The starting point for most change/innovation initiatives is a key question to be answered. However, if you do not start with the right question, the entire initiative is likely to fail.

One of the most famous projects my team had the opportunity to work on was for a large retailer looking to better compete with Amazon. This particular company had physical stores and an e-commerce site that was not growing as fast as Amazon. The way the client originally framed the question was: how do we accelerate our e-commerce growth to catch up to Amazon’s?

However, when we dug deeper into the data, it quickly became apparent that Amazon’s growth vs. the growth of our client’s entire business was so far out of whack that the company was facing an existential crisis: Amazon threatened to completely overwhelm this company within 5 years. So, instead of asking “how do we accelerate our e-commerce growth to catch up to Amazon’s e-commerce growth?”, the question was re-framed as “how do we more effectively compete against Amazon in order to survive?” As you can see, had we focused on the first question, our strategy might have been limited to investments in e-commerce capabilities and infrastructure, while answers to the second question enabled us to broadly consider a myriad of potential solutions, like figuring out a new role for the physical stores or leveraging merchandise categories where Amazon was still not strongly competitive. And these two areas turned out to be exactly right. Within 18 months, this particular client’s omni-channel business was actually growing faster than Amazon.

Therefore, the 1st Superpower of Change is framing the right questions that sit at the heart of your key business challenges. So how do you know when you have framed the right questions to answer? The starting point is identifying the key business challenge, while avoiding the temptation of tying it to a potential solution. As you think about your business and its key challenges, try to frame questions in ways that are open-ended from the start, without making the leap to a particular solution. Casting the widest net yields the largest catch.

The dirty secret of consulting is that consultants make more money by increasing complexity. Also, many types of consulting firms are never on the hook to actually implement solutions, so the work they deliver tends to over-complicate problems rather than driving towards singular answers of what to do (or not do). A good (simple!) test of a consulting firm’s business model is whether it sells its services by the hour. If so, it is also likely that the firm’s approach will be to increase complexity so that it can sell follow-on work, to “solve” the problems its approach has created.

A common misconception about consulting is that the work is only valuable if it is loaded with complex charts, graphics and frameworks. And indeed, the work of consulting – sifting through data and research and financials – is often riddled with complexity. But the value of consulting boils down to whether or not the advice can drive actionable, sustainable change. And in our experience, this is a function of making sure that the advice we deliver is widely legible and comprehensible. In other words, simple. A good test of simplicity is whether a broader set of stakeholders – including folks not previously involved in the project – could easily understand the advice we are providing. Could a “rank and file” employee understand?

In our work, after the proper framing of questions described above, the second most important state to achieve early in projects is the simplification of tasks, expressed in everyday language easily understood by the entire organization. The desire for simplification is perhaps one of the reasons why brand purpose has become a somewhat trendy approach (above and beyond data that demonstrates purpose-driven companies perform better). Brand purpose is a handy tool that simplifies the internal and external motivations and ambitions of an entire company to a single phrase (e.g. “Nike: to provide inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.”). Other tools in the simplification arsenal include value propositions, design targets, future value maps, experience foundations and ecosystem architectures. We will unpack what we believe to be the “Fab 5” of simplification – the five outputs we are asked most often to create for clients because they help simplify the tasks and move the change agenda forward – in a future article in this series.

Ultimately, the goal of these simplification tools is to sift through a brand’s plethora of assets to uncover, and codify, which among them are most defensible – that is, a brand’s core strengths that are uniquely ownable to no one else but said brand. Value propositions articulate and clarify them, future value maps find new opportunities to build on them and ecosystems connect them to multiply their value. Understanding your greatest strength and employing tools that sharpen and codify them gives you a clear advantage over competitors by providing focus and enabling speed to market in a way that’s ownable for your business.

Now that you have framed your problem appropriately and used some of the tools above to figure out what to do, how do you actually begin the painful process of implementing change? What is the right starting point (assuming there are a multitude of tasks ahead that have been identified using the strategic outputs)? And how do you attain consensus so that the organization is bought in and invested in the plan?

There are two powerful tools proven time and again to drive alignment, even among stakeholders with seemingly competing demands and interests: data and prototyping. And many projects that fail to gain alignment typically are lacking in one or both of these. Let’s start with data.

Data

Data is one of the key sources of fuel for the digitally-connected age, and many companies are swimming in more intimate, personal data about their customers than was ever believed to be possible to obtain. As consumers use digital products and services, they leave behind a trail of data that is truly insightful about their behaviors and habits as well as actionable in terms of activating future product or service development. Unfortunately, data is not equally distributed, and the world is divided between data haves and data have nots. New economy companies born of the digital revolution inherently have data, while classic Fortune 500 companies born prior to the invention of the Web typically lack it. At one time, market research served as a proxy for lack of data: we did research to try to find out by extrapolation the very insights that data reveals in real time. But now, data trumps research as the foundational source of strategic knowledge.

Pertinent to the topic of alignment, data is the great equalizer and settler of disagreement. As Daniel Moynihan famously remarked, “You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” As it relates to change and innovation, data is “the facts.” In our business, anytime there have been disagreements with clients or internally among their teams, it was often looking at data that ultimately yielded resolution. No change/innovation project can be successful if it is deprived of data – and any shortfalls in data ultimately rear their head at those exact moments when alignment is needed to move forward. Therefore, it is essential to have a data collection and interpretation strategy if one is going to drive a successful change/innovation initiative.

Prototype

The second key factor of alignment requires acknowledging a simple fact of human nature: most folks cannot get on board unless they can actually see where the boat is heading. Therefore, design and prototyping are critical for alignment and must be planned for from the very outset of a change/innovation project.

In fact, this was always one of the Achilles Heels of management consulting: the inability to help clients envision change via design. All the charts and frameworks and spreadsheets in the world cannot help people imagine a new future for their company faster than a prototype for a new proposition. And design and prototyping are even more critical to gain alignment when moving beyond the working project team outward to other stakeholders and executive decision makers who have not been as intimately involved in the work. Like lack of data, the lack of design/prototyping are key barriers to ensuring everyone has the same understanding of where the company is trying to go. And prototyping does not have to be a heavy investment. For a recent engagement on the Future of Hydration, our strategists worked closely with creative technologists and experience designers to create mockups of future water systems in different contexts (made possible by AI) to make the vision tangible. It not only invited meaningful conversation in the boardroom, but also made it easier for the global leads to make the vision resonate with country leads and mobilize stakeholders. More on this topic in the next section.

The journey from thinking to making essential to all change/innovation initiatives was historically disconnected given the number of external partners and internal teams who kept the tasks separated. For instance, the management consultants who were often tasked with the strategic thinking were never on the hook for the making or the implementation, so their recommendations were often disjointed from the people and process realities required to actually bring ideas to market. Conversely, external partners and teams whose main job was execution were often disconnected from the commercial thinking and financial realities of what it takes to create a sustainable business idea.

It is in this disconnect between strategy and implementation that most change/innovation projects go to die. Handoffs between partners and/or internal teams often lead to tricky missteps and falls. In our decades of experience helping drive change and innovation within large, complex and matrix organizations, this is by far the most common failure point (after getting started in the first place, see Innovator’s Dilemma above). So how do you mitigate failure, and how do you smooth the rocky path from pure strategic thought to actual, real-world launch of new product, service, business or brand?

The short answer: always be implementing (the innovator’s corollary to the salesperson’s “always be closing.”) As long as we think of implementation as a set of discrete tasks at the end that are separate from “the thinking,” we set ourselves up for the missteps and falls. The way to do this is to think of change/transformation/innovation as a fluid process that requires interdisciplinary thinking from the outset and where design processes start almost immediately at the beginning, always with an eye towards actually bringing ideas to market.

A Change Design team is composed of a mix of disciplines: commercial thinkers, innovation strategists, brand thinkers and designers, experience thinkers and designers and technologists, with some data expertise thrown in to boot. The processes of Change Design are based on iterative loops, but where every discrete task and output is designed to help guide downstream decision making and implementation. As described in the prior section, we strongly believe that design is one of the key drivers of alignment, so “making” (in the form of prototypes of various degrees of fidelity) starts at the beginning of projects, rather than a singular output that lives at the very end.

If process and bringing design and prototyping early are key drivers of enabling implementation, there are also tools that come closer to the end that are equally valuable: playbooks. We used to think of brand guidelines or experience rules as constraints that needed to be followed, and because they never helped anyone do their job better, they were easily ignored. Change Design moves beyond rigid rules in favor of playbooks that inspire creativity and implementation. A brand or experience playbook (often one and the same, as modern brands are defined not just by how they appear and what they say, but also how they act and behave) is a set of tools – delivered digitally, by definition – that inspire teams to apply brand and experience thinking.

Modern playbooks can even go beyond describing how to creatively apply brand and experience. Using platforms like Figma and Canva, they can even provide tools that generate applications of design. We call these “generative tools,” and they can help enable internal teams to actually take the brand (and experience) and run with it, without needing extra designers, writers or coders. Planning around who will actually be on the hook to steer implementation and ensuring those folks have tools appropriate to their budgets and resources is another essential way in which Change Design enables implementation.