A simple technique to accelerate transformation success

At this week’s weekly leadership roundtable, I introduced a concept for designing the human at the heart of transformation. As well as this concept I also challenged the leaders in the room with extending their use of this technique all the way through the transformation journey – rather than just stop at design phase.

I don't know about you, but what I've experienced is, there's a great amount of work people do to understand the user and target audience at the start of any transformation. Then, we kind of switch off! Suddenly, all our timelines and targets are based on features and functions, or release dates driven by technology, budget deadlines or even sprints (when agile is misused).?The structure and environment of the program takes over and the human seems forgotten again, unless we've got an iterative user feedback process at best.

So, how could we humanise transformation end to end - to keep that deep human connection throughout the journey? A simple technique that's been around since the 50s and well known to anyone in advertising or product design.

Raymond Loewy said:

“If something is familiar make is surprising, if something is surprising make it familiar.”

If you breakdown this quote it talks to the answer and technique I want to share with you today.

MAYA

The principle of MAYA .

Using this technique to humanise transformation can increase engagement levels and even accelerate success.

MAYA, stands for most advanced, yet acceptable. Applied to transformation, it would mean delivering the most advanced in terms of something new, but still be acceptable in the eyes of the user because of having a sense of familiarity. In my experience this is super important to transformation success. It shouldn’t be that our delivery and deployment is determined by a technology, project or product build telling us when a new feature is ready it’s ready to deploy, it's the exact opposite we want.

Design what's right for the audience at that time.

How can we start to integrate MAYA into transformation

When we use MAYA in transformation we focus on three stages:

Identify Zone of Familiarity

The first thing we understand the current state, we need to understand what we call the zone of familiarity. What we mean by zone of familiarity goes deeper than most ‘current state’ data initiatives, because it’s not based on things like employee opinion surveys or user groups or persona avatars along. It’s based on is our ability to map and observe truth. The facts of what our users are doing, how they are doing that which can help inform how they think, as well as behave. We want to observe habitat and habit, norms and rituals. This data gives us truth and fact, when we consciously ask humans we usually get perception based on somebody's reality.

How do we gather the data that really gives us truth perception of reality? It's using techniques from disciplines like ethnography and anthropology.

It’s about observation. To build that zone of familiarity you can use four basic techniques.

Controlled

The first one is the controlled. It's a bit clinical where we recreate the natural environment in a controlled space and observe from there. What you might do in an in a workforce environment in an organisational environment is you might book out the boardroom for a couple of weeks. And you might use the boardroom, put some laptops and some computers with a new technology uploaded, then get people from a particular area to work out of that room for a week or two. This option is good because it allows us to standardise the data we collect.

Naturalistic

The observation technique is naturalistic. The thing about naturalistic though is that it takes time.

The benefit however, is that it's deeper. Why? Because you are putting yourself physically in that individual’s environment. Like shadowing. What’s interesting is a lot of people say to me naturalistic sounds great, but how does it work in a hybrid environment? Well it can because what you can get people to shadow others by following their diary commitments and attending their meetings Zoom or Teams meetings. It’s not as effective, or deep, but the data can still be rich. Naturalistic data is usually unstructured. Because the observer is mapping out and observing everything that they're seeing, hearing, experiencing, in a free flow way.

Participatory

The third type of observation is participatory and I would suggest this is the best for change and transformation. Because this is where you walk in the shoes of the individual. You're not shadowing you are one of them, or part of a team. Here you can gather both structured and unstructured data.

Technical

Then there is the final one, which is technical, something that is becoming more powerful as we navigate hybrid working. This is when we use technology to gather our truth and facts: Knowing the myriad of technologies people now use to engage and operate it’s a rich and fertile landscape: Office 365, Slack, Zoom, SharePoint, WhatsApp, the list is almost endless. The point is we are able to use these technologies and gather data that includes people's habits and norms – that might, for many not even be conscious. Another benefit of using technical data is that you can gather past historic data, as well as real time present data.

These are 4 basic techniques we can use to gather the truth and facts around people’s actions, words and behaviours.

A big caveat of course is that this has to be ethical and with the full permission of anyone you are planning on observing. With this data and other data points we might have access to we are able to create a Zone of Familiarity that shows us where people’s habits and comfort zone is. This data can be broken down to an individual level too with time.

Once we have this deep and holistic picture, we are ready to head for the stars…

Identify Zone of Possibility

Next thing is to map the zone of possibility, what you might call the art of the possible. It's that thing that's bigger than us, we call this the moon shot.

This is not however, usually the end goal or target of the project or the programme. This is about connecting people to something bigger than them, we want to connect them and unite them to a cause or purpose.

Take your project or program strategy or vision and go beyond…take it as far as you can until you connect with a moon shot cause or purpose.

There is an easy way you can do that. You can go on to the United Nations sustainability development goals website , you can see them there. So many times, we have taken an organisational goal or target that speaks to nothing at a human level and connected it to one of these goals and shifted the momentum of transformation for everyone. Why? Because cause and purpose generate human connection. Target and goals generate organisational connection.

Mapping transformation strategy to the UN Sustainability Development Goals can help connect humans to a greater cause or purpose around your program.        

With these two points in place, we can then use that beautiful technique of MAYA, most advanced yet acceptable to create the micro shifts for the design of deployment and delivery. So no longer does it have to be the IT team or the technology team or the product team saying X new feature will be released next week, we can use these two data points to will drive when and what gets delivered.

The interesting thing about these beautiful little micro shifts is that you can start to see a J curve of adoption emerge. Using MAYA to bring people on the journey of change builds trust and so people gain more and more confidence around change as time goes on, which means that they are likely to participate more and be more active.

A powerful and well known example of MAYA in practice

MAYA as a technique can help disrupt entire sectors as we continuously deploy change that is within the MAYA zone using familiarity and possibility as our design markers.

A great example of MAYA being used in the consumer world, is, of course, Apple. And if you think about Apple, and specifically the iPhone.

When Apple designed the iPhone, they knew what they wanted to disrupt an entire sector. However, when they observed the consumer zone of familiarity, they realised it was all based around what the mobile music devices: Remember the Sony Walkman!? The consumer handheld device that was familiar was not a phone but a music player. Apple responded with the launch of the iPod. They were in the zone of familiarity, but also nudging towards something new. As they continued to evolve the iPod they reached the Zone of familiarity that allowed for something that still dominates the consumer world: It is, of course, the iPhone.

There you go! – if we can use a technique that’s been around for decades and apply it with purpose to our transformation programs, we can humanise them and even accelerate success.

But there are some banana skins we need to be aware of too!

We don't want to slip up with some obvious things.

• Using MAYA is about going small, and small does not mean slow.

The other banana skin is to ensure you don’t design backwards. What do I mean by that? For me there is a clear, simple distinction between change and transformation. Change is when we design from where and who we are today to make something existing smarter, better, or faster. When we are transforming, we are becoming something different, something new – so our design focus should be on the moon shot – then coming back to now from that point.

• Think about how you can focus on creating forward and measuring back, if transformation is really what your vision is after.

Can you see how MAYA might help you connect to people and humanise your transformation? Can you put some actions in place now that can start to capture observational data? Is it time to do an acid test on your transformation vision or strategy – to ensure it connects at a human level based on a cause or purpose bigger than the organisation?

MAYA is one of the many elements that together make up the Quantum Experience that is a designed program for leaders of transformation. Using the Dilyn WayTM Framework for humanising transformation Quantum takes you through 4 stages to humanise transformation: Self, Team, Leaders, Organisation.

If you would like to know more about how you can humanise transformation using full Dilyn WayTM framework I would love to know more about where you are at and your goals and ambitions.?That’s exactly why I dedicate each Thursday afternoon to strategy session with transformation leaders all over the world: if you would like to take advantage of that, to see how Quantum could work for you?

Join me by booking at time HERE

Alternatively, you can join my free 45 min weekly Leadership Roundtable where I take 1 tiny aspect of humanising transformation to discuss, share and debate with other leaders like you. You can join me and others every Wednesday 8am UK Time by using this LINK.

See you soon for more on humanising transformation to accelerate success!