Number 18 – From Current State to Future State

Facilitate and develop plans that move change from current state to future state.

Practitioners: tactical, integrative, and strategic

Attention and Execution

To unpack this concept, we might look at failure modes that are common in improvement projects.  What moves us from current state to future state makes all the difference.  For example, a future state has been agreed to without any assigned responsibility.  Another common failure mode I have seen is a sponsor making a request without any commitment to following up on the outcome.  

I once had a student in one of my corporate sessions explain that he did not exert any effort toward a request made by his manager until his manager asked him a second time.  Curiously, I asked, how that was working for him.  He leaned back in his seat with a giant grin and said, it works great, he rarely comes back and askes a second time.  Saves me the trouble of working on things that aren’t important.

Current State to Future State

I also think about the relationship between the three functional systems.  Strategy defines what is important, management develops the methods for achieving what is important, and performance adjusts for all the barriers that keep us from achieving what is important.  That covers the scope of the statement for me.  I notoriously chide teams for failing to finish what they have started. 

Perhaps I should adjust the statement here as well from ‘facilitate and develop’ to ‘develop and facilitate’.  In my thinking, we develop and deploy our plans (creating a condition of readiness) and we facilitate the execution of those plans to deliver the future state of performance and value to the customer.

Questions For Your Consideration

Do you have any requests that you have failed to follow up? 

Have you made requests that no one understood to be assigned to them?

Do you have requests that never reach the level of agreement with a process or project owner?