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Step 2: Sense-making
Sense-making is about convening the right leaders and members of the workforce to make sense of the issues and co-create the way forward. This means bringing people from across the organization together, often in a physical location, to create a shared understanding of the issues and a sense of ownership over the outcome. They then explore the issue – to look at root cause rather than symptom.
Dominant lag indicators, such as KPIs that populate common dashboards, seem to offer clarity. While their apparent objectivity makes it tempting to use them in decision-making, their retrospective nature makes them less useful to guide future action. By contrast, key behavioral indicators (KBIs) and emotional cues are much more subjective, diffuse and hard to understand. If the signal is a shift in emotional energy, the next step is to get to the root cause.
Leaders should try to discern what they need to work on to get the program on track. Successfully navigating a turning point requires more than spotting the signal amid the noise; it requires leaders to decode what the signals are saying.
One company we interviewed established a series of small-scale projects to test and improve ways of working. “The [small-scale projects] were a testing ground for the imperfect but that was as good as we could get it,” the transformation leader noted. “When people used them, they had lots of ideas on how to improve them. So, we captured the ideas on those defining best practices from each of the [projects] and then we went from 60% to 80%. Then we deployed it to a few more and then went from 80% to 95%. So, it was continuous improvement.”
Step 3: Acting
Once program leaders sense the issues and understand what they mean – or are in the process of trying to understand them – they need to take action. Importantly, these actions must put humans at the center if they are to address the unique challenges facing the transformation.
Acting involves re-establishing the program environment that allows and encourages people to work together, using the six drivers of transformation success we identified in our initial research. Acting often occurs concurrently with sense-making, as leaders continually decide the best course of action. As one senior manager explained: “We escalated that we needed a change to top management, and that meant basically the ones reporting to the CEO. We had an event where we gathered all these leaders to present what the problems were. Because when you’re presenting what the problems are, you’re also presenting the solution. And I think we did that. We changed a lot of things related to the second [phase of the transformation] – more than we thought was possible, to be honest.”
While the idea of steps seems linear, these three steps are dynamic and interdependent. There needs to be a constant flow among them to maximize their success.