Why do so many organisational change projects fail? 

Vistage speaker and founder of Making Strategy Happen®, Michael Canic, knows a thing or two about achieving strategic goals. A doctorate in the psychology of human performance led to a variety of roles, from coaching a university football team to a national championship to leadership roles at businesses like the Atlanta Consulting Group and FedEx. 

When he joined the world of consulting the focus was on helping businesses with their strategic planning. “We’d help them to develop their plan, they’d be all amped up and we’d leave feeling like we’d accomplished our mission”, he says. “They’d then invite us back the next year to develop their new plan and we’d ask them what they’d accomplished in the last year. We’d be met with the wringing of hands and eyes darting away, and being told that they’d got really busy and so hadn’t put the plans we’d developed into place”. 

That’s when Michael realised that there must be a better way. “I created something called the strategic management system”, he explains. “It’s all about treating strategy as a process, not an event. 

The foundation of his system is Ruthless Consistency. “When our decisions and actions are relentlessly aligned with our intentions, that’s when we’re likely to be successful”, he says. 

At Michael’s recent Vistage event he explained why so many organisational change projects fail, and introduced how the Ruthless Consistency model can help. We caught up with him to learn more. 

Watch Michael’s event in full here.

Why do so many strategic change plans fail?

There are three key reasons why strategic change plans fail, says Michael.

“The first is calling it strategic planning”, he says. “When you say ‘strategic planning’ what comes to mind is the exercise of developing a plan, or maybe even the document itself”. 

What doesn’t come to mind is the idea of a continual, managed process, which is what strategic management, as he calls it, is all about. 

The second is taking on too much. “Every organisation I’ve ever consulted with takes on too much: too many strategies, too many objectives, too many initiatives”, he says. “You can’t do it all.” Instead, Michael focuses on what his clients perceive to be the very few critical things that must be done. 

The third reason is the failure to align people, processes and systems with strategic goals. “Businesses will say what they need to accomplish strategically, but their team’s goals, metrics and compensation will point them in another direction”, he clarifies. “Or, they’ll say that they need to get something done but can’t allocate the resources to it or don’t have the metrics to measure it, undermining what they’re trying to accomplish”. 

The solution? Ruthless Consistency.

What is Ruthless Consistency?

Michael’s Ruthless Consistency model for strategic management focuses on leaders doing three things: developing and sustaining the right focus they need to create the right environment in which people can perform at their best, and building the right team. 

“It’s about not just developing the right focus, but also sustaining it over time”, Michael explains. “It’s about creating an environment that fosters not just engagement, but also performance. And it’s about ensuring rigour in how you select and recruit people: really competing for talent in order to be successful”. 

When leaders do all of these things with ruthless consistency, he says, that’s when success happens. But what does this success look like? 

The benefits of the Ruthless Consistency model

“Put simply, we’re dramatically increasing the likelihood that you’ll be successful in executing whatever it is that is critical to your business”, Michael says, confidently. The companies he’s worked with have successfully improved gross margins, increased customer retention, expanded geographically. 

One of his favourite examples of a client that has applied the Ruthless Consistency model involves a good mid-sized company in North America that packages tea and coffee. “They were floundering”, Michael says. “They had become stagnant: they had some employee turnover, and their customers and suppliers weren’t particularly happy”. 

The first step in implementing the strategic management system was a solid assessment of the business. They spoke to customers to understand what they were happy and not happy with, what drives value for them and how the company could be a better supplier. They spoke with suppliers, and discovered that suppliers thought the business treated them transactionally when they would prefer more of a partnership. They spoke with employees to understand what they thought of the working environment and culture. 

Michael continues, “Using that assessment as a foundation, we then identified strategic initiatives to say, ok, if we’re going to be a much stronger, more viable company that grows, we need to focus on improving certain things”. 

Together, they developed strategic initiatives around what they needed to do with customers, how they could turn supplier relationships into partnerships, and how to create a more engaging environment for employees that would improve performance. They instituted a regular monthly process to track and manage the process of these initiatives: a process with time-linked milestones and clear expectations. 

“By managing this rigorously over the course of a few years, we were actually able to grow the EBIT of that business by 50%”, says Michael. “The CEO said he ended up spending half as much time working in the business: he was able to take a step up and work on the business. Customers were much happier, supplier relationships were solidified, and the employee survey results improved”. 

A few years later, the business was sold for a very strong multiple: a real success story of applying the principles and practices of Ruthless Consistency. 

The importance of commitment

“I always say to people, unless you’re truly committed to improving your business, to growing your business, to becoming successful, don’t waste your time”, Michael stresses. “If you feel fine just going along with how things are, you don’t need the Ruthless Consistency model”. 

It’s a model that requires a great level of commitment from business leaders: it takes time, energy and effort to implement. For those who really do want to flourish and grow, though, it’s a proven model that really can make an incredible difference. 

To learn more about the Ruthless Consistency model, watch Michael’s Vistage event in full here.

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