Editorial
The ancient Greek philosophical thought experiment, the Ship of Theseus, describes the triumphant return of Greek hero Theseus to Athens after he slayed a child-eating minotaur. In honor of his bravery, Theseus’s ship was kept in the Athenian harbor for centuries, maintained by Athenians through systematic replacement of old planks with new, stronger planks.
Eventually, all the original planks are replaced. The philosophical question is: Is it still the Ship of Theseus?
As business leaders, we’re constantly seeking the answer to this question as we navigate the seas of change, which can come in the form of new technologies or shifting customer expectations. At Laserfiche, leadership changes, digital transformation and a shifting marketplace have had their impact on our strategy.
Our organizations adapt and change course constantly. How do we ensure — after years of challenges, pivots and modifications — that we don’t lose ourselves in the process?
Understand That Change Is Evolution — and Inevitable
Just like the necessity of replacing parts to keep an old ship seaworthy, evolution is inevitable in any successful business. Stagnation is death. A McKinsey Global Survey reconfirmed that “the more transformation actions a company takes, the greater its chances for success.”
Resistance to change is a natural human response, but can hinder progress. Understanding that employees aren’t innately programmed to embrace change, business leaders can help to foster a “change mindset” within their organizations.
Laserfiche’s sales team constantly faces new challenges and must respond with agility and adaptability. To help them develop a change mindset, our VP of sales ran an exercise in which team members had to acknowledge their response — whether it was acceptance, hesitance, resistance or even extreme resistance — to change and talk through why they might feel this way. In another exercise, teams had to work together to respond to challenging sales scenarios for the best possible outcome.
These types of exercises get people comfortable with being uncomfortable. They give individuals and teams various the opportunity to not only work through their responses to scenarios — whether fun hypotheticals or relevant, real-life situations — but also see that they aren’t alone, and learn from others.
Related Article: How to Help Employees Navigate Uncertainty
Manage the Transition: Set Teams Up for Success
Careful planning and execution are critical to avoid sinking the ship. Beyond making the decision to change and communicating it out, a clear change management plan includes longer term communications, ongoing training and support for employees, and consistent engagement with stakeholders who will support your organization through major shifts.
Business leaders should make the effort to ensure they communicate the why behind changes so that teams can understand the context of various decisions. A “change story” can provide a framework for understanding, by shaping a narrative that is easy to understand, relatable and inspirational. The McKinsey Global Survey also reported that in organizations where CEOs communicate a compelling, high-level change story, a transformation is 5.8 times more likely to be successful. That success rate jumped to 6.3 times more likely when senior leaders spread aligned messaging about the change throughout the organization.
Especially at technology companies, we place high importance on our product roadmaps, which educate our customers, prospects and partners on where our products are headed. Meanwhile company roadmaps — which cover strategic direction, resource allocation and other high-level goals — can often be treated as an afterthought. When we saw the beginnings of the shift toward cloud computing at Laserfiche, we knew that this change would require us to reassess our company roadmap and tell the change story of why we were allocating resources toward cloud development, what we were asking of our employees and how long we expected a true shift to take place.
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Related Podcast: Making Change Stick at the U.S. Air Force
Define Your North Star: Stay True to Your Vision
In the Ship of Theseus, the ship’s identity is defined by its purpose, not its materials. Defining and staying true to your organization’s mission, vision and values — and ensuring that all employees understand them — is essential to aligning changes with the company strategy.
In 2022, Laserfiche saw unprecedented change in leadership. I assumed the role of CEO; additionally, we had new leadership in engineering, marketing, people and sales. A new leadership team can be a pivotal moment for an organization and present opportunities to inject fresh perspectives, skills and new energy into the company. But it also has the potential to cause destabilization and disorientation, especially with long-term employees. We were careful to communicate to staff over multiple meetings and across multiple channels that while leadership may look different, our purpose, mission, vision and values as a company remained the same. Today, we continue to emphasize the importance of these organizational pillars.
Having a north star and communicating it clearly will help teams to focus, prioritize and successfully manage decisions and actions that are authentic to your organization’s purpose and not chasing a trend. In the words of the Cheshire Cat from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland”: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”
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