Years ago, I read about a woman who decided to try a crazy experiment. She wanted to see if an average person could realistically do everything Oprah Winfrey told her audience to do – on TV, in books, and in magazines – at the same time.
She planned to try for a year. It only took a month before she had to admit – surprise, surprise – it was impossible.
Buying all the “must haves” and “Favorite Things” blew the budget she’d been told to make and filled her home with clutter that organizing gurus said she should work to clear.
This story popped back into my mind during my analyst days when I saw that my peers and I were overwhelming our clients the same way.
At least three of us were working on reports about how best to structure one’s organization. Mine focused on organizing for CX excellence. The others looked at organizing for mobile app development and digital marketing excellence, respectively.
I sat in a meeting and started to wonder – if we put these three reports on a CEO’s desk, could they make sense of what we were saying? Could they combine all of our recommendations in a single, ideal org chart? Probably not.
There’s actually a name for this idea of how multiple change programs pile up on a single person or team – “transformative load.”
Most organizations have two or three big transformation programs going at once these days. I rarely hear leaders talk about how they fit together and what it all means for real people at their desks trying to do real jobs.
What I do hear is employees who complain that they’re overwhelmed and have no clear sense of priorities or which process to follow.
Failure to manage (or even acknowledge!) transformative load is a key factor in the dismal success rate of change programs.
There are success stories, though.
Help me surface them.
If you know an organization that has successfully managed “transformative load” over time, how did they do it?
