The document discusses challenges with long term planning in times of rapid change and increasing priorities. It suggests that long term planning is difficult and often fails when the pace of change is accelerating. It proposes that the solution is to take a more iterative approach, breaking work into shorter sprints to allow for flexibility and learning from results. This approach helps address issues like silo thinking, slow decisions, and an inability to set clear priorities that arise when transforming organizations.
7. DO EVERYTHING THAT IS REQUESTED FROM YOU
=> YOU’RE GREAT
DON’T DO EVERYTHING THAT IS REQUESTED FROM YOU
=> YOU SUCK
8.
9.
10. OUR “TO DO” LISTS ARE GETTING
LONGER WITH LESS “DELIMITED” TASKS
11. Our “TO DO” lists are getting longer
with less delimited tasks
12. What you need to do might not be on
your “TO DO” list yet
13.
14. What’s the one thing I can do,
such that by doing it everything
else is easier or unnecessary?
15.
16. I go against who I am
I disappoint people
I generate chaos
17. You suck!
You didn’t
deliver, you
disappoint
people and
look at the
chaos!
You did
great!
If you
don’t
focus, you
know you
will fail!
18.
19. « Some people had the
courage to let go who
they thought they
should be in order to
be who they are »
20.
21.
22.
23. Opportunity
or
threat
Do I feel able to
cope?
I have the courage
to go out of my
comfort zone, I
learn and grow
I go back to my
comfort zone and
feel safe
24. Vicious circle
No focus
Still trying to
deliver on
everything
Bad
results
More
stress
Less able to
cope and learn
the necessary
skills
Welcome everyone and thank you for being here today. I am really grateful for your presence but also for your participation in my research. Thank Silversquare!!
cjI have interviewed 30 CEO’s and senior managers (most of them are here tonight) and have received over 250 answers to my quantitative survey. That information combined with my experience helped me build this presentation. I will take approximately one hour for this presentation with moments were you will be able to reflect.
PHONE
“We didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow we lost”. This is how Nokia CEO Stephen Elop ended his speech during the press conference to announce Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia in 2014.
“We didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow we lost”.
Those words really stayed with me. Because this is one of the greatest difficulties in digital transformation. You can do everything that is expected from you and still fail to the point of possible extinction.
Kodak and Nokia are the most famous examples but statistically, you have 1 chance in 3 that your company will not exist anymore in five years from now.
In fact, I believe that if you do everything that is expected from you, especially with the short-term expectations coming from some of your shareholders, your chances of failing will increase.
Why do we continue doing that then?
We, as directors have more difficulties setting priorities for ourselves, more than the rest of the organization. So why is that? Why do we have difficulties setting boundaries for ourselves? Why did I, as a CEO have difficulties setting boundaries? I could argue of course that it is because of the broader view I had, I saw all the things that needed to be tackled, maybe more than the rest of the organization could see.
But I don’t think so! In fact, I know it wasn’t the reason, I was there
No, I have been trained from a very young age to do what is expected from me, like Pavlov trained his dog.
In school, I got good grades when I did everything that was asked from me, I even learned to “tick” every item of my agenda. And I was punished if I didn’t do everything that was requested. That was the way to good grades. Imagine my teacher’s reaction, if one day in class I would have said: Yeah, sorry. I didn’t study that lesson and do that homework because I had to focus on more important things.
In fact, I asked my 15y old son to try it at school, just for the fun. This was his reaction.
And that was in school, but it was the same at home, in my gym classes and in my art class.
My Pavlov conditioning was the following:
DO EVERYTHING THAT IS REQUESTED FROM YOU => YOU’RE GREAT
DON’T DO EVERYTHING THAT IS REQUESTED FROM YOU => YOU SUCK
And over the years, I excelled at this. In fact, that is probably one of the competencies that got me through university and so far in my career. I could deliver!
And I have practiced this skill and practiced it and practiced it for so long that it had become part of who I am. It is embodied. Did you now, that when you practice something so often, a new connection is created in our brain? And when you continue to practice that, that connection becomes bigger, broader like a river in your brain. It becomes who you are because you are or you become what you practice.
But when your market is in disruption and you need to reinvent yourself, doing everything that is expected might lead to big failure.
Why is that?
First of all, my “to do” list became longer and longer everyday with requests coming from everywhere (meetings, mails, phone, sms, WhatsApp, Messenger, LinkedIn, from home, from friends, from colleagues and from strangers…) with reminders or reproaches coming from the same channels. People saying: “You haven’t answered my mail yet”. And the work I delivered wasn’t as delimited as it used to be, I could always do more research, align more, put more details into my work, do an extra review, give it the extra mile.
In my situation, it wasn’t realistic anymore to keep delivering on every request. I tried and it almost got me burned out. I think it is just not possible anymore to deliver everything that is expected.
But secondly and most importantly, the things I really needed to do were not on my “to do” list yet. Or if they were, nobody pressured me to do that one thing I should do, that thing that would move my company one step closer to survival and to success in this digital age. Like having a conversation with a possible partnering company, or meeting with a person that could inspire me, or enrolling to an ontological coaching program, or thinking about new business models, or taking the necessary time to find a creative solution to a recurring problem, … Even if they made it to my to do list, nobody was nagging me to tackle those. People were nagging me about a hundred other things.
WHAT YOU NEED TO DO MIGHT NOT BE ON YOUR “TO DO” LIST YET
But somehow, I felt this. I knew that what I needed to do was not on my list yet. And probably, somewhere in your belly, you know there is something that you should do, something that comes above the rest. To find it, I like the question coming from the book “The ONE Thing”. Chances are that you already have the answer to this question, somewhere in your belly.
So, if you are OK with it, I would like to do a small exercise. I’d like to spend 3 minutes to give you the opportunity to be in touch with your intuition and to find an answer to this question. Some of you might feel a little bit uncomfortable because you are not use to that. But allow yourself this time for you, give yourself permission to enjoy this moment in silence. I will ask you to sit as comfortably as possible. Close your eyes, enjoy the silence. I would like you to connect to your gut, your belly. Try to focus your attention on your intuition, your belly. You can even put your hands on it if you want. Take 3 deep breaths and bring the air to your belly.
Here is the question:
When you are ready, you can open your eyes again and take the time to come out of that silence.
If you haven’t written your answer down yet, please take the time. If nothing came to you, that is OK too. You might want to try this again at home or in your shower and take more time. In fact, this thing you really should do might only come to you when you are really balanced. But I can assure you that that thing is there somewhere for you to find.
And once you have found it, it might be a good idea to focus most of your attention to it. Focusing on the things you really need to do is crucial.
And once you have found it, it might be a good idea to focus most of your attention to it. Focusing on the things you really need to do is crucial.
Imagine now, you have found it and need to focus on it. It means that you will have to “not do everything that is expected from you”, by either saying no to someone or by ignoring someone. And chances are, you will have to ignore or say no to lots of someones in order to really focus, even to the people deciding whether you get a raise or get fired.
And in my experience that has 3 consequences:
I go against who I am: “The one who always delivers” (that felt very uncomfortable, especially since I used to be punished for that)
I will disappoint people including myself (which increased my feeling of not being comfortable)
All the things I won’t take care of will not be in control. That will generate chaos that I need to accept – which further increases my uncomfortable feeling
So for me, focusing indirectly meant: going against who I was, disappointing people and generating chaos.
I saw myself with 2 persons on my shoulders
I believe that is why focusing is hard! While, according to the study, a strategy with clear priorities is the number one success criteria to reach your companies goals and again according to the employees only 30% companies are relatively good at that.
So, I knew and understood why it was so difficult for me to focus. But what could I do about it?
I needed to master the new skills that come with focus:
Learn to say no at the cost of disappointing people
Learn to accept some chaos
Learn to go out of my comfort zone and go against who I was
I like how Brené Brown formulates it in her Ted Talk about the power of vulnerability. Some people, she said, had the courage to let go who they thought they should be in order to be who they are.
This sentence really nails it. During the digital transformation of my company, I was losing my professional identity. My old identity had served me very well in the past but wasn’t serving me anymore. I needed to embody a new one.
And I can assure you, this transition did not happen smoothly. You might imagine it like this.
But it felt more like this. I went through a crisis, and felt bad at times. Like a loser. I felt very vulnerable in those moments of crisis. But I noticed a nice side effect coming from this vulnerability.
When I felt the most vulnerable, I was also building deeper connections with my colleagues. Maybe because they were just seeing me with my imperfections and my struggles, they could relate to that and maybe that reassured them as well.
But it was only when I felt I was able to cope with the crisis, the transformation, that I had the courage to put myself in that vulnerable position and that I learned and I grew towards a new version of me.
Because that is how our brain works.
And how could I increase this feeling to be able to cope? By taking care of myself, so that I feel well or in peace. That is what I call being in balance.
When I felt stressed, angry or exhausted, I was definitely not in the best emotion to get out of my comfort zone. Only when I was balanced could I cope with it.
Therefore, I believe that taking care of yourself is a pre-requisite in digital transformation or in any kind of transformation. It is the best way to rewire your brain so that you can embody these new skills that will serve you better.
It can either become a virtuous circle or a vicious circle.
Of course I wasn’t the only one going through this personal transformation, my team and most people in the organization went through it. I had to support my team and even the whole organization to go through this growth process. That is why in my previous company, “care” was a core value and one of the foundations for our digital transformation.
What would taking care mean for you? What are the things that give you energy? I will give you some time to reflect on this. If you can form pairs or groups of 3, I will give you 3 minutes to discuss this with your neighbor (each 1 minute).
What would taking care mean for you? What are the things that give you energy? I will give you some time to reflect on this. If you can form pairs or groups of 3, I will give you 3 minutes to discuss this with your neighbor (each 1 minute).
Whether it is coming from new technologies, changes in policies & regulations or increased customer expectations, the pace of change has never been so fast as today and will keep accelerating. We and our companies have never witnessed this kind of speed before.
We are now here but we have been educated and our companies have been built for this slow pace of change. And soon, we will be in this rhythm of change. And that is why we have such difficulties to keep up with the pace of change. We, as people or as companies are not equipped well enough for that speed. And the organizations or leaders who will continue to run their companies as if we were still in this slow age might be among the first ones to disappear.
Is it the end of long-term planning? 80% experience great difficulties with long-term planning. The plans keep changing, sometimes even before the implementation has started. So why do these plan keep changing? It’s simple and there is only one answer. Because we receive new information that makes it necessary to change our plans. New information coming from new customer requests, new competitor’s offers, new regulation or new technologies.
At Plantyn, it drove people mad (myself included). People were telling me: “You said this last week and now you change your mind again! It keeps changing, I don’t know what to do anymore”. And some people became cynic, other froze and other kept running.
Our classic workflow wasn’t working anymore. The facts kept changing and we needed to change our plans constantly. Until we realized that making long-term plans in a volatile and unpredictable environment was counterproductive.
And what did our headquarters or shareholders do? The more they were uncertain, the more details they requested from us.
Our whole financial system is based on predicting future earnings while the CEO’s in my interviews saw forecasting as their number one personal issue.
So how did we solve this? For our product development, we applied the “lean start-up” methodology.
What is the big difference between the old methodology and this one?
The biggest difference is that
Start with an idea
Build a minimum viable product (prototype)
Test & measure
Pivot or persevere
Do fast iterations
It is a good methodology and we had great results in increased users.
I believe, this methodology is not only for digital developments, it is for every plan operating in a volatile environment whether it is launching a new product, changing your organization or coming up with a new distribution strategy. In fact, I am so convinced about this way of working that I decided to launch my company that way.
Working in iterations or sprints as we called it has also another huge benefit. A benefit linked to one of the key principles I use in my everyday life now. This concept was at the basis of my ontological coaching training.
(Explain OAR)
By working on sprints, you slowly change the observation of the people in your organizations. With that new observation, they see new possible actions that weren’t visible for them before allowing them to reach better results.
.
By working on sprints, you slowly change the observation of the people in your organizations. With that new observation, they see new possible actions that weren’t visible for them before allowing them to reach better results.
By working on sprints, you slowly change the observation of the people in your organizations. With that new observation, they see new possible actions that weren’t visible for them before allowing them to reach better results.
By working on sprints, you slowly change the observation of the people in your organizations. With that new observation, they see new possible actions that weren’t visible for them before allowing them to reach better results.
By working on sprints, you slowly change the observation of the people in your organizations. With that new observation, they see new possible actions that weren’t visible for them before allowing them to reach better results.
By working on sprints, you slowly change the observation of the people in your organizations. With that new observation, they see new possible actions that weren’t visible for them before allowing them to reach better results.
Now I would like to talk about the topic that creates the most negative emotions at work. When that business topic is not handled well it creates frustration, annoyance and powerlessness. I also believe that this topic is key if you want ownership and agility in your company.
Any guesses? I am talking about decision-making.
Agility and ownership are very much linked to decision-making. If you can decide and act fast as a company, you will adapt rapidly to the changes and benefit from the opportunities arising.
If you want to increase ownership within the company, the employees must be able to make decisions or at least participate actively in the decision process.
It seems that you know that, because there is a really a will to decentralize but in reality only 1 company out of 4 have already decentralized most decisions. And CEO’s also told me that when their company goes through a crisis, they see a tendency from headquarters to even centralize more.
And the more decisions are centralized, the less a company is agile, the less ownership and we see an increase in emotions like powerlessness or resignation. I looked at correlations in my study and also found this:
What was it like for our management team at Plantyn? At some point, we noticed that we weren’t the right decision organ anymore for many decisions. We were too slow. We need 10 extra FTE if we want to reach our budget or we need these innovations or new functionality in order to grow, I need extra marketing budget, I deserve a raise, …
With every questions, we felt the weight on our shoulders increase. And for the people waiting on decisions, they were frustrated when they had to wait or powerless or resigned when we decided against their request.
Like for every other major trend, my management team and I had to learn new skills like learning to let go. But letting go felt like jumping from a cliff especially with the high pressure from our shareholders holding us accountable for the companies’ results. What if the teams made wrong decisions?
But how did we implement increased ownership within the organization?
One important thing is that we needed a foundation. Care, trust and our values are an important foundation. And of course we need to know what the mission is and our key objectives. When everything changes constantly, we need something to hold on to. A little bit like on a boat in the middle of a storm, you need a direction far away and something to hold on to. If you don’t look at the horizon, you get seasick.
Some people had to learn new skills like coaching instead of directing, letting go & sharing responsibilities (for the manager), learn to take responsibility for the team members, learning to read a P&L and to decide in line with our values and mission,…
In order to be able to make good decisions, the teams needed access to the right information. Therefore, finance build a new system, an extensive finance reporting that was very visual.
It is not because you have learned a skill that it is embodied. We all needed to practice our new skills, some had coaches to support them and finance played a key role in teaching this new habit by accompanying the teams in the decision process at first. And the people had to practice a lot and still practice because it takes on average 66 days to form a new habit if you practice every day.
Then we noticed that many issues were beyond the departments of each team. We had especially big issues of collaboration between marketing, sales and publishing. Therefore, we changed the organization. Suddenly, the teams could do something about key issues that used to be spread across departments.
And what we lost in specialty, we gained in customer satisfaction and increased market share and revenues. In fact, for French education we went even farther in the exercise. There, we also had integrated production and e-project management. And that team, was 30% more profitable than the rest of the organization. Plantyn would have been 1,3m € more profitable yearly if every team worked as efficiently as that one without economy of scale.
Because, all these things went up, people were becoming more empowered and slowly they started to come up with new business models or new products.
This is an example with empowerment but I really like this framework for transforming a company. It is based on the temple model from Flanders Synergy.
All 5 “arrows” are important during a transformation and they are linked to each other. You have to imagine a “not very elastic” rope between those pillars. Like I said in the previous part, a transformation also needs to be handled in sprints/iterations. You have to work on all 5 domains more or less simultaneously. Otherwise the rope will be pulled back or break.
How is the spirit of innovation in your company today? Which pillar do you need to focus on to increase it?
“Silo thinking” is the last big issue I would like to talk about. 85% of the respondents see there is an increased need to collaborate. And it isn’t going so well because 70% complain about silo thinking.
How can we increase collaboration? I believe that the biggest barrier today is the organizational structure with departments around functions. That organization has served us extremely well in slower times. In those times, we had time to adapt our processes with the KPI’s and objectives for each functional department. Now, with our products that keep changing, that functional organization has become counterproductive and that is why our problems have become so much more complex to solve. When your product or service changes, you need to align with almost every department.
And during that alignment, the product or service might change again. So you spend your times in meetings trying to align constantly and slowly forgetting why you need this alignment or that the objective is to deliver something with added value for your customer.
The solution I see is to build cross-functional teams like we did at Plantyn.
I told you in the reminder mail that there was one criteria that outperformed all the others in the study. It wasn’t happiness although that one is increasing the results as well. That criteria is “no silo thinking”. Remove the silo thinking by changing the organizational structure, and your results will exponentially increase. For our French education department, it meant a profit increase of 30%.
I am now at the end of my presentation. What I tried to explain to you was that one big trend (the acceleration of speed) was causing bit problems in our organizations. We all are transforming our organization in order to tackle those but before, we have seen that we have to transform ourselves.
This was a lot of information already and couldn’t share everything that I want to share with you. But if there are 3 things that I would suggest you to implement in your company, it would be the following:
First, be nice with yourself and learn to take care of yourself and of the people in your organization. Taking care is doing the things that give you energy, that will be very different for every person.
Taking care allows you to go out of your comfort zone, to find creative solutions, to reinvent your organization, to have better relationships and to increase your impact overall
Implement the lean start-up methodology and stop with the big plans, not only for IT but for all your plans in volatile conditions.
Improve your collaboration by changing your organizational structure. Organize yourself around your process instead of around functions or specialties.
I truly believe that you will reach amazing results and feel good about it.
