Balancing Ambition With Practicality
Future State Plans are hard to balance. Too little boldness and you end up with a plan that looks eerily like the current state. Too much ambition and you end up with a plan that looks like wishful thinking, making people cynical because of how disconnected it is from operational reality. The best plans make people slightly uncomfortable - they're ambitious enough to require real change but not so ambitious that they feel beyond reach. In other words, stretching without snapping.
Often, future state plans start with a discussion about upgrading a tool or an organizational structure, which spirals into a larger conversation about other upgrades; before you know it you've come up with a 10 year plan that costs millions. While there's nothing intrinsically wrong with building a 10 year plan or a plan that costs millions, the process you've taken to reach it was backwards. Instead, I recommend that you start by defining what your desired outcomes are. Detail out what you want to be true for customers, employees, and the business - make them specific, such as "our clients complete onboarding in 3 days or less". When you list out all the outcomes, you can then prioritize what is most important to the business, and what is a critical outcome versus a nice-to-have.
As I've written in previous blog posts, a future state plan without a current state map is like aiming for a target without knowing where you're throwing from. But, if we assume that you've done the due diligence of creating a thorough current state map, then you should compare your desired outcomes to the current state of affairs: Which processes affect which outcomes? What constraints are real limits (i.e. machine capacity) versus which are habits (i.e. lack of maintenance in the shop)? The current state map helps you create a gap analysis between your current state's outcomes and your desired outcomes. This gap analysis, in combination with your prioritized outcomes, will help build an ambitious, but practical, future state plan.
Now, a cautionary tale, also known as the ambition test. You should ask: "if we achieved this, would it fundamentally shift how the business operates or the level of outcome we're targeting?" If the answer is no, you're building an optimization of your current state of affairs, and sometimes that's ok. Often, plans that optimize current state of affairs are less costly and act on a lot of low-hanging fruit that can quickly yield results. However, a larger impact requires some degree of ambition, which can be good, but can also be an overreach (ergo the cautionary tale). The way to balance the ambition test is the practicality check: ask "do we have the capacity, capability, and resources to do this in the timeframe we're considering?". Some changes, while they might have an immense impact in the long-run, might cost too much in the short-term. Rolling out a new product line that requires a discontinued machine that is already at capacity; buying new software without the training or capability to utilize it; revamping the customer experience including improving the customer return policy while on already razor-thin margins. While all of these could have a significant impact, their cost (and therefore risk) is too high.
While coming up with this future state plan, it's important that you involve the people who live in the relevant processes. Having leadership be the sole design source often fails once the execution phase is reached. The people doing the work know which parts of the process are worth keeping, and why, as well as which parts can be served the most with improvements. This also gives them a sense of ownership that helps with change management down the line, and frequently reveals ideas that no one in leadership had considered previously.
Finally, I'd recommend building a document that is legible and useful for every level of the organization, or at least several alternative documents that may be more zoomed in or zoomed out to different areas. It needs to be specific enough that someone who wasn't in the room where the decisions were made can understand what you're trying to build. Then, this is key, gather feedback from the people that are doing the work. If the response is one of significant concern, of cynicism, or of incredulity, don't discredit them out of hand. Ask them where their concerns lie, and talk through it with them. I like to call this the "proofing" of the future state plan.
If leadership creates a current state plan, generates a list of prioritized desired outcomes, does a gap analysis, builds a future state plan while involving people who are actually doing the work, runs it through ambition and practicality tests, and completes a final proofing test, then you will have created a future state plan that is ambitious enough to reach those desired outcomes while being practical enough to implement.
