You know, there's a lot that goes on in an organization. It's very easy for people to sit in the cheap seats and not acknowledge how challenging the demands are of operating a business in today's environment. There is so much happening, on top of which, there is this split-- and I think it's an increasingly artificial split-- between running the business and changing the business. If you're a senior executive, and you're tasked with all of this, it's very hard to really keep a track and continually adjust as often as you like to the level you'd really like to. So, frequently there need to be trade-offs, one of which is not just monitoring, and managing, and understanding of what competitors are doing, of how the market might be changing, but also getting very tactical and practical around what it means for your initiative portfolio. And to start with, that often means stopping. Stopping some initiatives, regularly adjusting initiatives. Those things aren't easy. Arguably, it is in fact easier to add an initiative than it is to stop one because there's a lot of connection-- political, emotional, historic-- a set of factors which means it's not easy to stop initiatives. It's often not easy even to slow them down. I think senior leadership has a very big role to play in that but so do the teams themselves. And I think it's all too easy to put a great deal on to the leaders of the organizations. But it also falls to the teams. It also falls to the integrating bodies, if you like, that coordinate the information between all the initiatives, that get it to senior leaders in a way in which they can readily understand and act. All of these things need to be in place. So it starts with saying that each of these elements, what's the minimum sufficient we need to establish in order to get clarity on what we need to do, the resources with which to do it, and a clear line of sight around where are the emerging threats, the emerging risks, what's driving them, how are our most critical interdependencies going, where might we need help, and also for which initiatives do we need to actually change our scope, our resourcing, or whatever else we need to do to ensure success. If you're going to add in new initiatives, then be very thoughtful about what it means for the initiatives that you already have in play and the demands that you're placing on your people. Once again, we all too often, in theory, assume that there is an infinite pool of highly capable people available to deliver the strategic initiatives. It's a finite resource. And therefore, it has to be managed in a very definitive way. Culture is an incredibly complex topic. A lot of people have written a lot of books about it. It's also one that some people have, and not erroneously, distilled down to a small number of things-- who you hire, who you fire, who you make heroes out of, the most definitive actions that leaders take to show their support, the metrics that you establish, and publish, and frequently revisit, the explicit behaviors that you make clear in a very tangible way that you want to see people deliver against, and conversely, the very explicit behaviors, perhaps sometimes, the behaviors of the past that you simply will not tolerate seeing again. I think another thing that you do with culture that's very important is, if you're trying to transition from an old culture to a new culture, you raise the stakes. You make it very clear on what it means to not engage in, to not be a part of the new culture. So it is a push and it is a pull. So I think those things become very important to establishing any culture. Now I think in terms of the business environment in which people find themselves operating today, those considerations apply. But I think the premium on meritocracy becomes greater. I think the willingness to tolerate failure needs to become greater. I think the emphasis on transparency, on signaling up information early being the right thing to do, rather than running the risk of shooting the messenger, I think the expectations on team leaders and teams to really own and drive their changes, the expectations on senior leaders for the most important initiatives, be willing to be able to and have the means available to them to be able to roll up their sleeves and engage with teams becomes very important. Is a universal fact that management consultants love acronyms. So DICE is an acronym. It's an acronym for four things. D goes to duration, I goes to integrity, C goes to commitment, and E goes to effort. Let me take a moment to talk about each of those. The D, or duration, is either the time overall for an initiative or the time between well-structured, regular learning milestones. I goes to the performance integrity of the project team. Has it got the right team members with the right skills-- frequently cross-functional skills? Have we got enough of those team members? Are they a hard-charging team? Are they clear on their objectives? Are they resolved to achieve those objectives in a very purposeful way? And most of all, do they have a great team leader? That's I. C goes to commitment. Commitment measured at two levels-- the visible, aligned commitment of senior leadership, their ability to speak with one voice on the importance of the this initiative, where it fits versus other initiatives, and the imperative for it to succeed. The other dimension of commitment is the local commitment-- the commitment of the people who are going to experience and live that change firsthand. How do they feel about it? Do they welcome it? Do they fear it? Do they have so many unknowns about it that they are going to connect the dots in the worst possible way? And finally, effort. Effort is the incremental amount of time that that local group, the recipients of the change, are going to have to put in typically over the first four to eight weeks to help clear the hump of implementation. Now, those are the elements of DICE. As you've noted, commitment splits into two levels. So you could say there's the four elements of DICE or you could actually say there's five if you count the two levels of commitment. Irrespective, for each of those five elements that I have described, we have-- and it took roughly five years to do so. It was based on many interviews, and ultimately, a mountain of statistical analysis. We developed a simple step function for each of those five elements and a mathematical formula by which you're able to combine them to get a number that will range from 7 to 28. Between 7 to 14, you can be very confidently guaranteed of success. Between 14 to 17, you should start to worry. Between 17 to 28, you fall into something we call the woe zone, where your outcomes are either completely unpredictable or predictably awful. And what really is so powerful about that is we are leveraging a database put together from extensive surveying of other organizations. Our initial database, which has expanded probably 30 times fold since then, had around 30 million project hours. So you really are in a position to learn and make adjustments based on great failures or great successes of other organizations.
