The pressure to drive transformation is everywhere. Clarity on how to lead it is in shorter supply.
I think a key reason for this is that the skills needed for transformation are fundamentally different from the skills needed for incremental growth.
The ask to grow by 5 or 10x is very different from 5 or 10%
Transformation by its nature demands you rethink and challenge existing notions.
The speed with which the pressure to change has raced up on us. Understandably many teams are adapting as they go and developing it on the hoof.
I think it needs a thinking reset.
A shift in Mindset.
I’ve spent a career working in transformation - both business and personal.
Shifts are needed in both areas! As the saying goes, if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.
Here’s 3 ideas from my work on The Big Bold Mindset®:
1) Culture reveals itself under pressure.
It doesn’t default to what the values picture on the wall says. It defaults to “how we do things” - and I think this is a direct reflection of the conversations we most repeatedly have. Which may or may not be informed by your values.
What are the most common conversations you have? Do they support the culture you need to transform? Things like experimenting, trying, failing, learning, high trust, or do they support looking and sounding good?
2) Thinking Big and Bold really does require a different mindset.
You can’t approach transformation with the same thinking that made the current model successful. That’s where tension often comes from by protecting the status quo.
Transformation needs different thinking because you can’t navigate a new world using an old set of charts.
3) Better Never Stops
Change happens in the experiments and iterations we make every day. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by transformation, but it literally happens one step at a time.
This is where the personal transformation bit is important. The story we carry about ourselves shapes how we lead, especially when we are under pressure.
My story over time has been a journey from thinking “I was right” to realising “I was the problem” to “ingraining a learner's mindset”.
Microsoft nailed this in their transformation under Satya Nadella with the shift from “We Know” to “We Learn”
Want to go deeper? Here’s a recent blog I wrote with reflections on seeing some 400 business transformations.
The starting point is recognising that transformation and change needs a different mindset. That’s why I wrote The Big Bold Mindset®.