Discover the Secrets to Successful Business Transformation
About this webinar
Business transformation is an iterative process, not a single event. Lisa Wheatcroft frames it as a recurring cycle with four stages: Envision, Engage, Optimise and Embed. With Stuart Easton, she explores how direction, involvement, execution and lasting adoption connect as transformation moves through the organization.
In one aviation business, the leadership team analyzed a pulse survey and built a strategy in response. Engagement scores fell the next year. Lisa's lesson is that leaders had looked at the problems but had not involved people in shaping the solutions.
She also recalls, from earlier in her career, a global SAP implementation that was stopped after the organization did not adopt the accompanying behavioral and cultural changes. As she sees it, embedding new ways of working cannot be an afterthought.
What you'll hear
- Change or transformation: why the line between them is not clear-cut, and why scale and perspective matter more than the label.
- The four stages: how Envision, Engage, Optimise and Embed connect direction, involvement, execution and lasting adoption.
- Planning: why Lisa wants clear priorities, responsibilities and timing, and what that means for turning strategic direction into a plan.
- Governance: why Lisa sees sign-offs, gateways and clear accountability as part of successful transformation.
- Prioritization: Stuart's view that it is a key enabler of transformation but not enough on its own, a theme APA's experience also reflects.
- Work outside the program: how Stuart and Lisa, prompted by an audience comment, discuss under-the-radar work consuming resources and people's capacity to absorb change.
Research in context
McKinsey's 2016 Global Survey on organizational transformations drew 1,657 respondents, 1,487 of whom had been part of a transformation in the previous five years. At companies respondents described as successful, 73% said frontline employees were visibly engaged, compared with 46% of all other respondents. McKinsey counted a transformation as successful when it both improved organizational performance and equipped the organization to sustain it.
Lisa's Engage stage and her aviation example concern this same layer of the organization: whether the people closest to the work are involved in shaping the change, not only the leadership team. The survey shows an association: frontline engagement was reported more often where respondents judged the transformation successful.
How this connects to TransparentChoice
The recording moves from engaging the people closest to the work to the question of which work the organization has capacity to support. TransparentChoice can structure leadership judgment, gather independent assessments from the relevant contributors, and carry those priorities and assessments into a portfolio model alongside funding, capacity and other constraints.
Material work outside the formal program can also be represented where it consumes capacity, so leadership can compare feasible choices with that demand included and decide what to support. See how this works in TransparentChoice software.
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Speakers
Lisa Wheatcroft is a seasoned strategic HR and transformation leader with 20+ years of experience. She specializes in organizational design, cultural change, and workforce effectiveness, with a proven record of boosting engagement, reducing costs, and scaling businesses.
Stuart Easton is Founder & CEO of TransparentChoice. He works with leaders and portfolio teams on decisions about which investments and initiatives to fund, continue, change, defer or stop when priorities compete for limited funding and capacity. His work combines structured decision-making with practical portfolio choices.