Are you Transforming or Tinkering?

How do we deliver transformation on a shoestring?

That was the question our guest, Ian Cowan, brought to us at a recent Change Makers workshop.

Our guests at Change Makers are invited to lead with questions not answers. They share the questions they’re grappling with themselves. Because if they’re grappling with them, it’s likely we will be too. It’s an opportunity for a dialogue. One where all of us in the room get to share our perspectives, insights, and questions in ways that bring fresh insights, deeper engagement, and possible pathways around our intractable problems.

That conversation lit me up! Here are three of my insights that I scribbled down:

If you don’t have a clear, compelling purpose, you’re not transforming anything.

What are we transforming for? Last week, I worked with a leadership team that struggled to answer that question. And because they couldn’t, their focus stayed inward, with their attention on more immediate tasks, processes, and smaller dramas. Which leaves them unlikely to evolve anytime soon. 

Transformation serves a higher purpose. It’s not about simple efficiencies. It’s about moving towards a compelling vision for some version of a better world. One that you’re committed to creating.

Transformation isn’t about you. But it starts with you.

Transformation takes time. Most times, longer than you will be around in the organisation (we’re all fixed-term). You likely won’t experience first-hand the full benefit of the substantially different thing that’s been created. Yet if you care about it enough, you have a responsibility to contribute to it. Remember, you are traffic. 

From where you sit, transformation doesn’t live with the transformation team or the ELT. You can do your bit. Challenge your assumptions. Upgrade your belief systems. Experiment with new ways of doing things that serve a higher purpose. 

Transformation is not about tinkering.

We hear so many stories of businesses undergoing transformation programmes. Most of them should rightly be called business transition programmes. Transitions are largely about external changes (reorganisations, restructures, redundancies) which can be planned and managed. This is the domain of change management. Transformation is about creating something substantially different. It is hard work that deals with intangibles: purpose, vision, values, belief systems, and the stories we tell. This is the domain of change leadership. You can’t Gantt chart this stuff.

We often struggle to create transformation because we lack a clear, compelling purpose and vision, we think too short-term, we’re in too much of a hurry, and/or we don’t know how to do the hard, inner work that transformation requires. 

Want transformation? Think differently. Do differently.