Move

Chapter 23ConversationChange How You Communicate to Make Your Strategy Stick

Throughout this book so far, I've been talking about the fact that transformation cannot happen as a top-down process created and driven by executive effort alone. You need active involvement from everyone. And at last we are at the section of the model that is about E = Everyone.

To start on this idea, let's go back for a moment to where we began in Chapter 1: The Beginning of the Middle.

Imagine that you are in the first moments of your transformation. You have completed your planning. You have developed your strategy. You have created a presentation to communicate it. You're finally ready to roll it out. So now you hold an all-hands meeting, you take the stage, and you begin to communicate.

What Everyone Is Thinking

Here we go again, the strategy du jour. What's it going to be this time? Hmmm…I just thought of a new idea to solve a problem I was working on; I wish I wasn't in this meeting so I could keep working on it…What was on my Costco shopping list? Oops, I forgot to tell my son that his karate lesson was canceled…

In other words, people are thinking about whatever they are thinking about! They are not thinking about your new strategy.

You need to remember that you have been thinking about your new strategy for a long time. You have studied it, and maybe even tested options. You have all the history and the context. You have had the motivation to make this change for a long time. You have ...