WHAT'S THE BIG IDEA?
Ever worked on an integration?
Every consulting company will tell you their approach is the best.
But here’s a secret from a recovering Bain consultant: We all use more or less the same technique.
Each functional leader comes up with a list of to-dos, the consultant puts them all into a big combined spreadsheet, and then the team checks in every week to make sure that things get done. The “integration list” approach is simple, but it works. Pulling up the to-do list, reporting out on progress, and surfacing problems is a great way to ensure that things get done.
But in checking off dozens of individual tasks each week, it’s easy to start seeing the world with project management blinders on. A few months in, it’s common for executives to leave an Integration Management Office meeting and think to themselves:
“What is this all for again?”
As any integration drags on, it’s easy to get a little lost in the weekly grind of meetings, project plans, and the inevitable fire drills that come with merging two distinct and complex companies.
To manage this drift, we spend time at the beginning of any integration or change effort coming up with a set of “big ideas”: the most important thing we want to be true at the end of each month of the project.
Each project is unique, but the monthly big ideas often follow a similar thematic pattern. At the beginning of an integration, we’re focused on getting everyone up to speed: For the first few months, we might only focus on ensuring that people know why the integration is occurring and what comes next.
The next chapter usually focuses on early challenges – the acknowledgment of difficulties along with the hope that comes with seeing the team deal with them as they arise.
Towards the end of the first 6 months, we want to be able to point to results – what signals are we noticing that our plans are working? What movement are we seeing in the metrics that matter?
Summarizing these monthly “aspirational truths” is a great sanity check before an integration goes live. A calendar with a monthly “big idea” helps the integration team stay focused on what matters most and adjust accordingly, but it also gives us another, potentially more important, benefit. It helps us measure if we’re actually doing our job.
In a typical integration, we use a short survey to pulse the organization and sanity-check if we’re delivering on the “big idea” for that month. In one recent IMO, we noticed in our pulse check that while the team was clear on why we were bringing two companies together, the “what this means for me” question in our survey was getting lower-than-expected marks. This enabled our People Ops leader to huddle with the ELT, highlight some regional offices that may not have received the messaging around next steps as clearly, and organize some listening sessions/office hours to fill in the gaps.
Without asking directly and anonymously, this pocket of confusion might have been left to fester, side-tracking the integration and leaving people in limbo.