The Strategic Approach to Transformation
When companies make the decision to transform a process or operation, it’s generally because things have not been going well, a fact that often inserts a sense of urgency to the proceedings. Urgency has its utility, but in my experience, successful transformations are at their core an act of patience, resulting only after key strategic work that lays the foundation for the effort.
Step one is always to get the right people on board. These things don’t work when they’re top-down—you need buy-in from the leaders who will drive the implementation, and there’s no better way to get it than to grant them a seat at the strategy table.
My approach is to start by assembling people in a room and running through exercises, guided by time-tested templates like the X matrix or ocean strategy. The process is to identify key challenges and brainstorm solutions, iterating, voting, and iterating some more as you build out programs.
Think about this less like you’re leading the team to water and letting them drink, and more like you’re dropping them in the forest, thirsty and without a map.
There’s so much to be gained in the teamwork required to find the right solutions—the “water”—that will enliven the transformation. That license to take ownership of the project from the beginning is more important to the success of the transformation than the ideas themselves.
I’ve tested this approach at several stops along the way, including, a few years ago, a transformation within GE tied to electric vehicles and battery automation. It was a massive project touching six businesses geographically spread across the world. GE wasn’t going to deal with six different ways of working, so there was an obvious need for transformation. We also knew we were going to have to build massive scale for a short period of time, using contractors to more than double head count and then reduce it again in a year and a half. We had tight margins, further complicating the effort.
Guess where we started? Not by standardizing procedures or dropping deadlines and ultimatums, but by assembling the leaders of those six businesses to brainstorm and align on a strategy. By the end of those sessions, we gained consensus over things like building program management muscle across all sites, scaling certain sites, and introducing inventory control. And best of all, each business leader had now adhered to the plan.
I’m currently working with an organization that is on a multi-pronged journey of transformation, establishing more cohesion across an operation that has grown significantly over the last half decade, from a regional operation to a large national one. Recently, we brought all the site leaders together for a retreat featuring several days of team building and strategy exercises. The solutions that emerged will help us chart our path forward.
Then come the mechanical things. We’ll build in operating rhythms that drive accountability, but not so much that these key leaders don’t feel trusted. A critical and too-often-forgotten part of the transformation, too, is the reporting—make sure you update teams on progress and provide metrics to make sure people see the results of their efforts. Otherwise, you may get a sort of transformation fatigue, the professional equivalent to kids in the back seat saying, “Are we there yet?” Employees shouldn’t just be told “No” and to pipe down. They should get to see the map, understand how far they’ve come, and get a view of the road ahead. Even when you decide to go a different direction, doing so with transparency and shared learnings instills confidence and trust.
Transformation takes time. But doing it right—with buy-in and transparency—means it will only get easier as the organization builds its transformation muscle. That’s a worthy endeavor considering that, here in 2025, the need to transform is one of our few remaining constants.
