At our recent WhatNext? roundtable we asked business leaders to share the biggest challenges they’re currently facing in delivering what we call profound transformation – the seismic change to a business that delivers immediate and long-term impact - and there were two, inextricably linked, that kept coming up.
1) Lack of strategy
The problem:
You would think this would be a problem of the past and yet many guests cited a fundamental lack of joined-up, strategic thinking on the long-term future aims and objectives of the business as an issue for them today. And it’s something we see all too often with clients. A misaligned leadership team, often distracted with the tensions and conflicts that brings but which also filters down across the business, creating a confused and anxious workforce, resistant to change. Culture and faith in the business is eroded, often irreparably and achieving success with digital transformation programmes becomes almost impossible.
The solution:
It’s critical that Leaders take a step back and establish their big, hairy, audacious goal for the company’s future. This goal becomes the focal point every team gets behind and how every decision is made. Not only does this make it easier align on key decisions, so that everyone is pulling in the same direction but it also creates buy-in across the organisation and gives employees a clear sense of purpose. Crucially though, it increases trust and engagement levels when it comes to adopting new technologies and/or ways of working.
Emergence works with global organisations to define what we call their “NorthStar vision”, by zooming out to determine what they want to be known for in ten years’ time. We do this in collaborative, open workshops to ensure that the leadership team are working together on what the future looks like and we work them to establish ground rules for exponential thinking, so that the business leaders have mechanisms in place that help them take a step back from the incremental changes and decisions they make on a day-to-day basis to think strategically and within the context of their NorthStar Vision.
Once you’ve defined and communicated your NorthStar Vision for the future, you can focus on the initiatives that need to be delivered in order to meet that Vision and equally which ones should not. Which is when organisations run into the second key problem, which is:
2) Establishing the business case for change
The problem:
Business cases remain critical to securing budget and buy-in but it’s notoriously difficult to create a compelling business case for change that truly justifies the time, budget and resources being requested and reassures on the impact that it will have on the bottom line.
The main reason that organisations struggle with this is that they don’t have a baseline for as-is ways of working. This means that they don’t really know the cost or impact of operating as-is, which in turn makes it hard to map out the financial benefits of moving to the to-be. This results in flimsy, estimated business cases, often promising an unattainable ROI, which are impossible to defend when questioned by senior leadership, only for the budget requests to be rejected.
Or worse, projects are signed off with inaccurate projections, setting up for failure and eroding trust in business case leaders but also future similar projects. You just create a short-term win for a longer term loss.
Either way, the end result is either no project or a doomed one – both of which are unacceptable.
The solution:
Organisations need a data-led approach so that they can definitively understand as-is operating costs and can therefore create a valid business case for improving ways of working and can justify the cost of new technology to do so.
For example, we use our Value FInder product to do just that. We deploy an AI technology to user desktops so we can capture anonymised data on processes undertaken and systems used and then analyse the data to create an empirical baseline for as-is ways of working. There are no assumptions and no theories but empirical data on what is really happening or not happening.
Not only does this highlight where the inefficiencies lie and immediate opportunities for improvement but we can also use the data to rapidly determine the business case for those opportunities. No more guesswork, no more justification when being questioned for budget sign off. Our approach provides you with all the data needed to create a transparent and accurate business case for change so you can quickly take action and build up momentum as you work towards achieving your NorthStar vision.
Find out more about how we can help you define your NorthStar and create data-led business cases for advanced technology programmes that will accelerate your business towards it HERE