Our conditions of success are the factors we identify that will make a positive difference and increase our chances of successfully implementing the change.
We can start out with 5 key conditions for success. Depending on our particular change, having more than 5 conditions for success can pull us in too many directions and actually make it more difficult to lead a successful change.
How do we develop our conditions for success?
Our conditions for success will be unique to our organization or project. That being said, there are some common themes that tend to be key conditions no matter the specifics of a particular change.
So, although the conditions will be unique to our change, in general we can formulate our conditions based on the following key themes:
- Leadership is committed to the change
- We have enough time and resources to implement the change successfully
- The leadership team and key partners will be involved in the design and implementation of the change
- Our vision and expectations of success (in terms of return on investment and timing) are realistic
- Analyzing and solving root causes (including mindsets) will be a key area of focus as part of the change
- We have regular (as necessary) access to key people involved in the change
We can drill down more into specifics, but developing these conditions (especially with the leadership team) will bring clarity to the process and to expectations around requirements and the likelihood of success.
Next steps
With our vision and conditions of success in hand, we have one more strategic element to consider before we start looking at our stakeholders and analyzing our context more deeply. This is where we can think about what sort of strategic levers we may need to use in order to get leaders and key stakeholders to look at old problems through a new lens.
