A new leader in an organization once asked to understand my role. My answer was very simple: “My role is to change mindsets.”
I’m fairly sure the expectation was something different: a laundry list of functional responsibilities, goals, in-flight activities or tasks that were top of mind, the makeup of my team, etc. All relevant aspects of a job, to be sure, but not my primary focus.
I explained that my goal was to help transform the organization, and if I couldn’t change people’s mindsets, everything else that needed to be done was going to be much more difficult. That’s how it is with change.
Complacency is the enemy. Excellence is a journey and you are never meant to reach the destination.
Having been part of and worked with organizations that enjoyed tremendous market share but then encountered adversity and lost their advantage, there were common characteristics, starting with basking in the glow of that success too long and losing the hunger and drive that made them successful in the first place.
The remainder of this article will explore the topic further in three dimensions: leadership, innovation, and transformation in the interest of providing some perspective on the things to look for when excellence is your goal.
Fall short of excellence, you can still be great. Try to be great and fail? You’re going to be average… and who wants to be part of something average? No one who wants to win.
Courageous Leadership
As with anything, excellence has to start with leadership. There is always resistance and friction associated with change. That’s healthy and good because it surfaces questions and risks and, in a perfect world, the more points of view you can leverage in setting direction, the more likely you’ll avoid blind spots or avoidable mistakes just for a lack of awareness or understanding of what you are doing.
There is a level of discipline needed to accomplish great things over time and courage is a requirement, because there will inevitably be challenges, surprises, and setbacks. How leaders respond to that adversity, through their adaptability, tenacity and resilience will ultimately have a substantial influence on what is possible overall.
Some questions to consider:
- Is there enough risk tolerance to create space to try new ideas, fail, learn, and try again?
- Is there discipline in your approach so that business choices are thoughtful, reasoned, intentional, measured, and driven towards clear outcomes?
- Is there a healthy level of humility to understand that, no matter how much success there is right now, without continuing to evolve, there will always be a threat of obsolescence?
Relentless Innovation
In my article on Excellence by Design, I was deliberate in choosing the word “relentless” in terms of innovation, because I’ve seen so many instances over time of the next silver bullet meant to be a “game changer”, “disruptor”, etc. only to see that then be overtaken by the next big thing a year or so later.
One of the best things about working in technology is that it constantly gives us opportunities to do new things: to be more productive and effective, produce better outcomes, create more customer value, and be more competitive.
Some people see that as a threat, because it requires a willingness to continue to evolve, adapt, and learn. You can’t place too much value on a deep understanding of X technology, because tomorrow Y may come along and make that knowledge fairly obsolete. While there is an aspect of that argument that is true at an implementation level, it gives too much importance to the tools and not enough to the problems we’re ultimately trying to solve, namely creating a better customer experience, delivering a better product or service, and so on.
We need to plan like the most important thing right now won’t be the most important 6 months or even a year from now. Assume we will want to replace it, or integrate something new to work with it, improving our overall capability and creating even more value over time.
What does that do? In a disciplined environment, it should change our mindset about how we approach implementing new tools and technologies in the first place. It should also influence how much exposure we create in the dependencies we place upon those tools in the process of utilizing them.
To take what could be a fairly controversial example: I’ve written multiple articles on Artificial Intelligence (AI), how to approach it, and how I think about it in various dimensions, including where it is going. The hype surrounding these technologies is deservedly very high right now, there is a surge in investment, and a significant number of tools are and will be hitting the market. It’s also reasonable to assume a number of “agentic” solutions will pop up, meant to solve this problem and that… ok… now what happens then? Are things better, worse, or just different? What is the sum of an organization that is fully deployed with all of the latest tools? I don’t believe we have any idea and I also believe it will be terribly inefficient if we don’t ask this question right now.
As a comparison, what history has taught us is that there will be a user plugged into these future ecosystems somewhere, with some role and responsibilities, to work in concert (and ideally in harmony) with all this automation (physical and virtual) that we’ve brought to bear on everyone’s behalf. How will they make sense of it all? If we drop an agent for everything, is it any different than giving someone a bunch of new applications, all of which spit recommendations and notifications and alerts at them, saying “this is what you need to do”, but leaving them to figure out which of those disconnected pieces of advice make the most sense, which should be the priority, and try somehow not to be overwhelmed? Maybe not, because the future state might be a combination of intelligent applications (something I wrote about in The Intelligent Enterprise) and purpose-built agents that fill gaps those applications don’t cover.
Ok, so why does any of that matter? I’m not making an argument against experimenting and leveraging AI. My point is that, every time there is surge towards the next technology advancement, we seldom think about the reality that it will eventually evolve or be replaced by something else and we should take that into consideration as we integrate those new technologies to begin with. The only constant is change and that’s a good thing, but we also need to be disciplined in how we think about it on an ongoing basis.
Some questions to consider:
- Is there a thoughtful and disciplined approach to innovation in place?
- Is there a full lifecycle-oriented view when introducing new technologies, to consider how to integrate them so they can be replaced or to retire other existing, potentially redundant solutions once they are introduced?
- Are the new technologies being vetted, reviewed, and integrated as part of a defined ecosystem with an eye towards managing technical debt over time?
Continual Transformation
In the spirit of fostering change, it is very common for a “strategy” conversation to be rooted in a vision. A vision sets the stage for what the future environment is meant to look like. It is ideally compelling enough to create a clear understanding of the desired outcome and to generate momentum in the pursuit of that goal (or set of goals)… and experience has taught me this is actually NOT the first or only thing important to consider in that first step.
Sustainable change isn’t just about having a vision, it is about having the right culture.
The process for strategy definition isn’t terribly complicated at an overall level: define a vision, understand the current state, identify the gaps, develop a roadmap to fill those gaps, execute, adapt, and govern until you’re done.
The problem is that large transformation efforts are extremely difficult to deliver. I don’t fundamentally believe that difficulty is often rooted in the lack of a clear vision or as simple as having execution issues that ultimately undermine success. I believe successful transformation isn’t a destination to begin with. Transformation should be a continual journey towards excellence.
How that excellence is manifest can be articulated through one or more “visions” that communicate concepts of the desired state, but that picture can and will evolve as capabilities available through automation, process, and organizational change occur. What’s most important is having courageous leadership and the innovation mindset mentioned above, but also a culture driven to sustain that competitive advantage and hunger for success.
Said differently: With the right culture, you can likely accomplish almost any vision, but only some visions will be achievable without the right culture.
Some questions to consider in this regard:
- Is there a vision in place for where the organization is heading today?
- What was the “previous” vision, what happened to it, did it succeed or fail and, if so, why?
- Is the current change viewed as a “project” or a “different way of working”? (I would argue the latter is the desired state nearly in all cases)
Wrapping Up
Having shared the above thoughts, it’s difficult to communicate what is so fundamental to excellence, which is the passion it takes to succeed in the first place.
Excellence is a choice. Success is a commitment. It takes tenacity and grit to make it happen and that isn’t always easy or popular.
There is always room to be better, even in some of the most mundane things we do every day. That’s why courageous leadership is so important and where culture becomes critical in providing the foundation for longer-term success.
I hope the ideas were worth considering. Thanks for spending the time to read them. Feedback is welcome as always.
-CJG 06/05/2025
Organized Chaos 