In undertaking any organisational transformation, the team tasked to conceptualise, strategise, synchronise and implement the change will find themselves having to deal with issues and challenges on many fronts.

Having a well-formulated transformation agenda can help to frame the initial narrative to get started. Thereafter, in planning the specifics of transformation, what is needed is drawing out a transformation reference document to chart and navigate the transformation journey. The document provides a common basis to understand interdependencies and advocate for adjustments so that at the systems level, the systemic structures can continue to be developed as a total solution.

Here are five things to systemically pay attention to when leading transformational change.

1. Provide clarity on essential aspects of the transformation

After consulting widely across business units and having interviewed key stakeholders and understanding their mental models, the transformation team needs to organise the data and insights into essential aspects that will guide planning and execution. Each aspect should document from the perspectives of both current reality and the desired future reality. Some mandatory sections to cover are business model, culture, operations and risk management.

The articulation of the existing business model and the transformed model should clearly demonstrate the differences at a few levels. Namely, at the events and activities level, what is observable in the day-to-day? Then, at a systemic pattern level, what are the key indicators that will shift over time? The business model needs to determine at the structural level what policies, processes and systems need to be created, modified or eliminated. The mental models raised through interviewing the relevant stakeholders should guide the modelling of the business that’s envisioned at the end of the transformation journey.

2. Articulate what will change, and develop the steps to get there

This section is all about signaling what is the envisioned change and how teams and individuals are impacted. It will include a list of critical projects and initiatives, with indicators and targets to help units align their efforts to achieve these targets.

For example, in improving customer service, the existing measures might be turnaround time and percentage of complaints versus compliments. In the new articulation, it could be orienting the customer journey in terms of satisfaction, positive engagements and referrals. Such shifts require recalibration in norms and behaviours and mindset change. Positive customer experience will imply marked improvements in terms of the value proposition throughout the lifetime customer journey. Key follow-up questions might be the role of technology and digitalisation in providing customer visibility, insights and future-oriented modelling.

The transformation team needs to monitor all the parallel tasks that are happening and track their progress in getting to the stated transformation goals.

3. Define and deliver the positive impact for post-transformation work, workplace and workforce

Post-Covid-19, every transformation initiative will need to define what “working” means. For example, the nature of emerging work might mean exhibiting the following characteristics: firstly, being highly collaborative and mastering essential soft skills within and across teams; secondly, having integrated workflows enabled through technology with an emphasis on innovation; and thirdly, having ultra-disciplinary, cross competency-based, evidence-based approaches.

By “workplace,” the organisation might want to stipulate that as part of the transformation, the envisioned workplace will have certain characteristics. For example, perhaps the workspace will have a physical office but also co-working sites elsewhere, and digital workplaces may be designed to facilitate the “work anywhere safely” concept, such as adopting seamless-presence conferencing facilities.

When it comes to the workforce, possible desired characteristics of the employee post-Covid-19 might be the ability to anticipate customers’ needs and new requirements, being competent to make data-driven decisions and to make sense of the environment and being agile, coachable and having a growth mindset.

Irrespective of the choice of characteristics, organisational transformation must provide a clear vision and commitment to this aspect.

4. Embed transformation projects within the corporate work plan

Transformation projects are not confined to those undertaken by the transformation office. In fact, the office is the secretariat that maintains a bird’s-eye view of all the interventions by functional units in service of advancing the transformation work.

More likely than not, these projects are multi-year in nature and need to be resourced accordingly. There is a need to capture initial assumptions and hypotheses, documenting the scope of change and planning the engagement of impacted stakeholders. And from a work plan point of view, you must track deliverables, timelines and budget utilisation.

For example, if customer service is integrating a new technology platform, the stakeholders might be current employees with account management responsibilities, the internal training team, managers accessing the system for evaluation and offer approvals and the audit office.

The input-output table maintained by the transformation team must have clearly defined change management plans that appear in the relevant units’ work plan.

5. Draw up a comprehensive risk management plan

For a complex undertaking such as transformation, there are many accompanying risks that need to be considered and mitigated against. A risk register is a starting point and should contain action plans for when things do not go according to plan.

These issues might be technology implementation delays impacting training delivery, issues with the scheduling of training or the availability of training resources or the inability for all employees to be operationally ready for launch.

Some mitigating actions could include evaluating options and the pros and cons for pilots instead of full-scale launch, maintaining parallel systems while keeping a view on related costs, considering training early adopters to have a buddy system and making available demos even before training to get employees used to the changes to “unfreeze” them in preparation for the migration.

A well-defined transformation reference document with a good monitoring regimen ensures that the organization is not blindsided when the outputs and outcomes fail to yield the envisioned results or do not achieve the desired quality. There should be no surprises of projects falling behind schedule—and resulting in unforeseen blockages along the critical path. Having a master transformation schedule and maintaining it rigorously means that the transformation has a systemic way to move toward success.

Thomas Lim is the Vice-Dean of Centre for Systems Leadership at SIM Academy. He is an AI+Web3 practitioner & author of Think.Coach.Thrive!