BenRamsden

Can Business Transformation be Compassionate?

By BenRamsden on February 6, 2019

By definition Business Transformation is transformative!

Manual processes are automated, human interactions taken online, old routines are eliminated. All to achieve a better customer experience, lower cost to serve, or improved compliance.

Even for those staff who accept the reason, adapting to the consequences is often challenging. And for those who don’t, or will lose their job, it’s worse.

Leaders who have been successful in their roles for many years can suddenly find themselves in uncharted territory, and expected to have all the answers.

It’s nobody’s fault.

Strategy without psychology is simply expensive Powerpoint!

It takes an enormous amount of effort to start a transformation project. A business problem has become large enough that there is finally complete commitment to fix it.

The strategy is agreed, a business case has been written, re-written, presented, amended, argued and finally funding is secured. The CIO has allocated (already busy) resources, a Project Manager recruited, etc, etc…

Despite all best intentions, managing the human consequences of the planned transformation are either forgotten or the effort under estimated.

In our experience those who are great at the ‘what’ are often extremely poor at the ‘how’.

Change Management is a false promise

As an accredited Change Manager, I am massive believer in the profession, except for its title!

Simple change can be managed. Transformational change requires something far more powerful.

At it’s core, Change Management identifies the human impact of change and seeks to manage that. Management often involves communications, consultation, training and other crucial ingredients.

It often fails by turning empathy into a structured process and hence de-personalising it.

“Your life is about to completely change, but don’t worry because we’ve already designed a new life for you(!)”

Compassion is the missing ingredient

It’s not that there is anything fundamentally wrong with Change Management, it’s simply that it does not go far enough.

Compassion does not mean soft, or shirking difficult decisions. (Clients have employed Compassionate Business Transformation on projects involving multiple redundancies).

Compassionate means establishing a culture of respect and true understanding, a precursor to trust and commitment. It is leadership, not management. And it works.

The project to date has remained on track, on budget and its key milestones have been met.

Mark O’Neill, General Manager, Coal Services Health

When to consider Compassionate Business Transformation

The change will have a significant impact on your people, and is mission critical;
Your people are critical to success, and you anticipate adoption challenges;
You and your leadership team are open to receiving support to strengthening change leadership skills;
Your organisation does not have a history of successfully delivering transformations like this.

When not

The change is small and/or not mission critical;
You are confident that your people with adapt with minimal issues;
The leadership style of you and your leadership team is good enough and you don’t need to improve;
You haven’t got much time to devote to the project.

What is it?

Compassionate Business Transformation is for leaders who believe that success will be achieved because of their team, not despite them.

It’s core tenets are leadership (not management) and empathy (not sympathy).

Implementation focusses on 3 practices:

Helicopter vision – reading the psychology of organisational behaviour to your advantage.
Authentic empathy – routinely creating strong trust by forming human connections based on listening, understanding and appropriate responses.
Turbocharged influence – successfully leading people to where they believe they need to go (but don’t necessarily want to).

We absolutely believe that certain business transformation projects can and should be compassionate! Is it appropriate for your project?

For a longer read checkout our book Right is Wrong, 8 essential steps to avoid the pitfalls that smart people make when transforming their organisation.

Too busy to read? Checkout our Smart Business Transformation podcast on iTunes, Android and the web!

Ben Ramsden supports transformational leaders in market challengers, not-for-profits and institutions to create enduring breakthroughs.

What to do if you are the smartest person in the room

By BenRamsden on November 22, 2018

Organisations with big problems often hire smart people to fix them. This is necessary but not sufficient.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them

Albert Einstein

We regularly work with smart people with a transformation mandate. Here are some probing questions to help them stay on the road to success.

Why are you in the room?

Yes sure they need you, and you got the job. That’s why THEY need YOU. But why do YOU need THEM?

Validation – further proof that you are THE expert? A bigger version of the problem you solved last time? More CV points?
Development – to learn or enhance something?
Money / location / escape?
Something else?

Most of these will probably be on your list, but what’s your #1? Be honest.

If that is your #1 motivation, how will that affect your behaviour?

How do you react to rejection and failure?

After the initial honeymoon period it’s going to get tough, possibly very. Of course hurdles go with the territory, but what happens when these derail?

What happens if your boss or board doesn’t give you the unequivocal support they originally promised? Or keeping the lights on today always gets in the way of fixing for tomorrow? Or someone knifes you in the back?

Are you a journey or destination person?

When was the last time you felt out of your depth?

Remember how it felt? This is probably your impact on the organisation (although many of your colleagues might not realise that). How does this help achieve success?

Do you have time?

Emergency rescues can be fast, but solving massive endemic problems requires time. Are you willing to put yourself on the line for, say, the next 5 years to deliver? How does this align with your #1 motivation above?

Time is a key tool of transformation – used skilfully it can create drama, energy and urgency; out of control it will destroy progress through malaise. Which time tools will you deploy from your arsenal – panic, urgency, patience or perseverance?

Cure or grow?

Is your job to prescribe and administer medication, or lead the tribe to transform their behaviour?

What influences the tribe?

(Hint: quick answers to this question will almost certainly be wrong).

Contain or eliminate?

Will / can you fire, tolerate or hug ‘problem’ people?

What are NOT your smarts?

Review your Johari Window or other profile results. Are you a manager or leader? Do you delegate or empower? How will you mitigate your development opportunities?

Do you have a fundamental recipe or deep curiosity?

If the media is to be believed then gurus have unique recipes that anyone can follow to succeed. So why is success so difficult?

What do you reward?

You get what you incentivise. Long after you’ve gone, what will they be doing?

How will you ensure that you don’t run out of rooms to be smart in?

If you are the average of the people that you hang out with then you are not going to develop on this gig by default.

For a longer read checkout our book Right is Wrong, 8 essential steps to avoid the pitfalls that smart people make when transforming their organisation.

Ben Ramsden supports transformational leaders in market challengers, not-for-profits and institutions to create enduring breakthroughs.

What I learned from my 2017 failure

By BenRamsden on February 8, 2018

In the rose tinted world of social media it is less common to fess up to failure. Deep breath, here goes.

Scratching an itch a few years ago led me to selling software online. For too long I considered it a hobby business that I played with occasionally on the side. That changed in July 2016.

I had just grossed $1,000 in a month, which felt like a major milestone. For the first time I wondered whether it could actually become a ‘proper’ business. I set myself the objective of grossing $100,000 in 2017, and made a plan to achieve.

$100,000 felt like an audacious and scary goal. It was enormous compared with current sales, large enough to worth investing effort into, yet possibly achievable.

With 2017 now over the actual revenue is now confirmed as $27,281.23 which is barely a quarter of the target.

Is massive growth a failure?

Great question. So I aimed for the Moon and ended up falling well short, but still within the Stars.

I could say “it’s not so bad because..”, or “all things considered…”, but my gut tells me that this is failure, so it is.

What went wrong?

Stop. Stop.

Wrong question.

Post mortums are great at understanding problems and entirely backward looking. I need forward looking solutions.

What have I learned?

Numeric targets are crucial – without setting my $100k goal I would have continued to drift and would not be reviewing now.
Leading indicators are more important than lagging ones – to make a difference you need to manage and measure those things that make a difference.
Feed it and it will grow (starve it and it will wither) – there is no such thing as passive income.
Leadership is a passion not a task – hiring the right people is insufficient. You need to be there for them.
I knew all this already! – a slap in the face is so much more powerful than knowledge.

What am I going to do now?

Focus on true marketing not only SEO metrics
Be consistent
Set a deadline

Right, enough thinking, time for action…

Photocredit: Chris Potter of ccPixs.com

Do you know when to use disposable software?

By BenRamsden on September 17, 2017

Once upon a time television sets were housed in a polished walnut cabinet and cost the best part of a month’s wages. Most local high streets had a TV repair man (yes they mostly were men) who you would call on whenever your set went on the blink.

Don’t see many TV repair men these days do you?

The business systems software industry today looks much like the TV set industry of a bygone era. It’s a significant investment decision and requires hired expertise to install and maintain.

Any project requiring the CFO, CIO and external consultants is clearly not going to be quick.

So what could it be if we moved to a low cost and disposable model? Could it enable innovation without the risk of a career limiting decision?

Didn’t work? No worries – it was quick and cheap to find out.

And you learned heaps.

Welcome to disposable software!

As William Gibson said, “the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”. We are in that world, but not every organisation has taken advantage.

We all know about software as a service (SaaS) and many of us use one – gmail, xero, spotify, etc. There a gazillion other options out there too.

When to consider disposable software

When the business need will struggle to hit the CIO’s priority list
No major data security worries
Not a business critical system
It’s obvious that software could transform an existing manual or paper based system

Specific examples

Online training system for L&D
Vacation request and approval system for HR
Applications system for Enrolments
Expense claim system for Finance
Pool car booking and tracking system for Corporate Services
Customer satisfaction survey for Operations

Tips for working with disposable software

Work with someone whom you trust
Treat it as disposable – i.e. appropriate financial expenditure and staff time
Cater for 80% of use cases, ignore the 20%
Plan for a 2 year lifetime – after then either replace it with something more permanent, or switch it off
Deal with any CIO concerns – manage security, support, knowledge management and interconnectivity.

What would you get done if you knew that $10,000 would nail it?

Talk to us if you would like to discuss this further.

(image courtesy of Hackaday)

How to find the unseen forces holding you back

By BenRamsden on September 10, 2017

“There was a ghost inside”, she said as casually as someone might comment about the weather. “A ghost…”, I enquired somewhat startled, “inside what?”. “In the wardrobe* of course!”

“I knew that there was a ghost in the wardrobe because when I opened the door it came out and sat on the bed.”

She saw my completely confused expression and sought to explain. “The ghost was invisible but I could see the impression of its bottom on the bed”.

Although this conversation took place over 30 years ago, I can still remember it vividly today. At the time I was a student journalist investigating reports of poltergeist activity for the evening news.

Of course these days I am far more sophisticated. I am a Senior Management Consultant. I help really highly paid people in really large companies solve really big problems.

I travel the globe. I have lots of letters after my name. If your digital ROI needs a paradigm shift and you want to pivot your SEO with some low hanging fruit hacking then ya di ya di ya di ya di ya. Powerpoint bullet traffic funnel click bait.

Yawn, yawn. Bullshit buzzword. Body language mirror, connect on LinkedIn, tailored shirt but ditch the tie.

Busy, busy. Oh so busy.

Rinse and repeat.

and…

and so the years go past and, if I’m really honest… [yes I’m being dead serious now]… I start to become complacent. Clients are still happy. Very happy in many cases. But I have fallen asleep at the wheel.

It’s not that my standards have slipped. At least I hope not. It’s that they have failed to keep up with my potential.

Life hurtles on.

Busy, busy. Oh so busy.

Until one day I stumble across Daryl Conner and his underwhelmingly named Raising Your Game workshop.

We’re not talking raising like a flag up a flag pole. We’re talking raising like we’re launching it in a rocket and planting it on the Moon.

But that’s Daryl for you. A warm, humble, understated and affable gentleman who casually sprays value bombs every time he opens his mouth.

He would be highly embarrassed to be praised. In fact it would be seen as evidence that his clients have become too dependent on him.

Daryl would say that he does not teach anything. He creates the environment for participants to learn for themselves. His thesis has been developed over 40 years of professional practice. It states that the most impactful practitioners achieve results by deploying their full inner character via their external presence with clients.

Some people try to make change comfortable. But the pathway to deep commitment is through deep doubt.

Daryl Conner

The workshop is structured to enable participants to look deep inside themselves in order to move forward professionally. Much of the work is conducted in pairs, with ample time for debriefs and conclusions. To ensure highest quality there is a hand picked cohort group of participants augmented with alumni from previous events.

This is undoubtedly the best professional development that I have taken in the past decade. I left with buckets of value, and will share here one particularly powerful insight.

I found no skeletons in my cupboard, but there is a ghost in my briefcase. For over 30 years it has been completely invisible to me but has sat across all my work and left an impression. I probably can’t remove it, but with my new found awareness I can accelerate past it and make it irrelevant.

What unseen forces are holding you back?

*for our American readers please note that wardrobe is the quaint English expression for closet.

6 things I wish I’d learned faster in my digital business

By BenRamsden on June 14, 2017

1. There is a chasm between zero and 1 customers

One customer means that they have found you, seen value in your offer and made a purchase. If there is one then there can be another, and another, and another…

Zero means….?

2. Learn from experts, but don’t believe them

Devour the knowledge and experience of others. Just remember that it’s what they have seen work. Your customers will be different.

It either works or if doesn’t. If it does then do more. If it doesn’t then change it.

3. Customers value their email address more than their money

Money is like water, it comes and goes, fast and silently. An email address in the wrong hands means unwanted intrusion and time forever lost decluttering inboxes.

Transact or not. Build the relationship BUT cut the blah.

4. Resumes are completely and utterly irrelevant

Nobody except you and old fashioned recruiters are interested in what you have done. People who live life looking into the rear view mirror rarely change the world.

Focus on the value you will unleash for clients. Make sure you absolutely can, will and do.

5. Customers want the result not the service

Why did the chicken cross the road? Because it wanted to get to the other side!

Sell the other side, not the road crossing.

Hint: you will need a completely fresh perspective if you live in a city full of traffic lights.

6. Manage your energy, not your time

Time is linear, can be scheduled, and is measured everywhere. Energy peaks and troughs. An awesome 5 minutes can outperform a dull afternoon.

Value comes from energy, not time. Which are you managing?