Organisational change

Using the 7 Lenses of Transformation

Billy Street – Transforming Together

This post provides a good introduction to The 7 Lenses of Transformation recently published by the UK government. Its power is in a form of modesty: there is no spurious promise that religiously following a methodology takes the risk and challenge out of transformational change, but instead provides a sensible framing of seven areas which need to be thought about and acted on to increase the chances of success. It is strewn with useful prompts, reminders and challenges. But it also prompts a couple of broader questions.

The first is what counts as transformation, as opposed to mere change. The definition in the guidance isn’t altogether satisfactory, as ‘reducing the costs of delivering services and improving our internal processes’ is sufficient to count. That’s not just a niggle about wording: if there is something distinctive about transformation, there needs to be some clarity about what it is. It’s tempting to fall back to simple scale – but some large scale changes aren’t particularly transformational, while some much smaller changes can have a really radical impact on the relationship between inputs, outputs and, most importantly, outcomes.

The second is an inherent problem with numbered lists, which is that they present themselves as self-contained. It’s worth reflecting on what an eighth item might be. One possible answer is that there is more – quite a lot more – to be said in expansion of the seventh lens, on people. The recognition that people need to be involved and enthused is a good start, but a communication campaign isn’t a sufficient means of achieving that: if change is transformational, it is almost certain that it expects – and depends on – people’s behaviour changing, and it is dangerous to assume that behavioural change is an automatic by-product of change programmes. And of course there will often be many more people affected than those in the programme team itself – a point the ‘red flags’ section seems to overlook.

And there is a small but subtly important issue in the title: the lens metaphor is an odd one, which doesn’t stand up to very much thought. That’s not to say that there is a single self-evidently better one, but moving away from language which implies inspection and distortion to language which hints more at engagement and multiple perspectives might be a stronger foundation for delivering real transformation.