How Much Will Your Organization Change?

Organizations can’t sit still and survive. They cannot become what they need to be by remaining what they are. To compete and achieve in an ever-changing marketplace, leaders and organizations have to do things they have never done before. 

They either change or disappear. 

In the words of Haruki Murakami, “When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the storm is all about.” Time is a storm for people and organizations. 

How fast organizations change through incremental actions can be deceptive. Change never sleeps, but it only rarely occurs with a single, big decision or episode. Instead, change is a constant set of small actions, movements, and choices. It marches forward step-by-step every day. Because change is a process of cumulative actions, leaders are often caught off-guard by how fast or slow change really occurs. 

Think about this. As a general rule, your organization will likely look much the same in the next 12 to 18 months, but will be unrecognizable in five years. That’s how change works — its magic. Change is slow until it’s fast. 

As a result, leaders typically have a hard time predicting how much change their organization will experience in a set timeframe. They tend to overestimate the amount of change that will occur in the organization within two years, and underestimate the scope of change that will transpire in five to 10 years. 

This is important because sound strategic planning depends on how far out we believe we can anticipate change. Creating strategic plans three or more years out used to be the norm in most organizations and teams. But change is too fast and too slow for that timeframe to be meaningful anymore. Take a look at five-year strategic plans in retrospect and you’ll see they are generally laughable in their ambition, prediction, and focus. 

Planning for the future, setting strategic priorities and goals, and deciding on the investments the organization needs to make to keep pace is essential work. Doing so beyond a two-year horizon makes little sense in the dynamic environments leaders work in today. In fact, in many organizations, a strategic plan beyond one year will have to be revised so often as to make it relatively worthless. 

Change occurs at a deceptively slow and fast pace. Good leaders plan accordingly, setting their sights on the next year or two while admitting there is little hope of accurately predicting what will take place over the long term. In the words of visionary and former Southwest Airlines CEO Herb Kelleher, “We have a strategic plan. It’s called ‘doing things.’”