One of the great farces of the early 21st Century was Dubya standing on an aircraft carrier, waving a banner behind him.
Mission accomplished, it read.
The Iraq War had achieved its goals of changing the regime, destroying non-existent WMDs, stopping terrorists or whatever the point of it all was.
Maybe the war was justified, maybe not. Either way, that’s an embarrassing moment in retrospect. A decade or so later, we were still fighting and witnessing the rise of ISIL.
Oh well.
But I don’t mean to pick on the younger President Bush. It’s a common mistake. We’ve all done it.
What mistake, exactly?
Well, it’s hard to declare victory when you don’t know what you’re playing for.
And you can’t declare success unless you know what the win conditions are.
Otherwise it’s like waving the Mission Accomplished banner in Narnia. When you invade a fictitious country, who knows when you win?
Change initiatives are often the same.
There’s great fanfare about the glorious new future waiting on the other side…
But how do you know when you’ve succeeded?
How do you tell when you’re moving closer or further away?
More than that…
How do you celebrate the little wins along the way, correct your course and double down on what works?
This is a common problem: failing to define what success looks like. And it’s a tricky one to see. In your head, everything is so clear.
It’s obvious what a good outcome looks like.
And it’s just as clear in everyone else’s head too.
But who’s to say you’re thinking about the same thing?
If you can’t define and measure success, you can’t agree on what it is.
And you can’t prove you’ve achieved it.
Just because no one is leaving, that doesn’t mean you’ve solved your retention problems.
Just because you’re announcing new products, that doesn’t mean your workforce is more innovative.
Figuring out how to declare victory is a challenge. It requires deliberate effort and skill.
It needs clear, unambiguous, accurate, meaningful and… well, not ridiculous measures.
Stats that can’t be so easily gamed.
Stats that are somehow both objective numbers and real reflections of the state of things.
It’s not easy.
Maybe it’s not even possible.
But I’ll say this:
Like with everything else, organisational trust helps.
When your employees trust your leaders, there’s less of a need for cold, hard facts. Sure, you want to measure things as much as possible. But facts alone won’t persuade anyone and, with enough trust, people will follow you where the facts are unclear either way.
And it goes the other way.
If your leaders trust your employees, then they’re less likely to lie to you. One of the traps with data is in scared subordinates telling leaders what they want to hear.
That’s a recipe for a whole lot of things. But organisational change? That’s not one of them.