BBQ and Business Transformation
Kim Ehrman takes the mic from Michael Daehne to share what barbecue and business transformation have in common – and what we can learn from their similarities.
Since at FlexPoint, we care deeply about both barbecue and business transformation, and excelling in them can be tricky, we compiled five lessons that apply to both. They include:
Make a plan before you light the fire.
Keep it simple, stupid.
Measure, monitor, and adjust.
Pack your patience and survive the stall.
Don't over-index on the sauce.
We hope this playful comparison will equip you for success in one or both of these arenas.
Kim Ehrman: Welcome to Inflect, a podcast presented by FlexPoint Consulting, where we talk about navigating the critical inflection points of business and life.
Introduction
I'm Kim Ehrman, taking the mic today from Michael Daehne to share what barbecue and business transformation have in common. Yeah, you heard that right, barbecue.
Loyal listeners of the show will know that Michael has a deep and abiding love for barbecue. In fact, he even worked at a barbecue restaurant in high school, which he says is the hardest job he's ever had. He loves to tell the story of one time he had an angry customer throw barbecue sauce on him, which I'm sure taught perseverance that has served him well over the years.
Commonalities between Barbecue and Transformation
But what do barbecue and business transformation have in common, you may ask? There's more here than meets the eye. They both have simple origins, but today the version of them is expensive and difficult to do well. Success requires a mix of art and science, which means that everyone's doing it, but few are doing it well. That's because the process turns out to be more important than the tools, and you really can't rush it, barbecue or business transformation.
Five Lessons to Succeed in Barbecue and Transformation
Since at FlexPoint, we care deeply about both barbecue and business transformation, and excelling in them can be tricky, we compiled five lessons that apply to both. They include, make a plan before you light the fire. Keep it simple, stupid. Measure, monitor, and adjust. Pack your patience and survive the stall. And don't over-index on the sauce.
We hope this playful comparison will equip you for success in one or both of these arenas. So, let's get into the tips for success.
Make a Plan Before You Light the Fire
Lesson number one. Make a plan before you light the fire. In barbecue, this looks like understanding, how long will it take to cook this kind of meat at this kind of temperature? What wood will I use? When do I expect certain milestones to occur? Am I available at those times?
In business transformation, this looks like taking time to assess where you are today, envisioning a better future enabled by modern technologies, and then building an actionable transformation roadmap. Those who have worked with us have seen the roadmap methodology that we follow around baselining current state, envisioning future state, defining and evaluating gaps, and then roadmapping how to get from here to there.
Keep It Simple, Stupid
Lesson number two. Keep it simple, stupid. We often talk with clients and colleagues about why three in four transformation efforts fail to meet expectations.
There are plenty of reasons that things can go poorly, but the most frequent reason we see is over-complicating the project. We typically come at business transformation with an overarching objective. It might be cost cutting. It might be developing new capabilities, modernizing a technology stack, competing better in an industry. And then as we go, the simple vision gets additional items piled on. And that simple vision starts to get noisy, starts to get complex, and then the project risk, frankly, increases.
In barbecue, some of the great pitmasters make a brisket with just salt and pepper. They focus on executing well a very simple recipe. And so, from a business transformation perspective, we again want to focus on executing a simple objective really well. We want to be relentlessly skeptical of efforts to expand scope, to add complication, to just throw things into the plan because we're already working on something similar. Whether you're smoking a great brisket or delivering game-changing transformation, simplicity is crucial.
Measure, Monitor, and Adjust
Lesson number three, measure, monitor, and adjust. The best pitmasters use thermometers to gauge the progress of their smoked meat. But they also rely on experience and gut feel to make decisions along the way.
The same is true in business transformation. No matter how well you plan your journey, there will be some surprises. There will be some external factors that will force you to improvise. Your team composition may change quickly. Your competitive landscape may change under your feet. We often don't know precisely what will interrupt our best laid plans, but you can bet there will be something.
And it's the job of a transformation leader to play the hand you've been dealt. Just like that pitmaster making dozens of small decisions to produce a great brisket, great transformation leaders have good instincts and know how to adapt with shifting organizational priorities and changing industry dynamics.
Quantitative Transformation Health Measures
In business transformation, we have several quantitative health measures that we like to look at and several qualitative, as well. Quantitatively, we can look at budget, timeline, scope completion, quality of what's been delivered. We can look at resources, that is, our team members, both employees and contractors.
Qualitative Transformation Health Measures
From a qualitative perspective, we can look at team dynamics and collaboration, how people are working together. We can look at user engagement and alignment. This may be internal users, it may be external, but getting a sense for how our customers feel about what we're delivering, and whether we're on the same page with them, can be really helpful.
Another qualitative health measure we use is solution clarity. It can be really easy to sit in meetings and nod all of our heads that yes, we understand where we're going. We're on it. But you owe it to yourself to make sure that everyone who's responsible for delivering the solution truly understands what is being delivered from a business, functional, and technical perspective.
And then maybe Michael's favorite qualitative project health measure is what's keeping me awake at night. The very helpful WKMAAN acronym. It can be easy to get lost in details describing how the project or program is going. Asking, what's keeping me awake at night of leaders, of people working on the team, of folks around the effort can be really illuminating. It might show us risks that some of us weren't tracking. It might show us ways that this effort is super impactful and we should include some of those items in our messaging. So what's keeping me awake at night is a great qualitative measure for us to monitor.
Pack Your Patience and Survive the Stall
Lesson number four, pack your patience and survive the stall. For those who know about smoking a brisket, you're familiar with the stall, a phenomenon in which the internal temperature of the brisket suddenly stops rising during the cooking process. This can last more than four hours and usually occurs around 150 degrees Fahrenheit. And there's no shortcut, there's no trick to get around it. You just have to keep cooking.
For the barbecue novice, this can be one of the most puzzling and frustrating parts of the process, but you just have to patiently wait for the temperature to continue rising.
Transformation Fatigue
In transformation projects, we often see a similar phenomenon, where team members, stakeholders, and end users experience transformation fatigue midway through multi-year transformation journeys.
Early on in the project, everyone's excited about the promise of transformation, and late in the journey, people can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it's that middle phase, the stall, that can be really frustrating and where organizations and individuals are most likely to give up. But in the same way that you have to stick with it to produce a great brisket, you really have to keep on keeping on to deliver your transformation vision. Perseverance and commitment to your original vision, particularly during this challenging part of the project, may make or break your transformation journey.
Tactics for Surviving the Stall in Transformation
But we don't have to dismay, we have several tactics for surviving the stall. First up, own it, versus acting like it's not a problem. Simply acknowledging that the stall is happening, that, hey, we're all tired from working hard at this big, important goal, can make a world of difference.
So don't be afraid to own the stall. It can be a great time to realign, reenergize the team around the big goal that we're aiming for. It may also be a good time to infuse new or additional resources. Folks that aren't in the stall with us. Maybe they've been with the company but have been working on other things. Maybe they're new employee or contractor team members. Either way, consider infusing additional or new resources into the project.
It's also an opportunity to stage a halftime retro, or retrospective. By this point in the project or the program, you probably have a good sense for what's going well and what isn't going well. And frankly, this can change over time, too, so it's worth revisiting. So be willing to have a retrospective in this halftime or stall period and really dig in deep and learn well together.
A final way to survive the stall is to visualize the finish line. Paint a vivid picture of what it will look like, what it will mean to succeed on the transformation journey together. How will this impact customers? How will this impact team members? What opportunities will completing this effort unlock for all of us? You really can survive the stall, both in barbecue and in business transformation.
Don’t Over-Index on the Sauce
And finally, lesson number five, don't over-index on the sauce. From Michael's copious barbecue experiences, he says if your plate of barbecue shows up covered in sauce, you better lower your expectations. Good barbecue pitmasters don't need a lot of sauce to make their work product sing. Oftentimes the sauce is making up for poor quality ingredients or for faster process time.
The same is true in business transformation. You can't make up for poor inputs and rushed processes with a bunch of sauce or extras at the end. So we have five recommendations for preventing a sauce scramble at the end of a business transformation effort.
First, put your best people on the project from day one. We know they have day jobs, people rely on them. But what is the cost of not putting your best people on this? A potential scramble later on.
Second, spend a lot of time with your key users and seek to understand their processes and requirements. Involve your stakeholders, involve subject matter experts, all the way through the transformation journey, not just at the beginning and at the end.
Third, choose the right tools. And the right tools are those that solve the challenge at hand in a scalable manner. They may not be the cheapest, but they probably also aren't the one tool to do everything. So keep both of those guardrails in mind as you're considering tools.
Fourth, choose the right partners. Again, they may not be the cheapest. We wouldn't recommend that as the only benchmark. The right partner is someone who truly invests in your success, who contributes expertise, skill, experience, perspective that is outside of what you could have gotten within the organization. And the right partner at different phases of the journey can also be different. There may be a partner that's best for defining strategy. There may be a different partner that's best for implementing the strategy. Just make sure that that partner is a person or a team that enables you to shine at the end of the day.
And finally, align on your process and methodology and stick to it. Within FlexPoint, we've worked with, we've seen many methodologies. These are various combinations of waterfall, Agile, lots of combinations of both of those. And trust me, you can make many methodologies work. We're partial to Agile mindsets and methods, but far from dogmatic in that belief. Align on a set of processes, align on methodologies that work well for your team, and stick with them. Don't worry too much about how other people are accomplishing their transformations. Determine what works well for your team and execute that expertly.
Closing
So let's recap. First, make a plan before you light the fire. Second, keep it simple, stupid. Third, measure, monitor, and adjust. Fourth, pack your patience and survive the stall. And fifth, don't over-index on the sauce.
We hope you've enjoyed this lighthearted playbook on how to excel in business transformation inspired by one of our favorites, barbecue. If the FlexPoint team can be of any assistance in helping apply these lessons to your current set of opportunities, please let us know. We'd be happy to help.
