Future State
A company’s future state is ultimately defined as the greater vision for the business. It’s where you want to be, your long-term goal and how that applies to your present-day business. Without a definitive future state, a company will often find themselves lacking direction, making it harder to make pivotal decisions, causing misalignment amongst executives and management, and ultimately hindering the progression and growth of a company’s mission.
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Combine Forces
Defining your future state and building a strategy around how to reach that point takes a joint effort. Get ahead of the game by pulling together members of your team across different functions. Hold a session or a workshop led by an experienced facilitator that can help guide them towards laying out those steps needed to reach your future state. This facilitator can help document your current state and pinpoint the pain points and challenges holding you back. They can ask the right questions that will drill down on necessary process improvements and steer your cross-functional team in the right direction.
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Talk to Your Team
Although you can’t fully eliminate resistance as you progress to your future state, bringing in the people who are executing on the processes cross-functionally and engaging them in the project can certainly decrease resistance.
Building a business case for your approach, preferably a case that is data-driven, will help to reach a general consensus amongst the team. To make a strong case, quantify specific benefits and growth opportunities, and tie those to the goals of the business. Always remember this starts and ends with proper organizational change management. More than communication and training, it’s about analyzing what the impacts of changes that will be made and defining how to address the impacts with ease for each employee.
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Highlight Your Specialties
Work with the people on your team that have the expertise around the processes that separate you from your competitors. Sure, everyone’s business is unique in certain Identifying the areas of your business in which you are unique starts with a strategic discussion with your leaders and executives about where you land in the marketplace, what your competitors are doing, and your customer feedback. Customer feedback is a particularly critical aspect, which includes understanding why your customers are seeking you out and why they stay with you.
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Create a Process Map
The process map can vary depending on the organization. No matter the organization, it is good to have a map of some level of detail for reference, one that people can track and refer to in their daily operations. Some organizations may need to get more in-depth in determining what their steps are, while others may find that it’s enough to have just a framework in order to have people on the same page.
Either way, a process map will help you identify your opportunities for improvement and ways to change how you’re doing business, which could include anything from shifting the way you’re communicating to restructuring teams to finding operational opportunities. A process map might stop you in the middle of your transformation initiative and make you reassess the direction you’re moving in.
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Why is all of this important?
Change and transformation is constantly on the move, and fast. Your future state is coming quicker than you realize. If you wait too long, changes to processes are essentially forced upon your businesses, and it’s now or never to roll with those changes. By being proactive, you have an opportunity to look at the changing landscapes within your industry and forecast what you would like the future to look like. Now is the time to get a handle on your processes and ensure that they’re robust enough to adapt when changes arise, which they inevitably will.
Change is all around us, and it’s a matter of either letting change control you, or you being able to appropriately respond to the change and be in control of your future. By being on top of your processes and continually reevaluating them, you’re enabling yourself to be able to respond to changes more quickly and to do so in a way that’s not completely reactive. It’s all about continuous improvement, and you need to have a discipline around that which you can maintain over time. Defining your future state is imperative to keeping your business alive.
