Meanwhile, at Ponder: While Peter was busy buying pens and notebooks, Moritz took the time to reflect on why so many transformation processes fail. Here are his thoughts …

Time and again we witness companies devoting an incredible amount of time and energy to meticulously planning and setting up innovation projects. They design comprehensive organisational diagrams and define decision processes down to the smallest detail. And all this before the people who are supposed to »innovate« – that is internal or external design and development teams, domain experts, etc. – have any chance of getting started.

This generally leads to complete stagnation and frustration on all sides.

Let me give you an example from my personal experience:

The digital platform of a media company was strong in content, but technically and functionally outdated and had to be relaunched. It was clear to everyone: We have to act now to keep up with the competition.

So the will to change was obviously there, but the pressure on the project team was high. Things were not made any easier by the fact that such an important and politically charged project had to be carried out by different teams within the company. So everything took its usual (not very successful) course and after a while, the project manager was replaced and the team was reorganised. While the team members were of good will, the difficult circumstances, in particular the frequent outside interference, left them completely unsettled.

The dilemma: They had lost confidence in themselves and their problem-solving skills and made a decisive mistake. Instead of relying on their own experience and intuition, they sought salvation in the form of organisation charts, action guidelines for every conceivable situation and in the formulation of irrevocable rules on roles, responsibilities and decision-making processes. It is easy to imagine how successful this approach was …

Another case:

In a major corporation without much Agile experience, things didn’t go quite as well with the innovation project as the expensive consultants had promised and the management had expected.

Perhaps it was because the roadmap had been set for years, alas without any space for ground work. Perhaps it was because consultants and management were focused on innovation, but rather bored by the constraints of existing infrastructure or day-to-day business.

Anyway, when after a few months no visible results were shipped, first the process was »optimised« and then the team was drastically expanded. Still, somehow things didn’t work out.

Their way forward? Almost every team member was assigned an Agile Coach as a permanent companion. The result: Communication revolved even more around processes, responsibilities and the »proper« use of Scrum. And as you’d expect, this did not lead to work progressing quicker, or to user-relevant results or new ideas.

But why is it that again and again, projects simply don’t go as planned? Shouldn’t we be able to come up with the right standards and processes by now?

I’m afraid not.

Complex systems – that is, all those in which humans interact with each other – simply cannot be planned. And anyone who believes that we could push them in the right direction with just a few purposeful interventions is mistaken.

However, shall we just give up then and embrace the inevitable mess that every future project is going to end up in?

No. Just as our experience has repeatedly shown us what doesn’t work, it has also shown us what does.

The only thing needed is interdisciplinary collaboration without hierarchies and the courage to actually make things.

The closer, more direct and less hierarchical people collaborate in projects, the more constructive and meaningful their interactions become. This hugely improves the projects’ results as well. Miracles can happen when design, development, domain experts, copywriters and business people work together to solve problems, when they put experimentation and learning above over-defining processes.

You can experience this frequently in workshop formats such as design sprints which really seem to be ubiquitous these days. In just a couple of days, a small interdisciplinary team develops viable business- and user-relevant features – which are often more valuable than the result of weeks of traditional project work with countless rounds of approval and modifications.

Once you have experienced the transformative power of such shared successes, you no longer worry about process planning or decision workflows.

Instead of wasting huge amounts of energy on planning, expensive external consultants and control, companies should use this energy exclusively to empower their employees with the freedom they need for true collaboration and experimentation.

Sounds relatable? Hit reply to share your experience or discuss how we can collaborate!

Till next time, Moritz