Chinese whispers of culture change
If you want to make your organisation data driven and you know that culture spreads from the top down it’s probably no surprise that first you need to become data driven yourself.
There is one thing that will help you achieve this quicker and better than anything else. And the same thing will help you spread the culture throughout the organisation smoothly and quickly.
The magic ingredient is connecting directly with the analyst leading the transformation project. In most organisations there is at least one, typically more people between the business leader and the analyst.
Here are the benefits of the direct link.
Clarity
Have you ever played Chinese whispers? Well that’s pretty much how the hierarchy in an organisation works. The more links you have between yourself and the person doing a task the higher the chance of miscommunication. Obviously you can’t be working directly with everyone in your company, your time is limited.
However with high priority projects it pays off if the business leaders abseil down the hierarchy and get close to the implementation because that’s where the projects often break. By circumventing the corporate hierarchy they leaders maximise the chances a project will succeed.
Speed
The same thing will help you speed things up. Implementing a project is never a one off conversation. It requires back and forth clarification, brainstorming, decision making, etc. And every time these conversations repeat they need to run through the chain all the way down and back up again and each of the steps can be a separate meeting.
Coupled with the reduced clarity, discussed earlier, the need for clarifications will multiply which will further slow down the momentum.
Idea enhancement
The greatest benefit I see in connecting directly with the leader and the doer is the improving and enhancing the original idea.
Managers are great in managing projects and people but they are often too distant from actually doing the work. As a result they can’t reliably say if something is possible or not without checking with their staff so they can’t effectively challenge the ideas of their bosses or expand on them.
If you bring together a business leader who understands the problem and its context and who is great at making decisions; and you connect them with a person (in our case the analyst) who understands the art of possible, who understands exactly how the problem will get solved and what other challenges might pop up; you get a very powerful duo.
Together they have got incredible powers and as it’s just two of them they remain nimble so they can move and change course quickly and easily.
Summary
I see a great value in delegating. It’s a necessary tool in business leader’s arsenal and it works brilliantly in business as usual situations. But when it comes to high priority change initiatives, getting temporarily down to the trenches is the most effective way to ensure the success of a given project and it’s a sign of a great leader.
