New initiatives in large organizations have a lower rate of success than Mars missions.

But you can increase your odds of success up to 6x

Implementing change programs and initiatives in large organizations is hard. Over 85% of these fail to achieve the desired results. However, your change initiative doesn’t have to be on the wrong side of that statistic. You can set your initiative up for success by identifying the success patterns and implementing them using a systematic capability building process for your initiative teams.

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If you are leading innovation, transformation, or change in your organization, the chances are that you feel the odds are stacked against you. 

Your role is crucial for your organization’s future, yet you fight a constant battle for internal alignment. Your team is either new to the organization or doesn’t have the expertise required to implement successful change programs. You dream of the day you’ll do a victory lap after successfully implementing the change. Still, the path is riddled with obstacles such as time overruns, cost overruns, and low adoption.

Most organizations believe innovation is key to their growth and future success. Yet, Bain’s research suggests that only 20% of change programs achieve the desired results. There is significant scope for improvement here. 

Leaders whose change programs achieve the desired results attribute their success to good governance and execution far more than making the right strategic choices or achieving organizational alignment and commitment.

We will focus on the right Governance setup required for success in part 2 of this post. In this post (Part 1), let’s try to understand tips and tricks for better execution.

So why does the execution of change initiatives go wrong so often?

(Not accounting for strategic errors, leadership commitment, or cross-functional alignment problems)

Every innovation initiative and change program is unique. Hence, it comes with the (wrong) assumption that the only way to figure out the right implementation strategy is trial and error. 

While agile experimentation is vital, there is no need to reinvent the wheel every time. 

Let us try to understand this with an example.

Say you are building a digital solution for your organization or customers. There are relatively well-established methodologies and behaviors for the test-and-learn process that you could follow –

• Layout the business problem and size of the opportunity
• Discover user needs
• Ideate on the right technologies and features
• Define MVPs and critical metrics to test assumptions
• Develop the MVPs or find the right solution partners
• Measure and learn
• …

You can also get powerful tips and tricks for involving stakeholders in this journey and ensuring cross-functional collaboration. Even when it comes to your solution, there are success patterns in execution - for example, an ideal process for automating a part of your supply chain.

Building your team's capability to tune into your initiative’s success patterns can increase the odds of success up to 6x.

While this may sound obvious, the challenge is that large organizations’ successful change patterns are not readily available. In such a scenario, how do you find the secret sauce for the success of your initiative?

Let us begin by listing some common approaches adopted by initiative teams to do that:

•  They usually reach out to people in other organizations that have worked on similar initiatives to get insights. 
• They may look for useful literature or training solutions that help them become “agile” or explains relevant technology innovations and their use cases.
• Lastly, they might seek mentors with relevant experience to guide their execution. 

If you have tried any of these approaches, you know it can be a hit or a miss. 

While learning from people in other organizations can give you some insights, the needs and goals of your initiative may be completely different.

Training solutions that are not tailored to your change initiative’s specific goals often fail to deliver the desired outcomes. Most of the existing learning programs focus on developing particular skills, such as python programming, data analytics, agile certification, etc. Some cater to employees looking to acquire knowledge on new topics – Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, RPA, etc. However, there aren’t many learning programs in the market targeted at experienced professionals and teams to excel at delivering results in the new world.

Mentor relationships don’t work out often. Sometimes mentors don’t have relevant experience, and sometimes they try to be directive and port their experience directly to your unique situation.

Hence, innovation leaders feel like they are continually battling uncertainty - not just in outcomes but also in process and execution. Result expectations are not flexible, and budget allocations are not adjustable, while everything in between is uncertain. 

How can you identify the success patterns for your initiative type and train your teams to execute them?

The ideal solution lies in the approaches that you have already tried. You can accelerate results by executing these approaches systematically, incorporating the latest research on capability building and behavior change.

1. Change patterns across organizations

Instead of reaching out to a few peers, you need to study your flavor of change across many organizations within your industry and outside. You can do this systematically by speaking to many organizations going through change. Or you can reach out to companies that have done such studies already, for example, us at Ignite.

 The pattern recognition needs to work at two levels. 

• Identify the required behavior change.
• Discover the right execution process and the essential learning required to enable your initiative teams to follow the process while tailoring it to their unique situation

Our research at Ignite shows more than 30 types of changes are happening as unmistakable patterns across organizations right now. Agile transformation, customer experience transformation, digital product development, e-commerce acceleration, digital marketing acceleration, automation, commercial transformation, and performance improvement, to name a few. How these changes play out in each organization is unique, and so are the results. However, the building blocks are similar. 

2. Practical, relevant, bite-sized content delivered at the right time

Next, you need to translate the required behavior change and execution process into a systematic learning program that delivers relevant, concentrated learning at the right points of the initiative teams’ journey. This part is relatively easy to do online and at scale -more insights on this to follow in my future posts.

The learning program also needs to inculcate the required behaviors among initiative teams via action items, triggers, and reinforcements. This part is harder to achieve entirely with tech and at scale. The most effective solutions for affecting behavior change at scale employ coaches or peer-based accountability structures.

3. Mentors as coaches

Many organizations worldwide are investing in innovation mentors to help their teams with inspiration and creativity, to validate their ideas, and guide the transformation and change. 

It is an excellent idea to facilitate access to mentors. The most effective mentors have two attributes –

• They have relevant hands-on experience in the same role as their mentees. For example, if they are mentoring initiative teams, they have been a part of an initiative team in a large organization for the same or similar initiative.
• They act as coaches or sounding boards vs. porting their experience to your unique situation.

A carefully designed mentor engagement plan would focus on the learner, align to initiative goals, and have a structured engagement plan aligned with the initiative team’s implementation journey.

4. Peer-to-peer Learning

According to a Degreed study, over 55% of employees turn to their peers for learning, second only to their bosses and mentors. However, peer-learning programs often suffer from low engagement.

Peer-to-peer learning can be an excellent tool to execute change programs effectively. Organizations can form a community of initiative teams going through the change, creating a systematic engagement process to learn together and from each other. Having a cross-organizational community also helps, although it is not a substitute for a thriving internal community that shares the same context and constraints. 

The key to increasing engagement is to

• Focus on smaller, close-knit groups rather than trying to seed trust and relatedness across the whole community at once.
• Carefully select these groups to ensure a diversity of backgrounds, balanced against common goals or challenges to generate comfort and relatedness.

5. Test and learn

 Finally, the most important lever is to ensure that your change teams capture the learning from content, mentors, and peers, and apply it to their live initiatives almost immediately, then get feedback and iterate.

Establishing this cycle ensures that your teams can own the learning and customize it to their situation, thus getting the most value from it. It also enables you to track the value from your learning interventions and improve it over time.

To sum up,

You don’t need an e-learning platform or generic topical training for your initiative teams, but a much more bespoke solution to train them for success. Sure 85% of new initiatives in large organizations fail to deliver the desired results, but there is no reason for the failure rate to be that high. And there is no reason why your initiative should fall on the wrong side of that statistic. 

 These five building blocks can help you avoid costly mistakes.