The Change Project: Coming Out the steps

1. Create a hospitable climate: Make it clear, regularly and loudly, by actions as well as words, that the organization welcomes dissenting opinions, minority reports, new information, and unconventional wisdom.
2. Establish an initial group, including key decision makers and outsiders: Key decision makers must be involved in the discussions, not merely handed a set of neatly edited “options papers” when it’s all done. They need the full richness of information that the discussions entail. Beyond the key decision makers, the discussions need as wide a variety of people as possible. Finance people, technicians, “suits,” people of different departments, campuses and parts of the organization, as well as different races and ages, will bring far more information and perspective to the conversation than would a homogenous group.
3. Include outside information and outside people: The thinking of any organization becomes inbred. Outsiders (consultants, “experts,” even visitors from other organizations) and outside information (articles, studies, books, web searches) provide a leavening that cannot be generated inside. Benchmarking (intensively studying the methods of other, highly effective organizations) is one powerful method of bringing in outside knowledge.
4. Look ahead far in advance of decisions: The best time to think about a decision is not when we are under the gun of a deadline or a present crisis. We often have a general idea what kind of big decisions we will be facing far in advance. These may be coming new technologies, shifts in markets, or the loss of key raw materials. Our conversations about these things will be far richer and deeper if we begin them now, instead of waiting for events to catch up with us.
5. Begin by looking at the present and the past: To figure out where we want to go, we have to know where we are and how we got there. This discussion should also include our feelings: if people in the organization have a lot of passion about the past and the present, that will likely power its future, for better or worse.
6. Conduct preliminary scenario work in smaller groups: The discussion works best when it starts and ends in the larger group. But individual issues (Internet strategy, marketing, technical improvement) are best dealt with in smaller, more tightly focused sub-sets of the main group.
7. Play out the conversation: Now that you have gotten beyond the “conventional wisdom,” brought in new information, and generated a number of future scenarios in the sub-groups and the main group, you are ready to play these out into the future: What if Scenario A is true? How would we surf that particular wave? Would the strategy we have been discussing work in that scenario? Would it work better in Scenario B? How would we know?
8. Make it permanent: Once you have made one decision, don’t close down the conversation. Keep it going. Focus on new topics. Invite in new people. Hold workshops for other people in the organization, so that they can hear what has been going on. Make these discussions the core of the organization’s “learning strategy,” rather than delegating that strategy to a strategic planning department or a group of consultants.