The fifth component of the change management playbook is adjustments. Things change.

Once you've implemented systems to track; assess; adjust daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually; and thought through your ongoing communication, don't confuse communicating with operating cadences. Do avoid the public company sprint to do things just ahead of quarterly earnings calls, instead, staying ahead of the curve at all times.

Ideally you will have put in place a balanced scorecard to look at destination, objectives, strategic links, initiatives, and measures by the following segments:

• Financial (e.g., revenue, cash flow, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization [EBITDA], return on investment [ROI])
• Customer (e.g., sales from new products, on-time delivery, share, customer concentration)
• Internal business processes (e.g., cycle time, unit cost, yield, new product development)
• Learning and growth (e.g., time to market, product life cycle)

Recall, you'll likely want to follow up

• Daily for individual tasks done by workers (or more frequently in a crisis)
• Weekly for projects managed by first-line supervisors and made up of tasks
• Monthly for programs managed by middle managers, made up of discrete projects
• Quarterly with overall business reviews so senior leadership can adjust priorities and resource allocations along the way for things like information technology, infrastructure improvements, new product launches, hiring, and the like
• Annually for core process cycle perhaps doing talent reviews in Q1, strategic planning in Q2, future capability planning in Q3, and operational plans in Q4

Focus on strategic, organizational, and operational issues and opportunities with appropriate governance and culture as your foundation.

Strategic Process

The strategic process is about the creation and allocation of the right resources to the right places in the right way over time. It comes from the Greek strategos and is the art of the general, arranging forces before battle. Think in terms of broad choices for how to achieve objectives.

Planning

Annual strategic reassessment and plan (looking out 3–5 years)

Implementation

Through organizational and operational processes

The organizational process is about people—acquiring, developing, encouraging, planning, and transitioning them. You can't get from strategy to execution without people. The strongest organizations have tactical capacity—“a team's ability to work under difficult, challenging conditions and to translate strategies into tactical actions decisively, rapidly, and effectively.”¹

The core strategic organizational processes are laid out in Table 26.1.

Operational Process

The operational process is about making things happen—executional tactics. This comes from the Greek taktikos, the art of deploying forces during battle. This includes tasks that roll up into projects that in turn roll up into programs to design, build, sell, deliver, or support products or services.

Planning

Annual operating plan with monthly and quarterly reviews and updates (rolling quarterly?)

Programs and projects planned as appropriate

Implementation

Tasks: Performed and managed in real time and daily

Projects: Interdependent tasks rolled up into projects tracked and managed weekly

Programs: Interdependent projects rolled up into programs tracked and managed monthly

Governance Process

The governance process is about ensuring compliance with laws, regulations, and policies. This process is generally owned by the board.

Culture is made up of behaviors, relationships, attitudes, values, and the environment. Consider rolling quarterly planning. Each quarter:

Prior quarter: Capture key learnings, implications for future.

• What happened? Facts
• So what? Conclusions about why what happened happened
• Now what? Changes to future strategies and plans
• If, for example, you were doing this exercise in Q2 2023 the prior quarter would be Q1 2023. This learning would be directly applicable to the plans three quarters out—Q1 2014.

• Current quarter: Update progress. Understand potential misses. Realign resources to optimize overall results. These will be tactical adjustments.
• Next quarter: Finalize goals. Ensure resources in place. Final check on milestones: what's getting done by whom, when, with what support?
• Two quarters out: Nearly finalize goals. Ensure longer lead-time items being worked. At this point, plans should be set.
• Three to four quarters out: Update general plans including things that need to be done more than four quarters out to be ready to implement in planning horizon.
• Five to six quarters out: Initial targets set. This allows for a rolling general overview of the next 18 months.

If, for example, you were doing this exercise in Q2 2015, the 18-month read would include all of 2016—three to six quarters out. So you could set initial targets for the following year in Q2 and have your plans ready in Q4. Thus, the rolling quarterly planning process makes annual planning redundant.

With that as context, be disciplined about adjusting along the way in four key areas:²

1. Your leadership: Periodically gain feedback on your own leadership. Take a moment and determine what you should keep, stop, and start doing to be even more effective with your direct report team and the organization as a whole.
2. People: Decide how you are going to evolve your people practices in line with changing circumstances.
3. Practices: milestone management, long-term planning, and program management: Assess whether you've been measuring the right things and have built adequate practices to develop and implement your plans.
4. Culture: As your insights on the culture become sharper, zero in on the biggest gaps and implement a plan to create and maintain the winning culture that will become your greatest competitive advantage.

Adjust and Advance Your Leadership

Take a three-step approach to adjusting and advancing your leadership.

Step 1: Assess your effectiveness as a leader, defining areas you need to adjust to be more effective.

• Refer to whatever documents you have available—your original 100-day plan, your milestone management document, your culture-change tracking forms, your progress on increasing diversity, or your recent financial results—and assess how you have performed versus the goals that you (and your board and your boss) set.
• Rate yourself green if you are on track, yellow if you are at risk (yet have a solid plan to get back on track), and red if you will miss (and do not have a solid plan to get back on track). Ask your boss to do the same to identify disconnects in perceptions or expectations.
• Next, collect 360-degree feedback on your performance from your critical stakeholders up, across, and down. (Answer the same questions yourself so you can compare your own thoughts with others'). Doing this will help you:
  • See how others feel
  • Highlight disconnects between how you and others see you
  • Model the behavior of seeking and considering personal input from others
• Questions:
  • What are you doing that is particularly effective that you should keep doing?
  • What are you doing that gets in the way of your effectiveness that you should stop doing?
  • What else do you do to be even more effective that you should start doing?

Step 2: Prepare a leadership development plan.

• The plan should specify not only what to focus on to drive results but also how you need to communicate and lead the members of your team to drive engagement.
• Informed by the outputs from the self-assessment and 360-degree feedback, build your development plan. Define key deliverables across strategic, operational, and organizational matters and key leadership habits you need to strengthen to become even more effective.

Step 3: Identify support partners to help you refine your plan and stay on track.

• Start by leveraging your boss to ensure you stay on track with priorities. Establish a rolling agenda with the right balance of fixed and changeable items, and establish a regular communication cadence.
• If one of your needs is for greater organizational planning, utilize your assistant or chief of staff to ensure your time is being managed toward the key items.
• If it's behavioral coaching you need, enroll a trusted mentor or former boss, a board member, your human resources (HR) partner, an external coach, or a consultant.
• In any case, find the support to help you turn your desire into action and your action into habits. You will evolve and become an even better leader for the effort.

Develop Your Team

As appropriate, dial up your focus on developing your people as individuals, and your team as a whole, ensuring that they are positioned for longer-term success.

Set in motion a process to align the longer-term organizational development plans with the longer-term (3-plus years) strategic plan. Consider these four components:

1. Future capability development planning starting with the long-term strategy and then looking at what human capabilities you're going to need over time to implement that long-term plan.
2. Succession planning starting with the people you have in place in key roles and laying out who can take their places over time. Some of those potential successors may require development.
3. Contingency planning evaluating who can jump in and fill a position if one of your leaders is unable to fulfill the role for some reason. Some of these seat fillers may be permanent. Some may be on interim assignments. Some may be outsiders brought in for a short period.
4. Performance management and talent reviews monitoring the progress of individual development plans, and helping people maximize their potential by giving the appropriate people the training to build their knowledge, projects where they can practice and build skills, and assignments to gather experience.

Schedule these four processes to be done on an annual basis.

Enhance Practices: Milestone Management, Program Management, and Long-Term Planning

Evolve Your Culture

Periodically pause to consider whether you can evolve the organization even more assertively to your target culture with a three-part approach.

First, make sure you and your leadership team are aligned on the specific values and behaviors you are attempting to embed into the culture.

Second, work with your leadership team to evaluate where you are as an organization against the dimensions of a culture: behaviors, relationships, attitudes, values, and the environment (BRAVE). Identify where you believe you need to focus as a team to move closer to the desired state.

Third, now that you and your leadership team are aligned on BRAVE and clear about where you need to evolve across those components, begin to make changes in business processes that reflect where you are heading. Reinforce the changes by ensuring your core people processes work for you to embed the desired culture over time.

Adjust to the Inevitable Surprises

John Wooden, the legendary coach of University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) basketball, whose teams won an astounding 10 U.S. National Collegiate Athletic Association championships, said: “Things turn out the best for the people who make the best of the ways things turn out.”

As a leader, it is up to you to make the best of how things turn out. No matter how well you have planned your merger, no matter how disciplined you are in your follow-up, some things will be different from what you expected. Often your ability to keep moving forward while reacting to the unexpected or the unplanned will be the determining factor in whether your transition is deemed a success or failure.

One of the main advantages to starting early and deploying the building blocks of tactical capacity quickly is that you and your team will be ready that much sooner to adjust to changing circumstances and surprises. Remember, the ability to respond flexibly and fluidly is a hallmark of a team with tactical capacity. The preceding annual, quarterly, and monthly meeting schedule will enable your team to recognize and react to the changes that might impact your team over time.

Not all surprises are equal. Your first job is to sort them out to guide your own and your team's response. If it is a minor, temporary blip, keep your team focused on its existing priorities. If it is minor, but enduring, factor it into your ongoing people, plans, and practices evolution.

Major surprises are a different game. If they're temporary, you'll want to move into crisis or incident management. If they're enduring, you'll need to react and make some fundamental changes to deal with the new reality. When you're evaluating change, use Table 26.2 to help guide you to an appropriate measured response.

Major and Enduring

Consequential changes that are enduring (i.e., irreversible) require a fundamental restart. These can be material changes in things such as customer needs, collaborators' direction, competitors' strategies, or the economic, political, or social environment in which you operate. They can be internal changes, such as reorganizations, future acquisitions, or spin-offs; getting a new boss; or your boss getting a new boss.

Whatever the change, if it's major and enduring, hit a restart button. Go right back to the beginning; do a full situation analysis; identify the key stakeholders; relook at your message; restart your communication plan; and get your people, plans, and practices realigned around the new purpose. Remember, the fittest adapt best.

Major but Temporary

Major but temporary surprises start out either good or bad. They don't necessarily stay that way. Just as a crisis handled well can turn into a good thing, a major event handled poorly can easily turn into a serious crisis. The difference comes down to how well you prepared in advance, implemented the response, and learned and improved for the next time.

In a crisis or disaster, teams need a way to get done in hours what normally takes weeks or months. This requires an iterative instead of sequential approach. That disciplined iteration is detailed as follows.

Leadership is about inspiring, enabling, and empowering others. Enhance that with the idea that “It is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong.” Then add Charles Darwin's point that “it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”³ Add them all up and you get leading through a crisis being about inspiring, enabling, and empowering others to get things vaguely right quickly, and then adapt along the way—with clarity around direction, leadership, and roles.⁴

This plays out in three steps of a disciplined iteration that should be aligned with the overall purpose:

1. Prepare in advance: The better you have anticipated possible scenarios, the more prepared you are, and the more confidence you will have when crises strike.
2. React to events: The reason you prepared is so that you all can react quickly and flexibly to the situation you face. Don't overthink this. Do what you prepared to do.
3. Bridge the gaps: In a crisis, there is inevitably a gap between the desired and current state. Rectify that by bridging those gaps in the:
   • Situation—implement a response to the current crisis
   • Response—improve capabilities to respond to future crises
   • Prevention—reduce the risk of future crises happening

Along the way, keep the ultimate purpose in mind. It needs to inform and frame everything you do over the short, mid-, and long term as you lead through a crisis instead of merely out of a crisis. Crises change your organization. Be sure the choices you make during crises change you in ways that move you toward your purpose and aspirational culture and not away from your core vision and values.

Let's delve deeper into each of these key steps.

After-Action Review

At the end of the crisis, conduct an after-action review looking at:

• What actually happened? How did that compare with what we expected to happen?
• What impact did we have? How did that compare with our objectives?
• What did we do particularly effectively that we should do again?
• What can we do even better the next time in terms of risk mitigation and response?

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