Transformation vs. Adaptation: Why Incremental Change is the Key to Success 

Why do so many IT organizations attempt a “transformation”? In the last 30 years, most transformation attempts have failed, so why do leaders want to try and try again?

What Is True Organizational Transformation?

Most IT transformation initiatives are not meant to actually change the organization into something completely different than before. Successful transformations are rare and become business school case studies, like when Kaiser Permanente decided to give up its work in defense and become a healthcare company. The reality is that when your IT leaders mention “transformation,” they always mean something less than a complete change of purpose for your organization.

Usually, “transformation” is a catch-all term for a funded initiative that will invest capital into IT so that a capability can be built or enhanced, maybe leading to specific outcomes that improve how the business works. As an example, some “transformations” are just investments in installing or upgrading a packaged system that is expected to improve the company’s competitiveness, like SAP or Salesforce. While that may feel like a transformation for the groups that will use that new system, that’s not really a transformation.

Why Do Many Transformations Start So Poorly?

Over the last 30 years, I’ve found that “transformation” is usually a euphemism for “let’s change the tools and/or the process and hopefully improve the efficiency or effectiveness” of a particular part of the organization. With such an ambiguous target, why are so many perceived as failures?

It is rare for a company to be able to say, “I plan to reduce the number of steps to complete this process from 12 to 5 and reduce the human hours it takes to complete the process by 50%”. A more likely scenario is that IT leaders will issue a vague statement such as “We’re going to transform this organization,” and after a series of agonizing working sessions with those same IT leaders, ennui sets in. They set an unspecified goal of “improve efficiency” so they can get started. To be fair, most initiatives haven’t gathered data and performed the analysis to make such a definitive statement with specific numeric targets. Further, any attempt to do so would be a wasted effort, rightly called “analysis paralysis.”

The Case for Adaptation Over Transformation

What’s a better way? We’ve learned that a suspicion of inefficiency usually leads us to an indictment of tools or processes. With a small amount of funding and after some initial research, learnings may lead to more research and discovering what could be causing the inefficiency. Discovering a possible root cause leads to potential solutions. Repeated in small steps over time, real change is made, and it looks to the outsider like an evolutionary leap of improvement happens. Front-line managers have been doing this without much recognition since the start of the industrial age, but it works. What we’re really describing is adaptation.

Recognizing that we’ve moved into the digital age where disruptors often seem to appear from thin air as ghostly barbarians at the gate, building the capability to adapt – “adaptivity” – is the real goal underpinning these change efforts even if they don’t say it. The unspoken expectation is that those who don’t adapt when the market moves will become soul-sucking corporate behemoths employing resources, not people, and they’ll languish into irrelevance, but growing businesses will adapt because they must.

So why aren’t leaders funding “adaptation” initiatives? Because “transformation” sounds more forceful and timely and implies meaningful change. Adaptation sounds open-ended, soft, and implies baby steps, signifying that meaningful change is further down the road—which feels too slow for the quarterly-driven earnings cycle and corporate executives.

Incremental Change: The Practical Path to Real Change

What should IT leaders do that are stuck in a world where “transformation” is needed to make any change in the organization?

Several years ago, I was brought into a financial institution that took this approach. Even though they started an effort to improve their competitiveness by streamlining the business process – clearly an “adaptation” initiative, they had to call it “transformation” to get the budget allocation they needed. It was designed as a series of incremental improvements, and after about 16 months of hard work, collaboration, and coordination, the business changes were completed, and it was viewed as highly successful. As a bonus, because it was done incrementally, we never heard from the impacted business groups that we were moving too fast or that they had “change fatigue” due to the many changes happening around them.

Strategize how your business needs to adapt, incrementally design its adaptability, implement small steps, and label it what you must to get the funding you need to implement the change. Business leaders will appreciate the difference if it is successful — and they won’t care what you call it.