Transformation Management Office - Is yours set up to serve its role?

Less than a year ago, I had successfully helped our senior executives land on a strategy and we defined some core capabilities and enablers that would be required to execute on that vision. While senior executives could define some guiding principles around their strategy and desired operating model, we knew the details had to be defined by the leaders closest to the execution.

It was fascinating to watch and hear the questions from middle management as we unveiled the strategy. “What data did we use to arrive at this plan”, “What do we mean by our strategy and how does it truly translate into desired behaviors and mindsets?”, “What is the roadmap and timelines to get this done?”, “Where is the project plan so change management can manage to that plan?”

The questions were not wrong, but the timing was. We had to convert that linear, top-down thinking that expected a grand plan to cascade from the top into iterative, innovative, and agile thinking. This doesn’t mean we don’t need a strategy or a corporate vision. But as Peter Senge so eloquently puts it, “we need to create leadership capacity across the organization”.

I believe the primary role of a Transformation Management Office (TMO) is to create those conditions that enable that mindset shift. The core principle of a TMO should be enabling practice-based evidence, versus evidence-based practice, per Geoff Marlow (see full article here). And the beauty is that evidence gathered from practice can then help specify and refresh the strategy periodically, creating an agile infinity loop!

Here are 5 myths of what people think a TMO is:

1. Project management office
2. Implementation management office
3. Change management experts
4. A group of internal consultants
5. Innovation incubator

A TMO may have some of all the elements of the above, but a TMO is not just about that. A TMO is in fact much more about "creating conditions for acceleration in sense making, action, and iteration" as Geoff Marlow describes.

Five ways in which you can ensure the TMO lives up to its role as an accelerant of your enterprise transformation:

1. TMO must set up workstreams that enable design thinking with the front lines and practice-based evidence gathering through expert facilitation versus expert consultation. If we had all the answers, there was no need for a TMO! Therefore this group is not just internal consultants with all the answers and best practices, but rather a group of scientists conducting “learning labs” to iterate and define the future state based on practice or pilot based evidence.
2. TMO must set up governance that is separate from the business-as-usual decision making so there is accelerated practice-based evidence sense making and decision making is given to those workstreams championed by leaders at the C-suite level.
3. TMO must be led in partnership with business champions and business owners so the true culture of continuous improvement and practice-based evidence making can be engrained within the business and sustain the transformation well beyond the TMO’s tenure. Therefore the TMO cannot be the sole owner of the implementation.
4. TMO must embed change management and enterprise communications skill set in their team and approach to ensure there is transparent alignment from the board to the front lines, and the momentum for transformation sustains over the multi-year journey.
5. TMO must be “temporary and unbiased”, reporting into the CEO, to enable all the above in the most effective way. However, even though the TMO is limited in time, the transformation is a long multi-year journey. The TMO's role is to provide the initial thrust and acceleration like the rocket boosters provide to the rocket at launch!

After having the opportunity to create and staff an internally-led transformation office from the ground up, I have fully appreciated that the TMO is not about managing a collection of value creating workstreams. Managing a TMO is about systems thinking and routinely connecting workstreams around their dependencies, risks, overlaps, conflicts, learnings…Ultimately success is not in checking the boxes of the parts but constantly sub-optimizing the parts for optimizing the whole.

If you are indeed going through a transformation (as defined by my last few posts), think about how well you have set up your TMO for success. Please do share if you have additional insights or elements of success from your experience!