Vision

I always recommend starting with the vision. The vision should be reasonably aligned with the organization's overall strategy and priorities, or at the very least not be in conflict with them.

It sounds banal, but too often managers skip over this step and get a surprise during the change implementation. All professional organizations have strategies and priorities, but they may not be equally well communicated or understood in all parts of the organization. Or they can be outdated or too general for practical application. Sometimes the search for strategy and priorities can even reveal that different stakeholders in the organization are in fact not aligned around a common set of strategy and priorities at all, and while it may not be your job to fix that, it will be very important to know before you set out on a change journey—for several reasons. First, change projects with real impact often need a degree of management “air cover”, which you are more likely to receive if you have aligned the change vision with the organization's strategy and priorities and found supportive stakeholders at the management level. Second, any lack of alignment on strategy and priorities in the organization is likely to impact the assessment of resistance if you have to deal with resistance to change not only from the affected team but also resistance from the stakeholders not aligned with the strategy and priorities you based the vision on.

The change agent—i.e. the person driving the change—must be responsible for the Vision, and in our example it is you. A potential pitfall for the vision owner is to believe that the need for change and the associated benefits are obvious and do not need precise articulation. The benefits of change may eventually be self-evident to you, but remember that others may not have spent as much time analyzing the challenge as you have; and frankly, one person or team's benefit may turn out to be another person or team's disadvantage.

So before you start any significant change project you should test the vision on some trusted colleagues.

Now, for project Deal Performance, you swiftly confirm the company's strategy and priorities. The CEO has recently released a strategy to grow sales in a particular market, and the Legal function you belong to has been tasked with making your company easier to contract with and reduce average negotiation time with 20 % by the end of the year for deals in the target market. Having a contract workflow tool and central contracts repository will be helpful in terms of implementing the strategy and the Legal Department management will prioritize the project. You take down the following key elements for the Vision:

• Deal Performance will show who is supporting which deal and make it easier for the managers to allocate workload among team members.

• Proper allocation of workload will improve utilization of the team member's available time.

• Deal Performance will help in identifying deals where negotiations are taking a long time, and support pro-active manager intervention to drive difficult deals to closure.

• The repository function will help Finance find the executed documents.

We'll revisit these below, when pulling it all together and testing the formula.

4.2

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Source: Jacob Kai, Schindler Dierk, Strathausen Roger (Eds). Liquid Legal: Transforming Legal into a Business Savvy, Information Enabled and Performance Driven Industry. Springer,2017. — 473 p.. 2017

Vision

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