I have recently had reason to apply much of what I have learnt in my business life to my personal life. Without going into too much detail it came about after a trip to the doctor at which he told me I had type two diabetes. Initially I was devastated and hosted a personal pity party.

After a few days, however, I began to think about what I could do about it because I am committed to living a long and healthy life.

It occurred to me that the principles that underpin successful organisational change were likely to be just as relevant for me as a person. As it happens I know a fair bit about change as I have spent most of my career running change programmes either as a consultant to large organisations or as an executive leading teams within organisations. The irony is that although I may know a fair bit about change, I discovered that my knowledge has always been unstructured and intuitive. This meant it was difficult to pull it out of the business context and apply it to myself. So I set about structuring what I knew and came up with the following:

Start with purpose. Or as Simon Sinek coaches, “start with why”. People will work harder and offer more of themselves if they understand and believe that what they are doing is important and contributing to something bigger than themselves. A clear sense of purpose or vision provides this background for effectiveness. Purpose and vision are fantastic and absolutely necessary, however they are not enough.

You also need a way to measure and monitor the progress you are making towards your goal. Air travel provides a good analogy: while you need to know your destination, the purpose or goal for the flight, you also need constant feedback to let you know where you are in relation to the goal and be able to make whatever corrections are needed along the flight. Your success measures are effectively predefined by a combination of the purpose or vision and the dynamics which you want to harness to achieve that success (see below).

Understand underlying dynamics. In defining your strategy and approach, focus on the underlying dynamics at play and then plan to use those dynamics to your advantage. As I have written in the past I am fundamentally lazy, and as a lazy person I always try and find the easiest way to achieve a result. That easiest way almost always involves seeking to understand what is really going on behind the scenes and then using those dynamics to your advantage rather than pushing against them.

Act on the plan. Over time I have learnt that for a plan to be effective you have to live in the world of the doable, or as I like to say, focus on next practice not best practice. As a consultant I lived and breathed best practice. All my clients had to do was implement best practice and they would reap the promised rewards and benefits. As a CIO however I began to realise that knowing best practices and successfully implementing them were two completely different things. Often best practices are simply not achievable given the current level of maturity of the organisation – it’s like trying to get a fat man to run a marathon.

Learn, celebrate and correct. Having set off on the journey to meet your goal things are going to happen. Some of those are going to be good things and some not so good. Whatever happens, channel it into a process of evaluation and learning rather than a self-assessment of yourself as being brilliant or a failure. If what you did worked can it be systematised and repeated? If it didn’t work why not and what is a logical next action to take? So there it is, a model for change and success that can be applied in many different circumstances including personal and organisational change on virtually any scale.

ABOUT OWEN McCALL//

Passionate about using technology to make a real difference to businesses, communities, families and individuals, Owen McCall has focused his career on understanding and answering this question: “How do you harness the power of IT to deliver value?”
An independent IT consultant, he is a former CIO of The Warehouse.