I've spent a large part of my career working with organisations going through change, and one of the things I've become increasingly interested in is what happens in the space between deciding that transformation is needed and actually being ready to undertake it.
The two things aren't quite the same.
An organisation can be very clear that it needs to change. It can have an ambitious strategy, a compelling vision for the future and a growing awareness that the way it currently operates may not be sufficient for what comes next, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is ready to transform.
It might be that the organisation has grown faster than its structures and processes. Perhaps responsibilities have evolved organically and are no longer quite as clear as they once were. Perhaps good people have taken on additional responsibilities because they were needed at the time, and those arrangements have gradually become embedded.
The starting point for transformation isn't necessarily a list of things that need fixing. As I said in my 10 September post, I begin with the strategy and try to understand what the organisation is now being asked to achieve.
There is another part of organisational readiness that is less tangible but, in my experience, just as important: the willingness of people to engage with what the organisation may need to become.
That doesn't mean everyone has to agree with every proposed change. Organisations are made up of people with different perspectives, experiences and legitimate interests, and some of the most useful conversations in transformation are the ones where people disagree constructively.
It does mean that there needs to be trust for people to talk honestly about what is and isn't working, and respect for people to embrace what they’re being asked to do. This is one of the reasons an external perspective is useful because they can ask questions without carrying the same history and can sometimes see connections between things that have been considered separately for a long time.
Of course, that only works if the organisation is genuinely open to what it might discover, which brings me back to the space between transformation and organisational readiness.
For me, that space is about creating enough clarity to understand what needs to change, enough confidence to make choices about it, and enough capability within the organisation to turn those choices into reality.
I see organisational readiness as something that can itself be developed. Sometimes the work required before transformation is quite practical: clarifying priorities, decision-making, roles, responsibilities or information. Sometimes it is about creating the space for leaders and teams to have conversations they haven't previously had.
And sometimes it is simply about slowing things down enough to understand what is actually going on before deciding what to do about it. This can feel counterintuitive when an organisation is under pressure to change, but in my experience a little more time spent understanding the organisation can save a great deal of time later.
It also makes transformation much more likely to stick.