As you know, a historic wave of transformation is sweeping across every industry right now, and companies are scrambling to transform with it. It’s a time of unprecedented complexity for leaders, and during times like these, the temptation to oversimplify the concept of transformation tends to grow stronger. This is understandable, of course: when we’re overwhelmed, we seek simplicity, and the idea that transformation can be simple—that you can meet with your executive team, identify the behaviors that need to change, implement them and be done—is always appealing. The problem is that organizations are far from simple. And transforming them is even less so. 

Transformation should ultimately amount to new results, and these come through new behaviors within your organization. That said, sustainable transformation can’t actually be driven by a single-minded focus on behaviors. Because when you focus only on the behaviors you want to see changed, the new behaviors don’t stick. Behaviors are driven by thinking, thinking is driven by beliefs and beliefs are driven by experiences. It’s only when you engage the whole cycle—when you start from the reality of what people experience and believe—that you can sustainably, permanently transform how an organization runs.

I’ve found myself returning to our white paper, The Three Things That Change Everything, quite a bit with peers and clients lately. It lays out our thinking around all this in far more depth, and I encourage any of our readers who haven’t yet explored it to do so. For as true as it all was when we published it in 2018, it somehow feels more true now. The companies that manage to successfully transform alongside the world these coming years will not treat transformation like a discrete, top-down initiative. Instead, they will treat it like a social movement—something that runs on organic buy-in, that transcends departmental siloes and that everyone in the organization plays a part in creating. True change happens when people are inspired to change themselves—it can’t be a forced march. After all, organizations don’t transform. People do.

If it sounds messy, that’s because it is. But if I know one thing, it’s that the leaders who start by recognizing this messiness—who embrace the complexity of people and how challenging it is to get their authentic buy-in—are the ones who will manage to navigate through it. As always, we’re here to help.