"You’ll never see as little change as you did in the past year.”

It is one of the most impactful things that I’ve heard from one of my leaders. It wasn’t what was said, as I fundamentally knew it after working in IT for 20 years, but who said it and the way it was said. The CEO, Garth Warner, made the statement in an all-employee meeting and paused after saying it, which caused me to reflect on it.

We may see heavier years, but overall, each year has more and more change, in the business, the customer’s expectations, the way of working and of course technology. That I knew, as I had a role that required me to define business technology strategy, build roadmaps and execute them. In those activities, we’d look at freeing up operational funds and resources to create strategic capacity and we’d find ways to package our changes to try to minimize disruption.

The fact the CEO said it to all employees and paused to make people reflect, I felt was to address a rumbling in the organization. We just finished a very complex merger of equal partners which required significant change to people’s roles, their applications, their processes, and their leaders. A very transformative change that carried quite a bit of change fatigue. People were asking for a breather. A breather was good, but we knew it couldn’t be too long.

This was my aha moment. As I reflected, I thought, we need to find a way to not only create capacity to build strategic change (our prior focus), but we needed to help the employees absorb that change. If it was important enough for the CEO to mention at an all-employee meeting and the fact it kept coming up in our tactical and release planning as one of our biggest barriers to success, it must be important enough to make explicit in our outcomes-based strategies. That way, we ensure we create tactics that increase our ability to absorb change, not just build change.

I created a simple, map that we embedded into our strategic-outcomes maps. At a high level this is how I saw it:

In the corporate strategies. the rightmost outcome would connect to the growth goal or transformation goal that requires faster change throughput.

I used the map it in my adaptive agile business strategic roadmap that had the tactics and outcomes (results chain approach). The lack of existing tactics to address the change capacity outcomes was now obvious and the conversations that we felt were obvious from a technology or architecture perspective started to become easier to connect to strategy and thus, for business leaders to understand and support. “If we don’t increase our ability to absorb change, like we are accelerating our ability to build change, how can we expect to get faster?” In other words, we as leaders needed to enable our employees to absorb change in order to succeed.

End result: If you need to accelerate your rate of change and if you use outcomes-based strategy maps, embed the change outcomes that are needed. Then when you build your tactical map, ensure you are solving those outcomes. Tactics that may have seemed operational and not received enough support, are now seen to be critical to strategy.