After living overseas for two years and not playing golf the entire time, I returned to the states, joined a golf league, and quickly realized how out of practice I was.  I had always had good luck taking lessons or “tune ups” from a particular golf pro in Boston, but now I was living in Florida, and needed to find someone new.  So, I went to one golf pro, who upon analyzing my swing, suggested a half dozen things I should be doing.

I got worse.

I went to another pro, who watched my poor excuse for a swing, and promptly suggested a different half dozen things to do.

I got even worse.

Before giving up entirely, I tried yet one more guy.  After watching me fumble through a couple drives, he said “I don’t know who you have been taking lessons from, but they’ve got your head full of rules and you can’t relax out there – that’s why your swing stinks.  Forget about everything they taught you and just get out there and hit the ball.”  (For those who have seen the movie “Tin Cup”, this advice might sound familiar)

I got worse.  But then I started to get better.

The lesson I learned from this was the power of simplicity. I was trying too hard to do too much.  Removing the impediments to a decent golf swing was far easier that trying to pile a bunch of better rules on top of the foundation of bad habits.

Having worked with companies who are trying to transform in some way, I find that the same guidelines apply.  Your organization may want to become more nimble, more agile, more innovative, more something.  But it is probably full of organizational structures, processes, attitudes, cultures, and leadership styles that represent impediments to the desired transformation.

The mistake many companies make is to try to pile on the new ideas without removing the impediments, a strategy we might call “additive transformation.”  Generally, the new ideas just won’t fit and you’ll have a mess of conflicts.  For example, you may try the approach of implementing a policy of having your designers, architects, and developers work on something “free of constraints” for 10% of their time (a commonly attempted tactic to bring innovative ideas and fresh thinking to a stale environment).  Unfortunately, those people will quickly run into problems, such as project managers or business stakeholders who are still driving to dates without any consideration for allowing time for investments in innovation or process improvement.  As if they “never got the memo.”  Sentiments like “yes, we are all for innovation, but we also have a business to run and important deadlines to meet” will be interpreted completely differently by folks with different levels of agile maturity and will therefore result in mismatched expectations.

Instead of adding incongruent changes, focus on removing those impediments to agility and innovation, a strategy we might call “subtractive transformation.”  By using thinking tools like “Double Loop Learning” and coupling them with analytical tools like “Current Reality Trees” (from Eliyahu Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints) you can uncover the organizational structures, process, cultural elements, belief traps, and leadership styles that are responsible for those impediments to your new organizational vision.  Once you have discovered the roots of those impediments, it may be an easy step to simply remove them or to brainstorm an “environment design” change that will undo them.

The other advantage to this approach is that you can start from the most logical place – where you are today.   You don’t need to do a “reset” and start with a clean slate in order to achieve a transformation.  All you need to do is simplify and improve, via the removal of bad habits.

Before you know it, you’ll be hitting the ball in the fairway again.