The Persistence of Vision: sustaining energy in strategic transformation

Sometimes you just feel like giving up. Some days, even when you are the visionary leader of a transformation programme, even when your teams and your company are looking to you to provide energy, direction and confidence, it just feels like there are too many obstacles. You look at the many other abandoned programmes in your enterprise’s history, and you wonder how you can succeed when so many others have failed. You look at the status quo, and wonder whether it is really so bad. Maybe you should curtail your ambitions, and settle for some incremental improvements.

I don’t have a perfect answer for sustaining energy in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. But there are three ways of seeing - three perspectives - that I find helpful: the perspectives of imagination, of time and of others.

Perspective of imagination: vision

Statements of vision, mission and purpose often have a bad name in the corporate world. And it’s not hard to see why: if you look at many mission statements, you will find a mish-mash of goals, ambitions and vague intentions, glued together into a mess of corporate language that it is hard to remember - and even harder to say with conviction.

This does not mean that we should not bother to define our vision. It just means that we should get better at it - better at knowing what it is, and better at explaining it to ourselves and others. A good vision statement requires us to adopt the perspective of imagination: to picture ourselves where we want to be if our transformation is successful; to express that feeling in crisp, creative language; and to imagine what it feels like to hear that language. Does it sing or does it thud? Does it inspire or does it deflate?

A good expression of vision statement must survive over time. It must make sense in the middle of the journey as well as at the beginning. In times of challenge and difficulty, it must help people to remember why they chose to face that difficulty, and remember that they will get to the other side of it.

Perspective of time: strategy

When we start a transformation endeavour, we typically think broadly and strategically. We see day one of the programme as the first day in a journey of many steps. We want to see results soon - but we know that true transformation may take years.

When we are in the middle of a transformation endeavour, it can be much harder to maintain this perspective. When every task is slipping, when every test is failing, when people seem to be letting you down, your perspective can shrink to weeks, days or even hours. In current circumstances, where people are feeling the effects of long term remote working, even getting to the end of the day can feel like a relief.

It is at such times that we need to consciously adopt a strategic perspective, to remember that, while today’s goals and challenges are important, they are in service of a larger goal to be achieved over a longer time. Adopting such a perspective doesn’t solve today’s problems, but it can help put them into their proper scale.

Perspective of others: empathy

There’s a trap that it’s easy to fall into (and I know that I have fallen into it): when things go well, we think of the team, and when things go badly, we think of the task. In the midst of challenge, we may become so intensely focused on problem solving that we forget about the state of mind and the motivation of the people around us. As a result, we sometimes find that, even though we get past our immediate problems, we have created a much bigger problem - the team is no longer with us.

I believe that, if we aspire to lead transformation, then in tough times it is better to focus on the team than the task. If we have done our jobs, and assembled a team capable of getting the job done, and giving them the freedom to do it, then they will solve the task - the leader’s job is to create the conditions for their success and tackle problems outside their control. And I believe that commitment to the team is the greatest antidote for apathy.

(Views in this article are my own.)