How do you know if it’s not on fire?
This morning, I was talking about business change and transformation, asked what my top piece of advice would be, and I gave the advice I give fairly often: Make changes to your business before you need to.
Don’t wait for the external prompt that forces you to change. Don’t wait until the market has moved, your customers have changed, costs have become untenable, a competitor has overtaken you, or the way you work simply doesn’t work any more.
Someone challenged me: “But how do you know if the house is on fire before the house is on fire?”
What catches me is that this question sounds completely reasonable, but it contains an assumption that is worth unpicking: that change begins with evidence that something is wrong.
What if there is no fire?
We have a tendency to associate business transformation with trouble but it’s only one reason to change a business. What if nothing is wrong? A business can be profitable, functioning and perfectly satisfactory today.
Its customers can be happy.
Its people can be capable.
Its products can sell.
Its systems can work.
That tells us something useful about the business in its present context.
Context is the operative word here, the stuff that surrounds the business. A business working today, in its present context tells us much less about whether the same configuration will continue to work as that context changes.
Transformation doesn’t require a crisis
Transformation is often associated with the moment before disaster: tanking performance, desperate restructuring, turnaround, rescue. That work does exist but transformation does not require a burning platform; in fact, waiting for one takes choices away from you.
When circumstances force change, the question becomes: What must we do?
When you choose to change while things are still working, you can ask a much richer question: What might we do?
You have more room to think.
More room to experiment.
More room to stop something that doesn’t work.
More room to learn.
And more freedom to decide what you actually want the business to become.
That, to me, is one of the strongest arguments for doing transformation work before it becomes necessary. FREEDOM! THINKNG! LEARNING! EXPERIMENTING!
So how do you know you need to change something?
Perhaps you don't need to know the house is going to catch fire, and don't even need to believe that it will. You only have to reject the much bigger assumption that because something works now, it will therefore continue to be the right thing to do indefinitely.
A successful business model is not a permanent business model.
A useful system is not a permanent system.
A good customer proposition is not a permanent proposition.
Even your own definition of a successful business does not have to remain permanent.
Transformation, at its best, is not the practice of continually searching the building for smoke, iIt is the practice of periodically looking at the building and asking: Knowing what we know now, is this still the house we would choose to build? And if the answer is yes, excellent, keep it - but at least you chose it again.
Transformation can be a deliberate capability available to healthy businesses, not just an emergency service for failing ones.
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