Transformational Change

I have been seeing the word “transformation” a lot recently. Every change project is now transformational change, not just regular old average, boring change! Unfortunately, this is another victim of the never-ending buzz-word-bingo that seems to happen in the world.

Transformation is the process of becoming aware of how our assumptions constrain the way we perceive, think and feel, and then shattering those assumptions to reveal new possibilities. For transformation to happen, we must question our views of the world and our fundamental unquestionable assumptions about who we are, and then we must change them. Only then can we be transformed. We must confront the way we know the world is, and then change that. Transformational change is a metamorphosis. When the caterpillar transforms, it emerges a butterfly. It does not change from being a green caterpillar to a blue one, which is a prodigious change indeed, but not a transformational change.

In the world of work, organisations and strategy, if you want to transform, you cannot take a toaster and transform it by making it a pink toaster. That is incremental change, not a transformation. If you want to take a University and put all of its courses on-line, that is not a transformation; that is change. Transformation happens when a petrochemical company stops selling pesticides that poison the earth and starts to sell weed-free fields. The key to transformation and to upsetting the existing paradigm is thinking in terms of functions, not it terms of things.

Thinking about functions, what something and someone does, rather than what some thing or someone is, is the first step to transformation. Once you know what the functions are, you can then think of new ways to perform those functions. If you can design or think of a better way to perform the functions, you can then transform the existing into the new. 

Thinking in terms of processes and functions helps us get to the core of the issue and to find the activities to be performed that underlie the problem. The functional visualisation process is simple and is designed to help the thinker focus on ways and functions (using verbs) rather than focus on things (using nouns) as people often do. This helps us think more creatively because we are not tied down by our preconceived notions of the thing as it now is. We, therefore, do not have to limit the solution or design to being a line extension or incremental improvement to the existing thing … a pink toaster. For example, if our problem was to redesign a toaster, a shoe, a restaurant or a university classroom, in all cases we would likely start by thinking about, and visualising, the way things are today. This would lead us to try to design incremental improvements to existing toasters (make them pink), shoes (add a wheel), restaurants (make them fast or slow) and universities (put existing courses on-line) with which we are familiar. Instead, if we focus on the underlying ways and functions they provide we will find that toasters cook bread, shoes cover the foot, restaurants feed people and universities replace empty minds with open ones. This will help us then be able to focus on designing new and innovative ways to cook a slice of bread, to cover the foot, and to feed or educate people. We would then be freer to think more creatively about alternative solutions. Once we have the new idea, we can then transform from what is today to the new form.

The following illustrates this point perfectly. This is a quote from the person who was the head of design at the Power House Museum in Sydney when I interviewed him for my Strategy by Design book a few years ago:

“When I first began training as an industrial designer I had the opportunity of meeting Victor Papanek and he coined this phrase, ‘Don’t ask a designer how to build a bridge, ask them how to cross the river.’  As a designer you regularly get a brief like this: ‘I want you to build me a bridge. I want it to be made of bolts and steel. I want it to be painted yellow. I want it to be this long and this wide with this number of elements to it. Can you go away and design it?’ That is not design. That is just documenting somebody's ideas. A designer, if they are capable, should ask, ‘Why do you want to cross the river? Do you want to take things with you? Does it matter if they get wet?  How often are you going to cross the river? How many things are you going to carry and how heavy are they?’ If you start to ask all the right questions you start to build the parameters by which the right solution should start to emerge. In the end, it might not be a bridge, you may be better off with a boat or a slingshot or a hang glider. The ways to cross the river are almost endless. Most clients don't think like that. They think they need a bridge, it should be strong and they come up with the solution and ask you to design it. As clearly as you can, define why you want to cross the river. That is a fundamental thing that design brings as a discipline to our thinking that strategic planning needs to bring to its thinking. Too often strategic plans are actually almost created in absentia of the creation of the plan. ‘This is what we want the strategic plan to do, now go away and design it.’ That is like saying ‘Here is the bridge, now go away and design it for me.’ Expand your thinking in terms of what you can achieve through the strategic plan. What are the criteria that you can use to assess if it has achieved your goal? Think differently about the idea, challenge them to think and deliberately look for different ways of addressing those issues."

Redesigning a toaster means starting with an existing toaster and making it bigger, smaller, faster, pinker or whatever. This is what we typically do in strategy formulation and in all areas of life; we take what we did last year and add ten percent. When we think about ways to cook a slice of bread, it leaves us open to consider a vast array of options from the low-tech toasting fork used over an open fire while camping, to ways of using existing appliances to also cook bread, to developing entirely new cooking technologies. Similarly, thinking about redesigning a restaurant, a shoe or a university is seriously limiting to our thinking when compared to the more open questions of thinking about all the ways in which it is possible to feed and educate people or to cover the foot. In these cases the possibilities are almost endless. This is what we need to do in order to create transformational change.

Applied to you, your life and your organisation … when we get vague and ill-defined problems to solve, we must ‘question the way things are now’ and the basic assumptions that surround the situation. This is difficult as we often are not aware of our most basic, unquestionable assumptions because by definition they are unquestionable! We must focus on ways and functions (using verbs) rather than on things (nouns). This will help us separate from the past and how things are now, and will help us to be more creative and able to innovate. We must ask ‘Why? What is that supposed to achieve? What is the underlying function? Why is that important? So what? Why do we care about that?’ and we must keep asking those questions over and over until we get to the root of the problem, and can identify the core issues, problems, ways and functions. We will then be freer to think creatively and to create strategy innovations, new business models and solutions to seemingly intractable problems. We can then start the process of making transformational change so that you, like the caterpillar, will not recognise yourself when you emerge transformed.