If you follow my blogs, you won’t be surprised that I’m passionate about helping organizations drive to success in business transformation and achieve breakthrough performance. As the demand for digital transformation accelerates, I find companies setting out on the required multiyear journey without understanding what lies ahead – and then failing. I’ve blogged about several pitfalls such as the need to determine and develop support up front for the strategic intent, issues around budgeting and funding the initiative, how to de-risk the transformation journey, and much more. In this blog post, I want to alert you about the risk of “organizational fatigue.”
The number of challenges that usually arise during a business transformation initiative is not a small number. But the challenge of organizational fatigue stands out as a common point where many initiatives hit a major roadblock. The phenomenon of organizational fatigue has three significant characteristics:
- It occurs after, and despite, having experienced success in several projects in the transformation initiative
- It always causes major delays and often causes the overall transformation initiative to fail
- It can be avoided by taking the right approach up front.
