We have defined Rigger as the disciplined execution that tends bold ideas into measurable lasting results. And to be clear, Rigger isn't necessarily about being tougher or working harder. It's about building the systems that let you move fast, recover fast, and show up reliably, even during those inevitable moments where motivation dips along the transformation journey. For McKinsey & Company, I'm Sean Brown and welcome to Inside the Strategy Room. You just heard Dominic Scarrett discussing how he defines Rigger in the context of organizational transformation. And in today's episode, we'll explore the latest research into the role that Rigger plays in driving and sustaining successful transformations. Dom is a partner based in our New York office and a leader in our transformation practice. He works with management teams to drive radical performance improvement and transformational change that sticks. And he's helped more than 50 companies to deliver over 15 billion dollars in increased EBITDA. Dom, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Sean. And Priya Moody is an associate partner in our Southern California office and also a leader in our transformation practice. She works with global companies to drive large-scale, good-to-great transformations and brings deep expertise in end-to-end capability building for complex operations and performance improvement through growth. Priya, great to have you here today. Great to be here, Sean. So Dom, let's start with you and maybe you could describe for us what you mean by Rigger and why it's so important. Yeah, thank you, Sean. So we've all seen ambitious transformations with bold targets. And yet, we also see wildly different outcomes. Today, we're going to explore one important factor that separates the ones that succeed from those that stall. And that important factor is Rigger, often the missing link between ambition and real measurable impact. And yet to be clear, Rigger isn't necessarily about being tougher or working harder. It's about building the systems that let you move fast, recover fast, and show up reliably. And during those inevitable moments where motivation dips along the transformation journey, why does this matter? Well, it matters because from our analysis and our experience, Rigger's transformations drive better outcomes. And Dom, is Rigger something that you can measure internally or how does it show up in external metrics like TSR and EBITDA? In a business sense, these are measurable both internally and externally. They show up very clearly. So when we looked at transformations that we categorized as Riggerous, and that was those who within the first 24 months had executed on at least 80% of their goals, we saw increased total shareholder return at a sustainable level. So we measured it one year after the core transformation effort. Had that changed stuck. And so 14% increase in TSR. In a separate analysis, we also saw that the improvements in TSR were excess to geographic and sector-specific indices. So here we're seeing it's not just a rising tide, raising all boats, but also those companies that transformed with Rigger were outperforming the market materially. We saw that those that were Riggerous were delivering greater than 60% of their transformation value within the first year. So really got off to a fast start and laid that foundation. Instead of very clear message to the organization, things are different and that starts today. Importantly, we also found that these were fundamentally better places to work. They had 1.6 times more likely to have top or second quartile health. Organizational health has measured by the organizational health index. So being Riggerous actually makes the place a better place to show up to a better place to work. Introducing Rigger into the organization isn't going to destroy morale, isn't going to have organ rejection. Actually leads to it being a place that employees themselves describe as a better place to work. So how would you define a lack of Rigger than in your experience working with clients who are in or embarking on transformations? If they're not applying Rigger, what does it mean and why does that make Rigger so important? So in a word, I would define the opposite of Rigger as hope. Now to be clear, hope is important, it is necessary. You need to have belief, confidence, faith that your goals are achievable, but hope alone is not sufficient. Hope alone is not going to get you there unless it is backed up by a Rigger approach to working towards those goals. And Priya, anything you'd add here in your experience? I think that's exactly right. Hope is not a strategy. It is a compliment to Rigger for sure. So why don't all companies take this rigorous approach? It's a great question, Sean. I mean, it is hard. It is hard to do these things. So your Rigger requires moving faster than you're comfortable with. You're executing on a timeline that at first seems really hard. It seems like I don't know if I'm going to be able to do this. I haven't been able to execute that fast previously. It's all about pushing yourself to do that a little bit faster. It requires resilience. It requires when you've had a failure, how do you come back from that? That's hard. And also requires delivering consistently, and that is also hard. And Priya, could you tell us a little bit about what Rigger looks like in practice? What are the elements that really distinguish Rigger in a transformation? And we unpacked what disciplined execution really means. We learned that our most rigorous transformations exemplified three things consistently. Speed, so our most rigorous transformations initiated and executed change at a very different clip, and did so in a way that often felt uncomfortable. And they created the environment to do so, and that created accountability, decision-making, and more streamlined processes. The second is resilience. Rigger's transformations sustained the performance and cultural momentum, especially in the face of adversity. And the third thing was consistency. They were building and embedding the right practices, the right operating rhythms into the organization's way of working. So it wasn't a one-time push, but a muscle that they could consistently flex in the journey to reaching the most ambitious goals. And for those listeners who may not have engaged in a transformation yet, can you just describe for us quickly what the phases of a transformation are and the importance of a bankable plan? Yeah. So a bankable plan, the way we think about it, is the transformation target. And how we arrive at that is we first like to take an outside and look and say, how ambitious can you be? What is your aspiration? I'm looking at the company overall across all functions to say, what is that aspiration and how do we get there? How do we get there? Is all about planning, delivering discrete initiatives that then lead up into what we call a bankable plan, a plan that has a target, that has a timeline, that has real bottom-up initiatives that make it up, and then finally executing against that. And when we talk about that execution phase, the execution is therefore measurable because we have this bankable plan. And we can then see whether or not we've actually accomplished what you described. Is that right? Exactly. As Dom mentioned, our most rigorous transformations achieved 80% of their transformation target within a two-year timeframe, but also I think, impressively, consistently met their targets in period. So they have a plan and that plan has a certain goal at each interval and they met that consistently, which is hard to do. So we know that performance and health are mutually reinforcing. They're not trade-offs and that's really important here in the transformation kind of context. When we looked at what rigorous transformations practice in the organization of health, we saw three things. One was a purpose, having a purpose beyond the financial target. That creates a shared vision, focused on social responsibility, customers, and also the industry trends. Second was having a pulse on the external lens, being able to see the competitor landscape and understanding that to achieve those aspirational goals can do everything yourself, so also collaborating and investing in partnerships. The third thing that rigorous transformations did and practiced differently was having a very clear performance monitoring system, having clear operational metrics and goals and being able to track those with transparency that led to accountability, which then led to action. And as we mentioned before, speed is a critical factor in the transformations. We found that most top quartile transformations hit over 90% of their goal within 24 months, and they did so consistently over time. But they also executed.
faster and what that meant was that they implemented their initiatives and delivered quicker. And so doing so not only puts forward the transformation all in and performance goals, but also gives the organization confidence and its ability to deliver and to be empowered to deliver against those goals as well. And it also purples some momentum. It gives the organization some early fuel and investment to then dive deeper into those exciting innovative ideas as well. And Priya, is it possible to be too rigorous in the execution of a transformation or perhaps too unyielding? And how does that work in your experience making sure you don't burn out the organization but also making sure you have the flexibility to add other things in as you're moving toward that bankable plan? Yeah, this speed and rigor is tricky to ingrain an organization. You can't just tell people to move work faster or move the finish line up. And what we have found really helps is building a deeper purpose, really ingraining in not just that performance target and its timeline, but what is the why? And developing that change story behind it. And those stories often start with leaders. Leaders need to role model that. They need to act on it. And they also need to talk about that this is not an opt out exercise. The entire organization is getting a bolt in this. And then from there, the decisions are now anchored into that enterprise's purpose and functions. And you begin to see that priorities are more clear and teams are more empowered as well. Sean, I was going to jump in on your question there. It seemed like it was like at what point does rigor become rigidity and become reproductive rigidity? I think that the point that prearrased on resilience is really important here. And resilience is when you recover and it means you've got to adapt to a change in the situation. Hey, the plan didn't work out the way the plan was supposed to. And like Mike Tyson says, everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face. I think it's important to then adapt and how you respond is what matters. And so it's not rigidity because if you're a jitter, it means you're failing to adapt the plan. Resilience means an adaptation of the plan. And that's when rigor really comes at its best. It is about this unshakable belief and commitment that we will get to our goal. But also a real acknowledgement that along the way, the path may not be the path that we laid out at the beginning. And we're going to have to take different detours along the way. But we are committed to getting there and we're going to move fast on that path. We're going to move a purpose on that path. But we are going to get to that goal. So it's not rigidity. I just want to be clear. Rigor is not rigidity. Okay, so is there any difference in terms of the rigorous approach if you're on a burning platform versus going from good to great? I'll go first and pre-ordered. I'd love to hear your take on this. For me, the difference between burning platform versus good to great is to this point, the pre is covering here around purpose beyond the bottom line. When platform is burning, the purpose is obvious. It is very easy to communicate that. When it's a good to great, then it takes a bit more work by the leader to articulate that purpose and to help their team members find within themselves what their purpose is and how does it allow that organization. So it's not that rigor becomes more or less important. It's just it's easy to articulate the why to find that purpose when the places I fire and everyone can see it. Thank you, Dom. And Priya? Yeah, I'll add on to that. One of the companies in our samples was coming off of one of their best years, one of their best years yet. And yet they were embarking on a transformation. And so that required the leaders to really sit down and clarify, why are we doing this? We're doing this because we know we can be better because we have, we see a lot of growth in our horizon. And we can be better to our customers and have more of a competitive edge. And so I think to Dom's point as well, when it's more of a good to great situation, it's even more important to be really clear on your objectives, to empower the organization and get them to rally around this. Thank you both. So one more question related to the bankable plan and how you set it. If you set a more modest bankable plan, you're more likely to get it. But how do you ensure that the folks that you've been describing in terms of taking this rigorous approach have truly set a step change ambitious bankable plan? Yeah, I can go first with this and then Dom happy for you to jump in. This is where doing an outside in view what truly is in setting the aspiration is really important. We have found that otherwise you can become a bit insular and you need to push yourself and it's hard to push yourself when you don't know exactly what good can look like. And so setting the bankable plan and making sure that the plan is not too modest means going beyond what you may think is possible, setting that aspiration and hence why rigor so important in the execution. That's exactly right. Is that an objective perspective before you launch the transformation? Where should that go be? And then I would add after the transformation, after the fact we can see by the outperformance versus peer on total share return. So total share holder return, we can see that indeed those highest performing most rigorous transformations had set objectives that really were in excess of their peers. They really were quite audacious goals. And that shows up in the data when we look back, backwards looking data on these transformations. Okay, so I don't want to sidetrack us, but when you do that outside in analysis, how do you help bring the organization along and convince them that this bankable plan is actually attainable? Do you share examples of other companies that have done it? And how do you work with clients on this to get people really excited about this collective aspiration? This is where I think it goes also back to performance and health going hand in hand together because one of the things that we like to do is really sit down with our partners and our clients and understand what are these pain points? The financial is the output, but really what's the root cause of it? And a lot of that is the pain points experienced by customers, by the employees. And so by truly understanding where are those friction points, I think that also helps open up the picture of how can this be different, along with our collective experience of what the industry might be trending towards. And also across industry perspectives as well. Very much agree with that. Too often when setting goals, organizations resort to just the benchmark. What has someone else been able to achieve, therefore that should be our goal? And I think that it's a helpful source of information, but it's insufficient and it's inaccurate. I mean, your company is not like the other company, so maybe that benchmark is too high, maybe that benchmark is too low. So I'm like, it doesn't actually get to it and it doesn't instill belief, it's just a number. It's going to this second level of analysis and understanding the root causes. So important, people need to visualize what needs to change in my company in order for that number to become real. And I say that when these aspirations setting processes are done appropriately, half of it is about getting to a number. The other half that is getting to a psychological, emotional acceptance of the reality and a belief that we can change in a commitment to drive that change. And if you just have the analytical exercise, like the Excel model, the PowerPoint Gek, that's not going to get there. It's actually got to be, you know, this mind and heart commitment to achieve this goal. Thank you. So can we now touch on how building resilience fits into this larger theme on the importance of rigor and a transformation? Dom? Sure, I think this goes to the earlier question around how do we know that these truly are ambitious goals or, you know, were the organizations that performed well, the ones that sandbag the best, even those that performed in the top quartile still ended up canceling 9% of the initiatives that they had originally planned on to drive their bankable plan. Those that were less rigorous, canceled a much higher proportion of initiatives, 15%. And I think there's a couple of takeaways from this. One is that there's always going to be wins and losses, successes and failures. Not every initiative is going to deliver the way we expected it to. What matters is how do you respond to that failure? And one is like, do I try and continue to push this initiative, try and figure out a way to make it work before resorting to canceling it? So less rigorous transformations were more likely to just give up early on an initiative. Just say, hey, you know what, didn't work out as planned too hard. Let's just forget about it. The more rigorous ones, the more successful ones were those that did that much less frequently, the 9% versus the 15%. Another insight that we came across as we were exploring this aspect of resilience was that those that were more successful were also much better at even for the 9% they canceled, coming up with something to backfill it, coming up with what's planned be, what's another initiative and maybe do it.
very different and maybe even addressing a totally different source of value differently but a different part of the business. But they were much better at saying, okay, well, we've still made that commitment. We're going to find a way to get there, even a very different way to the one that we first saw. So that's resilience. How do you respond to these setbacks and still maintain that commitment to the goal? And, Dom, while we're on this topic of resilience, we've been talking about the need for rigor in an organizational transformation, but for the folks participating in it, there are also in many cases running a business at the same time and there are only so many hours in the day. So, I understand that it's important for the leadership to communicate a sense of purpose. But in your work with these executives, how do you help them not only stay on track in pursuit of the bankable plan, but also not completely burn out? So, as you said, purpose is really important. It is much easier to achieve hard things when you think those hard things are also important. I found one of the most effective things is engage others in setting the goal and setting the deadline. So, as an example of this, we were talking about speed before and how quickly can we get things done? I have a tree deadline suck, right? It's disempowering, is that a word? It's the opposite of empowering with someone else as you go to get it done by this day. Why? Like, why that day? I find it tremendously more effective when you ask the person what would be a reasonable time to get this thing done by and use that as the opening for the conversation. Maybe they come back with something that really isn't pushing at the speed that is needed. You know, maybe say, "Hey, it'll take three months. It'll take a month." But use that as a starting point. And then the second follow-up question it asks would be, what would it take to get it done by and then, you know, instead of time that really is aspirational? What would it take to get it done by the end of this week? What would it take to get it done by, you know, something that is much faster? And more often than not, what it would take would be just to give that person a hand. There is some obstacle that they're aware of. And they're just looking at the obstacle going, "Oh God, it's going to be so hard for me to get over that obstacle." For whatever reason. But if you ask them, "What would it take?" often that is in the power of the other person to help remove that obstacle to address it. A common example I see is, "Yes, you know, some says it's going to take three months." Say, "What would it take to get it done in a month?" Well, I'd need three times the resources. And they go, "Okay, well, this initiative is going to deliver $10 million to get you those resources that is going to cost us $100,000." It seems like a pretty good ROI to me. By having those conversations, you can start teasing out what really is the obstacle and actually help the person rather than just beating with a stick and say, "Well, you've got to get it done, you've got to get it done." Work it together. And like, you know, get a little bit deeper and understand what really is obstacle. Sometimes the obstacle is, "Hey, I needed a degree of organizational alignment to move forward with this. I've got ten different stakeholders I've got to get to agree." You know, they just don't, they butt heads, everything. If you're working with a senior and later this, see your leader on this. You can explore it and say, "Well, actually, five of those stakeholders, they have voice, but they don't have a vote in this." These other five, they do have a vote. And like me as the senior person, I have a convening power. I have an ability to bring them all together. So put it on me. I'll get that meeting together. I'll get the five folks in the room and we'll hash you out in an hour and we'll figure out the answer. But it's this thing of like, "Hey, we're in it together. Let's find out what the obstacle is and see what I can do to remove it." So what role do supporting systems, things like software and other tools play in providing some of these resources that you've been describing earlier to ensure that the rigour is applied as you just described? Dom? Yeah, if you want example, I'm particularly excited about these days. So McKinsey, you've got the benefit of having been doing this. We've been very much this form of transformation for the last ten to fifteen years. We've got a tremendously deep database of initiatives. We're talking millions of individual initiatives across every sector, every scale of company, every sort of value lever you could think of, a tremendous dataset. And now with the sort of AI revolution, we've been able to train agents on that such that embedded in our transformation management software, we have a value at risk agent which can very early on identify which initiatives are putting value at risk and which initiatives need to have this sort of conversation, what would it take to deliver this thing so we can address it earlier rather than, you know, it's well gone off the rails and it's not difficult to bring back. And so that addressing it earlier, that helps the person who's trying to drive it, it helps the organization. And we have these amazing tools that enable us to do that. Maybe the last thing I would just add Sean to this question is this idea of like, if you're not alone, I think when people feel overwhelmed and that personal resilience ties back though to the transformation team itself and that's the entire company. And so what we often seen too is this is a chance to break those silos and also a chance to work a bit unconventionally. So maybe, you know, not following the same SOP that you've always been following but how can you be a bit more agile in trying something new for this one time and then repeating it, adapting it as you scale up forward. And I think that kind of fresh perspective can also be a bit invigorating for people too. And do you have any examples of where you've seen this massive turnaround and the employees have just gotten this whole new sense of energy as a result of taking this approach? So I was working with one industrial company here in the US going to one of these transformations when the transformation started, we ran the organizational health index to get a sense of sort of, you know, where is the company at in terms of organizational health? And if you're not familiar with the organizational health index, think of it. It is different too but as a rough sort of analogy, think of it in employee engagement survey. They scored very firmly in the bottom quarter. This was not a healthy organization. It was not an effective workplace. There was no great place to show up to work. One specific site within that scored it two, like a on a percentile basis, two. Two, two out of a hundred? Two out of a hundred. So not a great place. Going through this rigorous transformation and it was one of the most rigorous transformations we've seen, you know, and it shows up in this data set. By the end of the second year, they had moved to just shy of the first quartile. They're at 72, 72 second percentile. From 20 something to 70 second, tremendous improvement in what it was like to be at this place. But then here, going back to your point, a related to resilience, related to individual employees and how they're experiencing it, at that one site that was scoring two towards the end of the second year, they were actually struggling to deliver on their transformation objectives. They had a few gaps towards their goals. And as an example of resilience, there was a front line employee, he was working in the loading base at the back of the factory where they palatized the product and put it on trucks to shoot for off the customers. His job was to run that palatization process. Part of that, he's got two lines, each with a massive cling wrap machine, wrapping up the palette with cling wrap. And he found that one line was running out faster than the other. And this was a pain for him because he had to go and get an 80 pound spool of cling wrap and put on his shoulder and bring it over and stick it on the thing and set up again. This was frustrating to him. And he also realized that, hang on a second, this is costing us a lot more money because I'm running this, I'm going to replace this spool more frequently, I've got a bimal cling wrap essentially. And he found that the root cause was the RPM settings were different on the two wrappers. Very simple issue. So he was able to adjust that setting, this ended up saving that one plant $40,000 a year and then multiply that across 20 different plants in their footprint. And they ended up saving something plus or minus on each plant is a different issue. But by standardizing that issue, they managed to save 800,000 across the network. Wow, on an annual basis. On an annual basis. I'm one employee deep in the organization saying, hey, I've got a pain point to Priya's earlier comment. Like this is about real pain points, not just throwing a crazy number out there and saying, let's go for it. Finding a real pain point that was valuable to the organization and just having this commitment to, hey, we are going to hit our goal. We're going to find new ideas. And so that idea surfaced because that guy's supervisor and so on had like reached down to employees, hey guys, we want your ideas. I want to hear your ideas. Maybe that guy would have fixed it for himself, but that idea wouldn't have radiated across the network of footprints unless there's that engagement deep in broad and that commitment to hit the goal. That is a very inspiring story. And dumb, how did the company then rapidly scale that opportunity that you just described? Yeah, great question. Sure. I think there were three things here that allowed that scaling to happen rapidly. One is this wave system that we have where every initiative and the transformation is clearly articulated. It's got a description. It's got the business case. You can understand, well, how did he get 20,000 on that or 40,000 on the S800? They're like, how do the numbers work? So that's somebody else's business case. And also really detailed, what is the implementation plan? What were the steps that were necessary to do this? Like maybe it required actually changing the type of cling wrap we're using. Maybe it required changing the size or shape of the palette, whatever it may be, like having really detailed so that someone else can replicate it. So there's a little bit of just caught up.
modification of what is the initiative in a system that is transparent is real time that you can have broad access to. So that's one part. I think the second part is having the infrastructure for knowledge sharing, like an organizational level. So in that case, there was an operations workstream. There was all that transforming how we do our operations in all of our plants. And then that's the organization wide, but then there was an operations transformation lead at each site. And then there was a forum where once a week, you know, the operations, transforming forum, that lead plus an executive sponsor would convene the leads at each site. And they do knowledge sharing, collective problem solving. Hey, I'm facing this problem. Hey, I'm seeing this opportunity. And in this case, hey, we found this opportunity at our loading bay. Oh, tell me more about it. Oh, that sounds great. Well, actually, it's initiative. You know, one two three four five six and wave, you can go and look at it and see all the details there. Oh, that's great. I'm going to copy that. I'm going to replicate it at my site. I'm going to find someone who's excited to own it and we're going to drive it. So that's so there's the codification. There's the organizational infrastructure. But I think almost most importantly, there was this mindset, this hunger to find these improvement opportunities and go and look for them. And you know, how do you inculcate that mindset, that hunger? Well, large part of it is, you know, the purpose while doing this. It's the empowerment of people to go after and do it. But also, and like we haven't touched on it here is rewarding people for doing that. Now, where people incentivize to want to go and find that and rapidly spread it. And in that case, in that organization, the person implementing, person delivering that initiative was paid 1% of the value from it. So if you're delivering something as worth $100,000 for the organization, you will get the $1,000 one time spot bonus payment for doing that. Pretty quickly, people started looking in the corner to see what opportunities they could find very effective organization, great ROI. And like the money piece matters, but also just people feeling that hey, what I do is appreciate it is recognized on the whole list. That matters as well. And pre any examples you'd like to share here. Yeah, I'm going off of the reward financially, but also nonfinancially, I would say eliminate the hierarchy. One of one of my favorite things, I think I see in transformations is when the CEO will make a call to that frontline employee and say, I heard about this. This is amazing. Thank you. And that just changes their world. I've seen it happen live and it is just as a spectator, it is really, really powerful. So it's financial, but it's also nonfinancial incentives as well. And then going deep into the organization as well, we know that transformations are way more successful when you, when most of the organization, all the organizations engaged. And so folks having the chance to contribute and make meaningful change and then be able to share that also creates the connective tissue and purpose that you're looking for as well. And dumb, can you comment a bit more on the relationship between rigor and resilience and how together they can fuel transformation, especially when initiatives don't immediately pan out and actually need to be revisited. So I've alluded to this a little bit earlier that the most rigorous organizations are way more resilient and resilient when you're things don't go their way. They're great at looking externally to find new initiatives. And you know, those in the top court, I mean, you know, medium, create 450 new initiatives after they've already committed to their plan. So these are initiatives that weren't in their original plan. These are ideas they came up with afterwards through, for instance, engaging the guy at the loading doc who's running the talentization process. Whereas those who are not in the top court, I'll create way fewer new initiatives, medium only 100. And so this goes a little bit back to that earlier question that relating to rigor versus rigidity and being consistent, being rigorous, being resilient is not about sticking to the original plan no matter what. It's about continuously creating new value to reach your goal while remaining committed to that goal. So the goal doesn't change, but the path to get their changes. We're not saying, hey, we used to want to get a gold medal and you're now, you know, right now I'm okay with sort of, you know, fifth place finish should be pretty good. No, we still want the gold medal. We've just realized that hang on a second, you know, we lost that match. We're going to have to pick it up in the next match. You know, we are going to find a way to get there, even if it's not the original way, we expect it. And top performers maintain momentum, maintain confidence and belief in optimism, hope, maintain hope by consistently creating new initiatives, creating many, many, many more than those who are in the top court out. And so when you're in the middle of the transformation, there are probably some cases where specific initiatives that maybe folks thought we're going to be successful, turn out not to be. And Dom, you alluded to this a little bit. The notion of sometimes they don't work out and you actually need to add new ones. But how does that flexibility, if you will, fit with this rigorous approach? In other words, if you're taking a rigorous approach, how do you identify and stop initiatives that are no longer valid? And how does stopping those initiatives fit into the rigorous approach we're talking about right now? Yeah, I think one of the things we talk about that I think is also different in going back to how we started this conversation around hope not being a strategy. Oftentimes, hope is a strategy when you're not having consistent conversations about the progress of the transformation. You're not actually getting deep into the problem solving of it. And that's where you do things differently. And that means also knowing when something just also isn't going to work. Not giving up on it too soon. That's about that's resilience. But then also knowing when the juices are worth the squeeze. And when you have real structural obstacles that are in your way to Dom's point earlier, if someone said, I need three resources, but that initiative was worth $100,000 and not 10 million. Well, then that doesn't really make sense anymore. And so either there's another pathway to get there or it's a chance to take a step back and say, what are we really achieving with this initiative? And does that really help us meet her goal or not? And if it doesn't, that's okay. And then you get back into the consistency here, which is making this a part of how you work your way of working, creating new initiatives to then back up and get you back back on the right direction to where you're heading. And how about maintaining the energy in the organization and the importance of having that shared purpose? And what role does emotion play in building that energy? Do you have any practical examples or techniques you can share? Dom, I know you've got a couple of guitars in your background right now. Maybe anything with music? I said, absolutely. Absolutely I have multiple examples of this. I've had cases where an organization has almost adopted like a theme song that they weave it into all of the corporate comms and it becomes a bit of an emblem for them. So like that's just kind of a low stakes kind of easy to achieve example. I had another organization where they adapted an existing song, but they might kind of change the lyrics to match their organization and built that into their corporate comms. You know, that was okay. This next thing that a third step, but I had one occasion is working with a bank, apologies to anybody who works at a bank out there, but I feel like banks are usually pretty conservative, pretty dry, risk of verse organizations. In this case, the C-suite performed a song, it became the theme song for their transformation. And when I say performed, I don't mean like they just stood on stage at a town hall and like, you know, lip sync to the song. They performed in that they shot a music video in a bar and they had like dance moves and they were singing and it was all in. And I think there were that was amazing on multiple levels, but it was effective for a couple of reasons. One, I mean, if you can get the CEO to do stuff like that, like they are clearly committed, like they are betting their personal reputation, their credibility on success of this thing and getting all the other C-suite members, there's a group of alignment and commitment that that represents. Two, it made it a little bit fun, which I think helped change the way that organization then approach some of the resilience conversations. How it approached failure, how it approached, okay, like we're going to, we're going to try and get that initiative to work, it's not working, okay, what's the other thing we're going to go and do. And how do we deal with those conversations about red? So removed a little bit of that allergy to failure. And three, just in terms of getting the message out, most corporate communications doesn't really stick. Sorry, it's sure enough I'm. No offense, taken down. I had to get it to stick internally. If people are getting bombarded with so much information, this was one thing that stuck. And hey, maybe not everybody knew the details of all, you know, 500 initiatives, the company was executing. They knew that this thing was happening, this thing was important, this thing had corporate energy behind it. And you know, I wish I had the commission.
the confidentiality permission to share this video because it really was something special. It sounds really inspiring. And oftentimes though, these transformations can come with changes that actually can create an undercurrent of fear. And how do you overcome that when it happens? You want to inspire folks, right? But they might also be wondering at the same time what that change means for the organization and more particularly for their own job. I'll offer a perspective then for you with love yours. Really important question, one of the organization's commonly faced. I think it is important to really understand, appreciate that the specifics of that company and what are the challenges it is facing. So like one example is working with a heavy industrial company where it was going to result in thousands of people losing their jobs. It was going to result in tens of thousands of people losing their jobs if they didn't make the changes that were necessary. They were facing, we're going to have to make some really hard choices or we're going to stop existing. And what's not existing, there are entire towns that depended on this company for the very existence. Like they were the major employer in a number of small towns throughout the Midwest. And if the company folded, all of those jobs would go away, those communities would be very hard hit. So there were some really tough decisions that needed to be made, but put in the broader context. It was better than having to make those other tough decisions. And that doesn't make it any easier. It doesn't make it feel any better for those who are going to lose their jobs or even for the survival guilt that remains. But I think if management can be transparent about what we are doing and why we are doing it, and you're going back to that point of purpose, I think it can be very helpful. Yeah, I was going to say radical transparency. I think opening up this transformation means it really exposing all those metrics, exposing your goals and making sharp runs on the same team from the front line to the management team. And I think that makes people uncomfortable. I think the management teams can feel uncomfortable, which is why diligent monitoring, really visual kind of metrics that can be centered all around the company are really important. Because it keeps everyone on the same talk track. Rumors don't get started, but people know the why. They may not like it, but they know why. And they can start to get their heads around it. And Priya, maybe you could take us through some of the things that folks can do today to start working toward a rigorous transformation right now. Yeah, the great thing is everything we've talked about, you can start to make some steps towards doing these things today and testing them out. I think first on speed, finish one thing fast. We talked about, I think, Don talked about this earlier. What would it take? What would it take to get something done one month earlier? So take that project that's tracking, figure out what would be, what's stopping it in its place? What are those friction points, those obstacles? Make some hard calls, determine what you need to decide on, what you need to stop, what you may need to simplify to get this done 30 days earlier. And then hold yourself to that, really walk in that plan, reset the date, actually change the date because oftentimes what happens will see is like, yeah, we'll aim to get to this 30 days earlier, but we're going to keep the original date. It doesn't create the same kind of momentum, right? The same kind of accountability. And really try to work to that. And if you don't get to that, that's okay. I think a lot of times what we see is when we, and the clients that we work with, there's always a bit of fear of moving this up a month earlier. It creates that accountability, but it's also okay. It's okay to say, you know what, we tried and we learned x, y, and z. And actually because of that, we're going to get to a better outcome. And so we do actually still need that extra week or two, but we're still finishing two weeks early. Something like that. For resilience, we talked a lot about that an initiative is never going to go perfect. It's never going to go according to the plan, the original plan. So pick that one struggling initiative and figure out how to reset it. Change the current approach. Instead of, oftentimes what happens, I think when things are struggling is our initiative owners and workstream leaders will say, well, these are all the ways that it's not going to work. These are all the ways where it's going wrong. Turn that around and it's head and say, what would it take to make this go right? What do I need to believe in? And decide on those two or three things that you could probably action. Fill them out, beat them up, brainstorm it, but then develop that execution plan and to help turn that around. And decide what kind of trade-offs you need to do that too. Lastly, on consistency, you can pick an initiative that you own fully and to end and hold yourself accountable to one new standard or metric. That could be a customer review. It could be this specific KPI that you're going to track and monitor now. It could be seeing something in action by walking the floors and then be able to correct and move things long and real time. But making sure that you embed it into your operating cadence is what's really going to be different and enable the consistency that you're looking for. Thank you, Priya. And don't I understand that your research on rigor is ongoing? Where are you and Priya taking it next? Yeah. So for those who are studying in Leningwold, we will have an article coming out, likely next month. And of course, if you're interested in a conversation with Priya on myself, you can always get in touch with us. And you're doing next. I mean, that's getting the concept out there. I think what we're doing next is bringing this to our clients, to the companies we are working with to help increase their rigor and therefore their odds of success in achieving these audacious goals. Not just their odds of success, but how their people feel about it along the way. Awesome. Priya, damn. Thank you so much for taking the time today. Thanks for having me, Tara Sean. And thank you to all of our listeners for joining us today. We hope you enjoyed the conversation and we welcome your feedback and ideas for future podcasts. Just email us at
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