Article
It all starts with the customer and the experience you desire to design for them. While one organisation strives to be the most innovative partner, another one might position themselves as the most knowledgeable specialist. The importance of culture, social connection, engagement and the approach to leadership are based on conscious decisions that set the direction for the future.
The ambition serves as guiding principles for people’s daily decisions and actions and is founded on the overall purpose of an organisation. If people can identify with this purpose, engagement and ownership for change are far more likely to happen.
Why a good ambition works
The direction that leaders set for the organisation will shape the actions people take every day. Close to 70% of transformations are unsuccessful, and a key factor in this is the underestimation of employees to create truly sustainable impact.
Our experience shows that prerequisites of successful transformations are:
- Leadership is defined by setting the direction, explaining the “why” and removing impediments.
- People are involved early, empowered to act and take decisions.
- Indicators are in place – transparent and comprehensive to visualise progress.
- Failure is seen as an opportunity to learn.
- Transformation is seen as a journey with numerous small steps (not as a “big bang”).
In his studies, Daniel Pink (Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, 2009) uncovered “Autonomy”, “Mastery” and “Purpose” as the main drivers of human motivation. A clear direction and empowerment of people are consequently the seeds for emerging change and long-lasting engagement.
How mice empower employees and contribute to successful transformations
Successful transformations use local expertise as key input. Local employees should be encouraged and inspired to look at their own processes from a different perspective.
While many organisations acknowledge the importance of involving and empowering their employees throughout a transformation, there are only few that truly know how to do this. Involving employees early in the transformation empowers them to actively drive solution-finding and, as a result, sustainable change.
To bring the organisation’s ambition to life, employees are invited to experiment and learn by designing and launching small experiments that work as “Trojan mice”, gradually penetrating the organisation.
This is the foundation of a successful Trojan mice setup:
- Everybody can contribute with ideas to get one step closer to the organisation’s ambition.
- Small risk-free experiments are designed and carried out by small self-organised teams.
- The teams set up result-oriented hypotheses and prototype these across the organisation to tackle specific challenges with high energy.
- Throughout the experiments, the effect is measured, and Trojan mice can be multiplied, customised or stopped.
- Experiments allow for quick results, and learnings are captured along the way.
Trojan mice instead of Trojan horses
Unless we are willing to experiment, we cannot expect big breakthroughs. Phased implementation of a single big idea acts in reality just like a Trojan horse. A sneaky way of introducing a single idea as a method of solving a complicated problem. This sort of phased implementation is certainly not an experimental “safe to fail” pilot to test different ideas. Unlike a Trojan horse, a Trojan mouse’s job is not to win the war all at once; its job is to test the waters and inform future tactics. Because there are many mice rushing the gates, it is also more likely that some of these tests will come back.
The right combination of experiments with the best energy and desired results in line with the organisation’s ambition is quickly rolled out across the organisation.
Trojan mice quickly generate high energy, implementation dynamics and a can-do mentality of the participants. They empower employees to actively drive solution-finding and implementation, to take responsibility and to adopt the method at an early stage. Concrete and result-oriented prototypes can be rolled out quickly, enabling a fast implementation, quick results and durable change.
