Picture credit: urbanmkr
Genuine runaway successes may be few and far between in the world of business change. But when they do happen they can sometimes cause far more damage than outright failure so beware the perils of success!
What are the dangers of success? This is a vital question that goes unasked too often by those planning projects and programmes.
Because risk assessment is usually focused on the dangers of failure, planners tend to spend most time considering just three scenarios:
- Best case
- Worst case
- Most likely
As a consequence, resource planning naturally gravitates towards the ‘most likely’ case, with perhaps a limited degree of resource contingency – somewhere towards ‘best case’ levels.
This ‘rational’ behavioural pattern is well within the comfort zone of most organizations and therefore will not raise any eyebrows during investment appraisal; because it looks kind of right.
But what happens to your resource planning if your business initiative turns out to be a runaway success: meeting or exceeding the ‘best case’ scenario? Very few of us can just turn on the tap and see the resource flow respond immediately and adequately – availability of people, money, time and materials doesn’t work like that in the real world.
Effective change planning needs to consider properly these questions:
What does success really look like?
How quickly will you be able to cover any shortfall in necessary resources to support success?
What does the resource demand profile look like – is it linear or exponential?
Are the resources actually obtainable?
If there is a reasonable risk that your change initiative might be very successful, you might just consider deliberately constraining the chances of success, through careful phasing and tightly controlled implementation. This may be counter-intuitive, especially in these straitened times, but could pay dividends in the long-run. It’s not so much a Plan B – more like a Plan A Plus.
How are you planning to avoid the perils of success? Do you really have everything you will need to sustain the initiative, or could you end up with egg on your face if you do too well?
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Colin, interesting perspective. I have a similar observation: Many organizations (if not most) “succeed in spite of themselves”. In other words, they do many things wrong and yet they still succeed.
This has been especially true in the United States. Our economy was always strong enough to reward both mediocrity and excellence. Mediocre organizations or managers viewed their success as an affirmation of their management skills and their processes. They do not look at the heroic efforts of their staff or the luck that helped them to avoid failure.
Another factor: “Bad news never travels upward”. The staff may see the problems and may identify them but the problems tend to get filtered as they travel up the chain of command. This promotes a culture based on “self delusion” which supports your argument about the perils of success. Interesting dialog.
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