TAP2 Change, A goal-based approach to evolutionary organizational change

There always seems to be a time in every organization’s journey when they identify a need to transform how they work, what they believe, and how they expect to continue to grow in ever more competitive markets. Many organizations mistakenly believe that adopting some new management framework will be the ticket that solves all the challenges they see in the organization.

Frameworks in themselves are not inherently bad things to consider, however, frameworks are great at two things — Identifying what isn’t working in the organization, which you already know on some level, and making consulting firms and the framework owners’ tons of money.

So, what to do instead? Focus on goals. This allows you to adopt a framework if you choose but the focus on goals will allow you to access the real issues in any successful change management effort, fixing the underlying operational issues that are keeping the organization from attaining higher levels of success, however, success is defined. Because success from a pure framework perspective looks much different than business success and often making the framework successful may be in direct opposition to the business problems you need to solve.

So, what is TAP2 Change? It is a non-framework approach to transforming your business, meaning it focuses on your organization and the people who make it all happen. TAP contains three core capability pillars:

· Transparency

· Accountability

· Predictability

Like the foundation for a home, each pillar is required for any change to become a permanent way of doing business, which we often lose sight of when focusing on the framework. Framework-focused change keeps us centered on the success of the framework operating rather than focusing on the specific business or operational goals we have that are the underlying drivers of why we need to transform our organization.

What is unspoken in most organizational transformation efforts is that the goal is not the transformation itself, but rather the understanding and changing long-held beliefs about how the organization should operate with the goal and outcome of finding a new operating model for the organization. The word transformation conveys a single transformative change that will occur in the not-so-distant future, much like the way we leverage how a caterpillar forms a chrysalis as an intermediary step towards the real transformation into a butterfly. We expect frameworks to deliver the final transformation outcome without doing all of the work that a caterpillar does just to get to their chrysalis phase.

Without specifically acknowledging it, organizations continually change, meaning they are always looking for new ways to make their current ways better, more efficient, or more productive. TAP2 Change seeks to harness this reality to develop and align organizational change goals to build your three pillars so that we evolve change over time to replace old muscle memory that will become our new operational normalcy.

We want to focus on goals and outcomes over the implementation of frameworks because the frameworks will typically highlight what isn’t working for your organization, something you mostly already know. What the frameworks don’t do for you is provide solutions. Frameworks provide you guidance on the why and the how, but ultimately the implementation of the how falls on you. And since the frameworks aren’t a reflection of your organization, you will always have trouble making your organization look like the framework.

The goal of TAP2 Change is to create a deep understanding of the operational state of the organization, how did you arrive where you are at? This analysis provides the foundation for the understanding of your operating culture, why do people work the way they do? Once we have built a transparent view of your current culture, we will then need to understand the goals of the organization and then design a new operating paradigm based on those goals. This new operating paradigm must be made transparent to everyone in the organization, and explaining why this change must be made will increase employee engagement. The Transparency pillar is the first and most important foundation to lay because without a clear vision and mission success will be muted at best.

With so many organizations having attempted an agile transformation and having failed to realize real change, it is time to rethink a few things:

Has Agile been passed by? Agile has been a buzzword in the last decade and its mindset and frameworks have been adopted by companies worldwide to attempt to deliver products faster to deliver customer value. However, as technology has continued to evolve, it is highlighting that agile frameworks may not be as relevant in the future, due to some of the following:

a. Increasing Complexity of Software Development — With the increasing complexity of software development, agile may not be sufficient to handle the intricacies of modern software systems. For example, the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence requires specialized development practices that may not fit into the agile framework. As software systems become more complex, they may require more specialized methodologies that are better suited to their unique requirements. And attempting to align to iterative planning and delivery may be less efficient than aligning to prototyping new solutions with AI-supported tools.

b. Changing Business Needs — The business landscape is constantly evolving, and agile frameworks may not be able to keep up with the changing needs of businesses. Business leaders need to deliver results, and they increasingly need the flexibility to change course quickly, and current agile frameworks focus more on filling a backlog of work and managing the flow through Portfolio Kanban management techniques.

c. Shift to Remote Work — The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift towards remote work, and this trend is expected to continue in the future. Agile has a strong focus on face-to-face communication and collaboration, and this may not be possible in a remote work environment. While there are tools and technologies that can facilitate remote agile development, they may not be as effective as in-person communication and collaboration.

Working in small teams focused on delivering work that is planned out via quarterly program increments may not align with how work is now evolving, with the prospect of capabilities such as ChatGPT we may find that more work can get done because it can be offloaded to an AI tool to deliver some, most or all of the outcomes. Though we aren’t there just yet, it may be time now to build a transparent view of how we would want work to be managed in this new paradigm, where planning in quarterly cycles may slow down value delivery and the focus on goals allows us to seek the best path forward in any given moment.

This content is part of my book that will provide a deep understanding of each pillar and how to leverage where appropriate, operational frameworks if they make sense for your organization.

If you would like to learn how to approach changing your organization starting with where you are at today and evolving change over time, contact me at michael@soundagile.com