Want to Improve Your Chances of Success? Dismantle That Productized Solution You Cling To

INTRODUCTION

I was once told that if you name it, people will resist it. It’s an oversimplification with some invaluable truth to it. People resist change. By now, we should all know why.

Organizations will develop or adopt Productized Solutions to drive change. Some do it the right way, while others don’t. There is an abundance of literature on why these efforts fail, but doomed from the start seems to be a popular theme.

Not fully understanding the change at every level is a leading cause of failure — not on an individual basis, but the organization as a whole. Group and individual understanding are interrelated but distinct. One comes from the other, and I, too, have made the mistake of believing that verifying each person’s understanding meant that the group understood.

When I realized that approaches like Lean were actually Productized Solutions, I was immediately curious.

What led to the original solution in the first place? 

Improvement is the result of the desire to achieve a goal or objective; said another way, necessity is the mother of innovation. Improvements can become best practices. If they can be standardized in a way to be used in a variety of situations, attempts are made to productize them.

However, it’s very rare that using someone else’s solution achieves strategic success.

Imitation does not lead to sustainable capabilities. Improving peoples’ ability to learn how to initiate, manage, and sustain does.

Questions to Consider:

• How does your organization define, initiate, or manage change?
• What has worked, and what hasn’t worked when it comes to the change you implemented?
• In the past, how have the people within your organization responded to change? 

We develop models to initiate and manage change based on what works

We explore models, methodologies, or concepts for current challenges or to prepare for a future threat. It’s natural for us to compare our existing mental models with new ones. Through reasoning, trial & error, and experimentation we develop new or at least revised models to work from. Productized Solutions attempt to force us to just accept a new model without going through our process of validation.

Yet, Productized Solutions remain relevant because they appear to have everything we need to handle something quickly. This is misleading because cultures don’t change quickly and people don’t blindly accept ideas. It is also human nature to change only when it’s more painful to keep doing what we are doing or a new way makes the current way look painful in comparison. Neither reacting or changing for the sake of changing have good outcomes.

Over the past 30 years, I’ve observed the number of organizations that react is far greater than those that plan for change. Also, change for its own sake has not been successful because it feels like manipulation. Making and following through on strategic choices is the best way.

The use of Productized Solutions is sweeping change that wastes time. They have their own terminology, forms, and templates, making them different in how and what must change. This is in addition to job requirements.  What adds to the appeal of Productized Solutions is the difference in what they offer. Lean prioritizes waste elimination. Six Sigma zeros in on reducing variation and process control increase. Theory of Constraints finds the bottleneck and ensures all upstream and downstream processes work to enable its effectiveness. Business Process Re-engineering focuses on changing and improving processes, eliminating “silos” along the way. With all these options, it is very tempting for leaders to grab one and use it.

Let’s examine an ideology like Continuous Improvement: how continuous and how much improvement?

Some warm-up questions to consider:

●    What does Continuous Improvement mean to you?

●    What does Continuous Improvement look like at your organization currently?

●    What’s similar and/or different from your preconceived idea of Continuous Improvement and what it looks like when it plays out in your work, organization, or team?

If you start with a preconceived notion of what Continuous Improvement should be, you may find yourself continuously reconciling your organization's needs with the concept's application.

Understanding your customers, industry, functional dominance, strategic intent, and organizational design is the best basis for determining needed capabilities. For example, the automotive industry made platform changes every three years; now, changes are made every model year and periodically throughout. Flat-screen televisions and DVD players change less frequently, but much more so than in the past. All industries needed to improve product development capabilities.

These behavioral changes were driven by industry competition and customer demand. If a company didn't offer the latest features and benefits, someone else would. Someone must have thought that improvement must be continuous to keep up. So, somewhere along the way someone productized continuous improvement. This begs the questions: how continuous and how much improvement.

What were intended to be holistic approaches to managing and initiating performance improvement have become off-the-shelf programs, one-size-fits-all, and wholesale attempts that ignore organizations’ distinctiveness.

These Productized Solutions appear to have potential but have yet to live up to the hype. While they differ technically, one thing they have in common is they are most often misused. To fight for relevance, believers attempt to turn them into a philosophy or absorb additional successes as part of their definition. In some cases, concepts like Lean stay relevant due to a cult following — all to no avail.

Do we need Productized Solutions and their artifacts to focus efforts, solve problems, and standardize improvement?

I’m not convinced Productized Solutions are needed to initiate and manage change. However, I don’t believe in simply telling people they are empowered and providing a few guidelines.

What these Productized Solutions have in common is a way to coordinate people, communicate, solve problems, and standardize. It seems easier to take a method already scripted out instead of devising a new framework. 

But not only are the canned approaches ineffective, they also have their own requirements that have nothing to do with improvement. They need experts, who then require training, coaches/facilitators, and even accreditation. They also apply to far fewer areas of the business than they claim.

A preferred approach relies on sensing what new and existing capabilities people will need to achieve strategic success.

How do people and cultures change?

There is a continuum that ranges from highly uniform changes to random improvements made by anyone at any time.

I think of the boundaries as social engineering and natural selection. Regardless of where people are on the continuum, they need leadership to be engaged at every level to make significant and sustainable change. It’s important to note that there is not an optimal spot on the continuum for everyone. Where an organization lands is unique to their culture and circumstances. Additionally, the boundaries are very rarely the place to be.

The more an organization moves toward a formalized side of the continuum, the more its processes must change to fit the whole; this may be the right way if very few processes need to be formalized and the culture is comfortable with change. On the other side, changes made by anyone at any time requires a hands-on leadership team willing to understand what their people are doing and learning and growing with them. All within the context of strategic choices.

The core skills of existing change archetypes can be combined to train and empower people to approach gaps in performance and close them in a way that is aligned with the organization’s objectives. However, this still requires a comprehensive context in which they are applied.

Some warm-up questions to consider:

1. Answer the questions of why and where changes are needed
2. Those answers will help form a personalized framework.
3. That framework is used to organize core skills into capabilities because it, not Productized Solutions, determines how changes are going to be made.

Cultures change only when the way people work together and the structure they rely on to get work done are changed

Leadership must lead in those moments employees are faced with doing it the old way or doing it the new way. 

The first principles of Productized Solutions can create variety. Leadership should make sure a variety of these core skills are available to help people find the best solutions. The objective of course is to get the best use of time and money to achieve greater customer satisfaction and profitability. Significant, sustainable, and widespread change only comes from comprehensive activities understood at every level and discipline. Not from sweeping change that wastes time.

Having a culture that understands and works with the interdependencies of the functions and departments can have meaningful improvements at a local level. The caveat is that localized improvements must be part of an organization’s overall strategy in order to avoid sub-optimization and misdirection.

It’s not about standardizing a variety of skills but the fact that you have a variety. The conversation should be about what is available to your people when they need it.

It’s what needs to be available as your team prepares for the next opportunity or challenge.

One Big Question: What does culture look like at your organization now?

Where does your organization need to go?

We can’t approach cultures directly because what makes up a culture resides somewhere in the collective consciousness. While some leaders will substitute Productized Solutions for their personal involvement, there is a very low success rate with this approach.

Any initiative that effectively involves people in its development and deployment and allows them to share in the rewards is a good start. Forcing change will produce unpredictable results. Also, people frown on social engineering, and cultures prefer natural selection. It’s not pain-free, but people will tolerate more if they choose for themselves.

If we think about how to reassemble our way of using the available techniques, methodologies, and models, it might be best to have something that feels like natural selection by way of engaged leadership and formalized processes and procedures.

Knowing your organization, where it fits on the change continuum, and involving as many people in the process of why, what, and how, is a great second step.

The first step is knowing in which direction your organization needs to go.

BEFORE I GO: 5 THINGS TO CONSIDER

1. Consider what you do in the case of a downturn or recession. Do you turn to - or cling - to Productized Solutions? If so, why? When, how, or with whom does that thinking or approach start?

2. Your strategy, business model, and culture are power plays that marshall dynamic capabilities.

3. Think about how to create value from your capabilities when you get your strategy, business model, and culture working together.

4. Truth: Business systems are models in action.

5. Another truth: You can’t measure culture; you CAN measure climate.

Sean’s Suggested Reads on the Subject:

●    Blame versus Accountability: Thoughts from Sean Driscoll (The Line Between Blame and Accountability)

●    The Big Lie of Strategic Planning: Thoughts by Roger Martin via HBR

●    The 4 Deadly Sins of Work Culture: Adam Grant’s on the TED podcast

●    The biggest issues going into 2023: People, Purpose, Prices, Productivity

To learn more about dismantling Productized Solutions, and leaning into people, culture, and success please reach out to Sean directly: [email protected]