How executives can help achieve positive change and greater impact

If that option is limited or cannot be used sparingly, you must look elsewhere for a more productive capacity. This will lead you to examine where you can improve within your existing workforce.

From our survey of opportunities in my previous post on amplifying software engineering impact, we can summarise the following strategies we identified which can be applied to help us reduce wasted effort and increase our impact:

• See inflight work through to completion
• Identify what to subtract
• Tackle the riskiest assumptions first
• Identify organisational constraints differently
• Establish new ways to determine progress
• Better time and meeting management
• Improve decision-making throughout the organisation
• Identify and invest in learning opportunities
• Systematise bringing in new organisational changes
• Prioritise problems the organisation is experiencing

Let’s explore how each can help us and what might be involved in bringing this change to reality.

See inflight work through to completion

The phrase ‘stop starting and start finishing’ is often used to remind us that it can be easy to start new activities, but finishing them brings benefits. This implies that we need discipline not to commence new initiatives as we think of them but to finish what we started or, if there truly is a higher priority, to be strong enough to pause or cancel work of a lower priority.

It also requires the discipline to decline new work until one can take it on and do it well and quickly.

Identify what to subtract

With a larger investment buffer, it can be easy to have rose-coloured glasses for many of the initiatives. You can use these leaner times to reassess the reality of all investments and assess the probability that each will yield the promised benefits. We can ask ourselves questions such as:

• Which will bring the most significant impacts?
• Which are closest to contributing to the core offering of the organisation?
• Which are critical in realising the company strategy?
• What is the evidence that this will make a difference?
• How will we collect evidence to decide whether to proceed or pivot?

Tackle the riskiest assumptions first

Following on from looking at what to subtract from the organisation’s commitments is to derisk those that remain.

A word of caution: it can be tempting to remove all risky initiatives because the payoff may seem uncertain. Avoid the temptation to eliminate all higher-risk items – it's vital to have a portfolio approach to investments with a mix of risk profiles. You can identify the riskier initiatives and ask, ‘What are the riskiest assumptions of this initiative?’. You can then prioritise these to reduce the risk or identify the initiative’s viability as early as possible and kill it should it be less viable than previously thought.

Identify organisational constraints differently

Some capacity planning is better than none, but there is also a wide range of effectiveness across different approaches. A common approach is to group up by role and function and then map these to projects. The challenge with this approach is that it does a poor job of identifying problems arising from context switching, coordination issues, waiting times between handoffs and many other problems that contribute to the flow of delivering value or lack thereof.

Analysis of the organisation’s most critical initiatives and the ‘dead time’ waiting for the availability of different skill sets will show that time spent doing nothing significantly contributed to the elapsed time waiting to experience the initiative’s benefits.

This may be due to how teams interact with shared resources or experts, different prioritisation schemes or various other reasons. These issues can be opaque without an effort to make them visible by default.

Once identified, the changes needed to address the issues might be simple adjustments to incentives, creation of shared goals and measurements that help people realise they are ‘in the same boat’ through to reorganisation of teams around the value they are there to support and improve rather than by the skillsets they possess.

Establish new ways to determine progress

Still, the most common way organisations today determine progress is by activity – that is, by tracking progress via task, milestone or project completion. Completing tasks, milestones and projects infers progress as the work meets some criteria for completion, but it typically falls short of providing evidence that the benefit has been achieved. This is often a trailing exercise, or worse still, something that is never actually undertaken due to pressure to complete the next activity.

Another way to track progress is to identify the leading and lagging indicators of what would provide the desired benefit. A lagging indicator might be measures such as usage data that show users are completing their tasks successfully using the software delivered, combined with satisfaction survey results that show the users are happy with how the tool is helping them.

Leading indicators during the development of the system are to incrementally deliver value to the users and track the uptake of that value by them, talking with users regularly about how well the software is meeting their needs and what they would like to prioritise solving next. There can be some effort to establish these approaches initially, so excuses are often made for not working this way. The reality is that building the right thing is the most crucial efficiency gain in software engineering. Continuous validation of what is being delivered is a low overhead compared to the costs expended on providing the wrong thing, over and over.

Better time and meeting management

There’s an epidemic of poor time and meeting management practices. Leaders who are constantly busy despite their protestations are less effective because, as Roger L Martin explains, ‘being too busy means your personal strategy sucks’. This can perpetuate across the organisation when those at the top exhibit these behaviours as it incentivises others in the belief that this is what will be rewarded. The result can be that everyone is so busy that they have no time to work together. Lots of tasks get checked off lists, but nothing impactful is achieved.To begin improving, leaders can be aware of how they manage themselves and what they present as important to others in the organisation. If your water cooler talk is about how busy you are and everything you are doing, the organisation will start to resemble this. If, instead, you focus on doing a few important things well and are open to hearing about challenges, leadership could help address them, and the effect in the broader organisation can be profound.

Suppose you notice that meetings in your organisation often conclude without a course of action or meander across many topics with no resolution. In that case, there’s likely an opportunity to improve their effectiveness. Improving this doesn’t take much. Again, it starts with ensuring that you are only involved in meetings where your presence is valuable to the organisation. Once your house is in order, you can coach others to do the same.Standards for good meeting hygiene can be established and promoted. Simple, but effective practices, such as having materials to read before a meeting, agendas and meeting minutes, help meetings run more smoothly and engage participants with different personalities and communication preferences.

Improve decision-making throughout the organisation

It may become apparent that a significant cause of delays in delivering value comes back to the effectiveness of decision-making processes in the organisation. For example, it is typical for decisions that could be made close to the source of the issue to be routinely elevated to senior management to decide. This can create delays while waiting for the go-ahead.In other cases, the need might be identified, but then it might be unclear how to navigate the organisation to make a decision, leading to delays.

In organisations with high decision velocity, decision-making is closely related to where the most information is available to make an informed decision. It’s clear where certain decisions that may have broader implications can be made. It’s also straightforward and exception cases can be raised and handled.

To achieve this in larger organisations, it takes a deliberate effort to develop a theory about how the organisation works and then explicitly explain how recurring decisions are handled every day. Visual diagrams and establishing appropriate mechanisms and forums for decisions can help.

Identify and invest in learning opportunities

Some inefficiency results from capability gaps. These could be a lack of familiarity or expertise with a tool, technology, process or practice or gaps in the soft skills that help address common frictions in social systems.

Learning can often seem like a nice-to-have investment because realising its benefits can be challenging to measure and pay off in an unpredictable timeframe. However, the productivity gains resulting from cumulative learning can be massive, with the quality and rate of work improving along with impact.

Proactively seeking out capability gaps and learning opportunities can feel like inviting additional investment, which is difficult in the current environment. However, you may need to make room for targeted learning investments to address areas that can unlock greater impact.

Systematise bringing in new organisational changes

Any of the opportunities described above involve introducing change into the organisation. As most experienced leaders know, change can be difficult. One common reason is the lack of a systematised approach to achieving organisational change. For this reason, change is often avoided until it cannot be. The result is very large-scale changes that are broad and stressful and rarely achieve the purported benefits.

Executive and technology leadership teams can take different approaches. The leadership team can systematise small, atomic, well-planned and experimental changes. By ‘systematised’, I mean there is a known way for the team to propose a change, a forum for reaching an agreement and a limit to the number of changes in flight (less is better) to know what effects can be associated with which change. There’s also a protocol around how people are engaged and communicated with about changes.

This could be as simple as building the structure of regular leadership meetings around change (push status updates and other less critical impacts into offline, asynchronous channels) and tracking the change initiatives on a shared board, encouraging the leadership team to pull together to support the successful change.

Realising the benefits of any of these opportunities depends on the effectiveness of your change mechanisms. Making more time to do these well will pay dividends by enabling you to undertake the organisational improvements necessary to have more impact. Choose what to stop and be disciplined about it.

Prioritise problems the organisation is experiencing

As Dr Jabe Bloom put so eloquently in CTO Life Line, my monthly livestream dedicated to supporting CTOs which I co-host with Noah Cantor, “You should never ask your teams to solve problems they don’t have or can’t see”.

When organisations introduce large frameworks to try to solve a host of perceived problems simultaneously, there is often justified pushback against them. A lot of change is triggered at once and the changes are complex to associate with the issues experienced by the people doing the work. This is not an indictment of large frameworks – that’s beyond the scope of this post. What it does highlight is the importance of how we approach change.

When trying to improve, we may have ideas about what is needed. Still, if other issues prevent us from experiencing the problems these ideas solve, we are better placed to understand the current state of affairs and the obstacles at play.

Dr Jabe shares what he describes as ‘Ideal Present Design’ and gives examples using his Ideal Present Canvas in a discussion with David Hall and Ben Mosior.

How can executives get started?

In the first post in this series, I listed inefficiencies that are present to some degree in most organisations. The caveat is that this is an aggregated generalisation about the industry. You need to identify which of these issues are present in your organisation, to what degree and which are directly impeding its creation of more value sooner.

Once identified, you and your team must discuss and decide which obstacles are the biggest and represent the most wasted effort. Ideally, you need visibility and a strong theory of what is causing what to happen so that once you start to make a change, you can identify whether the change is having the desired effect.

Depending on the causes, it leads you to some of the opportunities I have shared above about what interventions may help. I’ve focused on general opportunities often linked to organisational productivity. There will be issues and opportunities that may be unique to your organisation which you uncover.

The next step is to approach these opportunities for positive change systematically. Involve the people closest to the problems and, where possible, have them lead the change. Invest in these as part of your core focus rather than an afterthought that people try to fit in during ‘magic time’. For example, changes I gave earlier in this post, such as stopping initiatives that may be detracting from the most critical investments, are not just a one-off exercise but changes that need to become part of the executive team and all other decision-makers in the organisation. In this way, making this a regular part of the behaviour across the organisation takes a concentrated effort to educate people on why it’s important and to develop approaches for putting it into action.

Treating each of these opportunities as an essential change and bringing to these changes an intention, level of investment and structured approach to engaging the team can help an organisation realise the benefits.

Using the advice in this article, only take on what you can complete impactfully and clear the decks if you need to make that happen. Maintain a strong focus; the fewer concurrent changes, the better. Observe progress closely and review. Adapt to what is working and what is not. Repeat.

If you’d like help with cost-effective ways to improve your organisation’s impact without growing your cost-base, get in touch.