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Key Takeaways Misalignment of perception is the main cause of failed organizational transformation initiatives. The solution is to architect a new system dedicated to creating clarity.
Stop solving problems from the inside out. Finding the optimum solution requires an outside perspective — a facilitator who can ask the basic questions internal teams are too conditioned to see.
Breakthrough ideas are useless without a path to execution, and execution is impossible without clear ownership.
There’s a well-known allegory that tells the story of several blind men who encounter an elephant for the first time: one touches the tusk and declares it’s a spear, another touches the leg and calls it a tree, while a third grabs the tail and insists it’s a rope. And while each man draws a reasonable conclusion based on the data he has, they are all completely wrong about the nature of the animal.
This dynamic is precisely why 70% of all organizational transformation initiatives fail. As leaders, it’s easy to blame this failure rate on external factors like a flawed strategy, an insufficient budget or bad market timing. But those excuses mask a deeper problem, as most transformations are dead on arrival for reasons that have little to do with these external factors. Instead, the failure is almost always internal.
A leader from sales touches the customer-facing part of a project and sees one reality, while a leader from operations touches the internal process and sees another. So, although they leave the same meeting nodding in agreement, in truth, they are all trying to manage a different beast, which creates the fundamental disconnect — or, if you will, the elephant in the conference room.
Related: Want Your Next Change Initiative to Succeed? Start With These 4 Coaching Moves
Stop solving problems from the inside out
Once you see the elephant, you can’t unsee it. And that realization immediately clarifies why the conventional playbook of more PowerPoint decks and status meetings is so ineffective. It’s a playbook designed to report on a problem, not solve a deep-seated misalignment of perception. It is painfully obvious that in order to break this cycle, you have to architect a new system dedicated entirely to creating clarity.
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