Many if not all my LinkedIn contacts are making change happen.

Having worked within the world of IT and business change for my entire career I feel passionate about the changes and the impact that they can make. I often find myself reflecting on the impact we are making and if all the energy, thought and action is driving the best outcomes for our customers, the teams we work with and ultimately the business performance.

The 3 area that I reflect on the most are ..

1. The business world has so many opportunities to reshape itself and drive better outcomes.

Assessing the opportunities, understanding how we could reframe and reshape and the impact on customers, our teams and our business performance as a consequence of that reshaping plays on my mind.

Are we assessing the right opportunities? Are we applying biases to the impacts we feel we could make? Do we really understand how all aspects of the business need to change to get the right outcome? Can we reframe our initial assumptions and see things differently? Are we rushing to the solutions before being really clear on the problem?

I often link back to a key piece of advice I was given in my early career – if you want to understand the impact that is going to be made, take a look back at what preparation went into deciding the approach and the outcomes and you’ll get a pretty good idea of what impact will be made – you can’t complete and compete in a marathon without putting in a lot of personal assessment and undergoing a significant amount of training and you can’t fundamentally change a business without seriously considering all aspects of what needs to change and where you want to take the business as a result of the change before you get to the start line .

2. We are only scratching at the surface of the change agenda and all the possibilities open to us.

Not a day goes by when business leaders are identifying and setting new business targets based on yesterday’s performance.

The improvement actions are often defined by the internal knowledge of the status quo and lead to significant effort which may only scratch at the surface ..

The pace of technology change and the pace of consumer and business demand changes must mean that every change we make is subject to being too little to late .. we must be bold and try out the emerging trends as we make change… and recognise that the change agenda has to help many parts and teams within the organization move out of their comfort zones. Changing within the comfort zone of the world we know will not get us beyond the surface of change

3. What ever happens next must embrace how we all work better together, how we are organised, the things we do and the many tools we use to make the change happen

The business world is now a world of suppliers, partners, contractors and internal teams working together to make change happen. Just changing the internal permanent team is not enough we need to look beyond the internal mindset and work in co-creation teams and we must organise ourselves to work in collaborative processes using common tools and approaches to get things done.

Often I see the different teams from the different functions, businesses organising work, adopting processes and using tools that are dissimilar causing friction, mis-understanding and leading to what I call change leakage (too many years spent in insurance talking about claims leakage makes me worry about these sorts of things)

Let’s make good things happen

1. Let’s make sure we are open to new ideas and our testing of our own art of the possible biases

2. Let’s look beyond our comfort zones and make the most of the effort we are expending in change and try and stretch boundaries to get audacious results

3. Let’s go beyond the internal team and extend our change initiatives to embrace suppliers, partners, internal teams and adopt shared virtual working environments and agree on our approaches and tools to get the right result for our customers, our teams and our business performance

No one said it would be easy and every day has to be a school day with new lessons learnt and new learnings applied .. we can do it.

What are your thoughts ?