a sustainable part of what we do?”.

No matter your camp, you should find the concepts we’ll cover today useful. Applying any one of them will save you substantial time and money.

But First, Let’s Get Something Clear. What Exactly Is Strategic Change?

When I talk strategic change, I don’t mean change management, i.e., ‘changing behaviours/driving adoption etc.’ - - - instead I mean change in its purest form:

You’re at A, and you need to get to B (where B is an improved state of being).

This is strategic change.

And it is what we’ll be focusing on. Pay particular note to the part in brackets in the above definition - ‘Where B is an improved state of being’. This is the entire point of strategic change, to make things better in some way or form! (usually aligned with some form of corporate strategy or direction).

Maybe it’s to become a more efficient organisation. Or one with a better culture, reducing turnover. Or one with higher customer satisfaction, increasing customer retention rates. Or one that brings in 10x the revenue.

No matter the goal, the next 3 concepts will dramatically improve how you ensure that happens.

Concept 1: Respect The Cost/Clarity Curve

You may be surprised at how many projects do not have enough clarity on what they are actually doing. I certainly was at first. What should be a no-brainer is often one of the thorns that ends up crippling projects down the line.

I’ve found that there is an inverse relationship between the amount of money spent on a project and the clarity (and usefulness!) of its scoped inclusions. I’ve demonstrated this idea in my very scientific diagram below.

Once complexity and scale is introduced, we humans tend to be pretty darn poor at figuring out what will work, how much it will cost and what could go wrong.

Interestingly, my experience seems to reflect the stats here.

In Flyvberg and Gardner’s really good book - “How big things get done” , they pull insights from a database of over 16,000 projects. It turns out that there’s a very clear pattern when it comes to project success: the larger the project, the more likely it is to have proportionally more exorbitant cost and time overruns. You see, larger projects are exposed to what the authors term a ‘long-tail’ cost overrun curve. So while they found that only 18% of IT projects had cost overruns of >50% - the average overrun for that group was 447%!

Your Takeaway: The larger and more complex the project, the more likely you will be exposed to catastrophic risk. This WILL undermine the target benefits you’re looking for. If you don’t have to solve the world, don’t.

Which naturally leads us to

Concept 2: The Minimum Viable Initiative (MVI)

You’ve heard of the the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) right? (a product with just enough features to validate an idea early in the product development cycle). Well a Minimum Viable Initiative is similar, but different.

A Minimum Viable Initiative (MVI) is the smallest number of actions needed to achieve your target end state.

It’s not an MVP, but may well include one. Your MVI is the answer to “What is the bare minimum we can do to make this value target a reality?”.

In practice it will usually look like a mix of the following:

• adjustments to how operational success is measured (usually KPIs)
• removing or adding things into existing processes and/or decision mechanisms
• a few systems tweaks
• some form of internal engagement, influencing and adoption support.

(Hint: If you can’t intuitively answer the MVI question, then you may not have enough clarity on the problem or opportunity you’re targeting. Spend some more time on that first.)

The benefit of this type of thinking is twofold:

First - you’re reducing project size and complexity, which in turn massively reduces your exposure to catastrophic risk.

Second - You’re focusing on the target value state, not the target solution. Your bearings are dialed in on what matters.

Your Takeaway: Honestly ask “What is the bare minimum we can do to make this a reality?”. It’s not lazy - it’s strategic.

But how do we build our MVI? Ah, that’s where concept 3 comes into play:

Concept 3: The Strategic Change Hierarchy

There’s a lovely concept in Alex Smith’s (also really good) book No Bullsh*t Strategy that I’m going to borrow and tweak here, and that’s his concept of ‘multi-layer pacing’. The

The idea is simple: the more strategic an element is to a business, the less it changes. The more tactical, the more it changes. If we take that idea and apply it to our strategic change initiatives, it’d look something like this:

The area that should change the least is the project ‘WHY’ - i.e. the entire point of it. This is followed by your project’s value targets, then your project’s scope and finally you allow maximum variability in your project’s planned approach and tactics.

Your MVI should be built of succinct answers to each of these four levels.

Thankfully, there’s a simple way to traverse between levels.

If you need to move down a level, simply ask “how?”.

And if you need to move up a level, ask “what are we trying to achieve with this?”.

Then set your boundaries and tolerances around what would be an acceptable time, cost and effort to solve the TOP LEVEL of this hierarchy (the WHY) and govern accordingly.

Your Takeaway: Tighten controls on the strategic levels of your change initiatives, while allowing maximum adaptability through the tactical levels. Remember your ideas of scope and plan will almost certainly not be correct at the start. Allow room for learning.

So to sum up:

• Keep your projects as small as possible. It’ll save you time, money and your reputation.
• Ensure your projects make sense by coherently connecting the strategic with the tactical.

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PS. Please drop me a note or comment to let me know if you prefer this type of slightly longer form content, or the short dot-point ‘direct insight’ content.