The value of understanding your current state, planning your future state, and embracing the change of your technology.
We’ve all heard the clichés “change is inevitable”, “the only constant is change”, and “get comfortable being uncomfortable”. While all true, these statements often carry a negative connotation regarding change. Discomfort, inevitability, and constant pressure are all things that many of us seek to avoid. Often, we hide behind this fear and avoidance to resist change, working harder to fight change than to embrace the opportunity to improve. The unfortunate thing about these statements is that change doesn’t have to be uncomfortable, and gaining a greater understanding of where you are and where you are headed will help you and your organization embrace change, foster excitement about change, and use the opportunity for change to improve your organization.
Educate and Prepare through Current State Process Improvement
With any challenge or test in life, the best way to improve comfort is to educate and prepare. Change is no exception to that rule. While it can be time-consuming, painful, and scary to expose your current processes and pain points, the value gained is grand. Mapping the current state allows us to truly understand what we do, why we do it, and what pieces of the process hold us back from achieving our goals. Far too often, I have been in current state workshops with stakeholders from different departments who know nothing about what the other does and how their actions impact the process both upstream and downstream from them. As the conversation develops, we inevitably learn painful things about the process than can be fixed today with ‘quick hits’. Further, we gain huge value in understanding the pieces or processes that can’t be immediately fixed, why we do them (this is the way it’s always been done, legal regulation, etc…), and what opportunities exist in our ideal future state.
Think Ahead with Future State Planning
Once you have gone through the exploratory process of exposing your current state, the next difficult but necessary step is planning your future state. This is done with an understanding of where you came from, the pain points and opportunities for improvement that currently exist, and the ideal manner of using the functionality of new technology to optimize your business processes. Future state mapping is a realistic representation of opportunity, growth, and improvement for the organization. The ideal future state is not the same as wishful thinking, but balances need, resolution, and realistic thinking that will all add up to positive transformation. As Albert Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Communication Is Key
As mentioned above, using the functionality of new technology fully to optimize your business processes will make embracing the change even more worthwhile. It may be difficult as users could see this new technology as threatening to their job or comfort zone. The reality, though, is that the objective of the new technology is not to replace anyone in the process, but to make the process more efficient, leaving additional time and resources to give attention to other value-added activities and manage the exceptions. By clearly communicating this value add to users, communicating the need for change, and sharing a unified message across the organization you can help ensure universal buy in towards successful change. This holistic approach to communication also lends itself to success in implementation and powerful organizational change management.
What are these value-add activities on which your newly freed resources will be able to focus? They can include improved customer service and focus, a deeper analysis of outliers, the execution of a higher quality service and customer experience, an improvement in performance, closer compliance alignment, vast cost reductions, or performing more tedious tasks that simply were pushed aside for inefficient everyday activities. Overall, this value-add is made possible by the combination of understanding of your current state, planning your future state, embracing the potential change of your technology, and successful management of your organizational change.
