Why a strong vision is not enough to drive transformation

They believed in the vision, but they didn’t believe we could make it happen.

We all know how important it is to have a strong and clear vision to cause transformation, but what I have witnessed is that even a clear and strong vision is not enough to move people.

I had a strong vision and clarity on where we should go and why. I even had visuals to showcase it. When I started pitching this vision and direction, many people believed in it and said that they also wanted the same thing, so there was no real doubt about the vision or the direction.

The doubts were different. Many people had seen similar initiatives before and had experienced them failing. The questions were more around whether we were actually capable of making it happen. We didn’t have the resources, the money or the people to make it happen. Others would say, “This is just a concept, it has not been confirmed by leadership. Let’s wait and see if it will happen.”

That was interesting to me because people believed in the destination, but they didn’t believe we could get there.

So the challenge was not to convince people that the vision was right. The challenge was to create the belief that we could actually make it happen.

Alignment, not agreement

To move forward, you need to take all those doubts and answer every question. You need to go from the high-level overview into the details and guide people in how to break the vision down into smaller, step-by-step elements that people can understand and work with.

It took around 2–3 months to align on the vision and the concept. And I learned that there is a big difference between agreement and alignment. People can agree with a vision without actually being aligned around what it means, what needs to change and what they need to do differently.

Aligning 25+ stakeholders around the same vision is a hard job, especially when you are in an environment where you are new and people don’t know you. You need to establish a relationship and credibility before they can really listen to you. To do so, you need to understand them first, be authentic about your goals and see if you can help them too.

Every conversation is an opportunity to create alignment.

Keep it small first

I started by pitching the vision to a smaller group first, getting their feedback, improving the concept and then moving on. I remember pitching an idea to three senior stakeholders and all three had similar feedback and a similar solution. I acknowledged that feedback and then brought it into a bigger group.

That was important because it was authentic, but it also showed that this was becoming a mutual concept rather than something that was simply coming from me. The more people contribute to shaping the concept, the more they become part of it.

Introduce it to the bigger group, but have a structure in place

I remember presenting the concept to a bigger audience and how many people raised their hands and mentioned all the challenges, all the things that could not work and how this was wrong.

In the calls after that, I changed the structure. I asked people to raise their hand if they were not aligned with the direction, tell us why and, importantly, propose something different.

I was amazed by how many stopped raising their hands because it is easy to find all the things that are wrong, but having a better solution is much harder. If you allow people to be part of the solution, the conversation changes. You are no longer asking them to simply accept your concept; you are asking them to help make it better.

Go one step deeper and align on the open points

We had a workshop with 40+ people going through 55 questions that were raised by different stakeholders and teams. We went through them one by one until all of them were answered.

This was part of the process of creating alignment. You cannot expect people to move when they still have fundamental questions about what you are trying to achieve, how it will work or what it means for them.

Once we had answered those questions, we had a much stronger foundation. But then we discovered that having the vision and the concept aligned still did not mean there was movement.

Having the vision and concept aligned does not mean there is movement

Theoretically, you think that when we know the vision and we have a concept, people will move in that direction. But that is not the case because they need someone to guide them and structure them.

All these teams said, “The vision and the concept are clear, but we don’t have requirements.”

If there is a word that annoys me the most, it is “requirements”. We can’t do anything because we don’t have requirements. Somebody needs to write the requirements.

This was another lesson for me. People were aligned on where we wanted to go, but they were still looking for the traditional mechanisms they were used to in order to start moving.

Requirements documents are useless

Project and delivery people love requirements documents because they give you a sense of certainty, but they can also create false hope that once the document exists, the transformation is ready to move.

We had to write a lengthy functional requirements document and get approval from 50+ people. That meant multiple calls to go through their concerns, questions and feedback. I knew the next question would be an ask for the backlog, so I prepared the structure already before they would ask for it.

But the requirements were not really the problem.

The bigger question was how we were going to deliver this new vision.

How do you create the belief that we can do it?

Many people use the existing structures in place to deliver a new vision, which is one of the reasons many transformations fail. How can an old structure give you a different output?

If you deliver it as just another project or programme, people will see it as another project or programme, but will still work in the same old ways.

To create the belief that we could actually do it, we needed to fix what was really broken. To do that, I needed to understand how all the different teams were working, where the dependencies were, where decisions were getting stuck and where the existing way of working was preventing us from moving.

The vision was new, but the way of working was still old.

That had to change.

Introduce a new operating model

This is where you need to collect the believers, the early adopters and the agents of change. You need them to make it happen. With them, you design the new operating model that is solving the issues you have identified.

Introducing a new operating model is not a presentation deck. It is not something you present once and expect people to follow. Next to defining the structure, you need to make sure the structure you have defined is actually being established by the people who are responsible for it.

Sometimes they don’t do it, sometimes they don’t get it and sometimes they don’t want to do it. That’s where you coach, guide and show them the benefit.

It took another 2 months to mobilise the teams and put them into the right structure.

At that point, we had something different. We had a vision people believed in, a concept they were aligned around and a structure that allowed them to start working differently.

Coaching as a people builder

I believe that everyone wants to do what they think is right. No one is resisting your ideas because they simply want to be difficult. They have experience and they have seen many different situations where they might have been hurt, disappointed or where things didn’t work, and now they operate in a certain way because of those experiences.

When you come with a new way of working, you need to coach them to see that too. You need to help them understand why the new way is different and how it can help them.

This is especially important when you are leading a cross-functional transformation with 45+ people. You cannot simply create a new structure and expect people to change because you have put it on a slide.

The operating model only becomes real when people start behaving differently.

Early wins are more important than big deliveries

Once we had the structure in place, we started seeing the first results of delivery.

Within around 2 months, we had our first tangible result: the unification of three platforms.

This was important because it created evidence.

Until that point, people had heard the vision, challenged the concept, raised questions and seen the new operating model being introduced. But now they could actually see something happening.

The vision was no longer just a vision. The concept was no longer just a concept. We had evidence that we could actually make it happen.

This is why I believe early wins are more important than big deliveries. Make sure your structure allows people to see their win in a short time. It should not take many months before people can see that the new way of working is producing something different.

Once people see the evidence, you don’t need to keep asking them to believe.

The vision was never the problem

Looking back, the vision was never really the problem. People believed in it from the beginning. The challenge was that they didn’t believe we could make it happen.

It took around 2–3 months to align on the vision and concept, another 2 months to mobilise the teams and put them into the right structure, and then within around 2 months we could see the first tangible result: the unification of three platforms.

The interesting part is that the delivery itself was not what created the movement. The work we did before delivery created the conditions for movement.

We created alignment, not just agreement. We answered the questions, created the structure, changed the operating model, brought the believers and early adopters together and coached people through the change.

Then we created evidence. It created belief that we could actually do it.

Having a clear and strong vision is not enough to mobilise people. Next to it, you need a concept that people can align around. Aligned and not just agreed, because those are two completely different things.

Then you need to give people a structure and an operating model that allows them to work differently, and you need to give them the evidence that the new way can actually work.

Because sometimes people don’t need you to convince them to believe in the vision.

They need you to help them believe that they can get there.

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