If your team has been spinning out on your organization's digital transformation or the implementation of a product model, it’s easy to see the temptation of a canned plan. It’s billed as turnkey and can get your team out of the weeds quickly, right? Wrong. 

Building and implementing a plan requires immersive observation and, I say this with love, a lot of hand-holding. I’ve come onto projects behind Big 5 Firms often enough to recognize the typical footprints: same models, same slides, same terminology, and a set of tire tracks to the door while clients are left wondering what happens next.

But building a plan isn’t as easy as ordering from the $1 menu in the drive-through lane. You can’t pull tools “off the shelf” and assume they’ll work for your business. You need the nuance of other inputs–like team dynamics and culture–to build a framework that effects lasting change.

So, what does it take to create successful transformation and implementation? 

1. Take stock

   Understand what you have in the assets column (culture, talent, strategic alignment), and the liabilities column (change resistance, legacy/siloed tech, etc.), in order to truly understand what you’re up against. I often join teams by their second or third run at this work. This offers a wealth of insights to mine regarding the pain points at play, and an objective eye can help suss out the root causes. For example, if your company is really change-averse, it’s likely that your business is being dragged into digital transformation (I’m looking at you, finance, manufacturing and CPG). When a culture is built around reducing risk and being tightly controlled, how do you think things will go when it’s time to shift the center of gravity on that control to make a major transformation? Canned plans don’t take these nuances into account because they aren’t created with the right contextual inputs.

2. Know where you’re going

   Misalignment is often the culprit of wasted time and dead ends. If your team has been spinning out for a while, are you sure you’re trying to solve the right problem? A canned plan will take leadership’s word for it when it comes to the challenge. However, what The Top has to say about an issue is different from what The Doers might say. The Top may talk about market pressures and look through an external lens while The Doers may talk about tactical challenges, tensions between teams and internal obstacles to getting things done. These clues and indicators reveal themselves when I’m immersed in full team dynamics across titles and functions. Without this evaluation, implementation is destined for disaster.

3. Leverage proven models, but make it bespoke

   Any good plan includes proven tools and methods of product management, agile delivery, and dev ops, but the combination that works well for one company won’t necessarily move the dial for another. Why? Because your industry, culture, and position make your challenge completely unique from Brand ABC that rose to the top with Model XYZ. I sometimes get requests from leaders to pull an approach off the shelf and just “follow the Spotify model.” But a copy/paste almost certainly guarantees you’ll end up stuck again (you might just take a different road to get there). Are there nuggets from the Spotify model that could roll into a bespoke plan for your business? Probably. But following another business’ approach to a T is missing the point completely. Spotify saw success with their model because it was built specifically for their unique problem and culture, not YOURS. I leverage a deep bench of tools to build plans, but making sure they’re the right tools to solve your business needs is my priority. Think of it as an exercise in curation, or the difference between the McDonald’s $1 menu and a customized prix fixe menu.

4. Guided implementation

   This is the canned plan’s biggest fault. Why? Because even though you might get a quick, neatly-wrapped plan in a jiff, it doesn’t mean that 1). someone is going to stick around to help when things get messy, or 2). that your plan can even hold up to the realities of the mess. And things will absolutely get messy. When these realities strike, it’s time to pivot in real time, which is why having a guide is so critical. It’s also why I never simply hand off a plan to a team and wish them luck. Implementation takes finesse when you hit bumps in the road or feel cultural resistance to change. I find that when I embed myself within a team, we’re able to co-create solutions when challenges arise. What better way to foster ownership and accountability than to drive change together versus force a plan onto a team when it’s clearly not working? A canned process isn’t collaborative and it doesn’t co-create a vision for change. That’s not the soup-to-nuts transformation your team / product / marketplace needs.

5. Hire the right people

   Your team is your biggest asset, and getting the right people at the table is critical to getting the work done. Make sure your guide can push work forward, but take a human approach to relationships, power dynamics, and good old fashioned feelings. You’re likely to need a super-team of internal FTEs and external consultants. You’re looking to create a blend of institutional knowledge and political clout with external perspectives and subject matter expertise. This team will serve as something like a guide through the wilderness to find the right path for your business. When I’m on a project, I tend to play the role of this kind of guide, making sure we’re solving the right problem with the right tools through adaptive implementation and flexibility, focusing as much on feelings as frameworks, and talent as much as templates. If you find yourself leading this transformation, you’re going to need someone like this in your corner who takes the entire process as seriously as you do (maybe even more so!), and who can triage the challenges that will bubble up between start and finish.

At the end of the day, all of this nuance matters. The unique and specific characteristics about your company and its challenges are also the defining inputs of a plan that will work for YOU. Don’t trust your business outcomes to a process that treats your problem like an algorithm. With a high-touch plan and guide, transformation is right around the corner.