The S Curve for Business represents logical and realistic progress in terms of starting slow, stabilizing, and gaining growth over time. We could high momentum in a short span of time with aggressive adoption and sales strategies.
Keeping the momentum is always the most challenging part where your growth mindset plays bigger role as compared the mathematics and numbers.
There are many factors, Internal & External impact the progress of any company. As we are in the initial phase those factors we see less impact as the risk associated is less. As we grow the risk associated increases with the Growth and it needs a more strategic approach to ensure the impact is less and we recover quickly to keep the Growth momentum.
Here we see the ”Opportunity of Change Management”. As we have seen change management initiative is based on data, information, and its analysis. Whenever we see there are more impact and risk associated which push the S Curve into decline mode, we have to have the Change Management Strategy ready to act. The overall initiative is always continuous efforts that keep on gathering the data, information, risks, and impact. We don’t trigger the change management if data points are within control limits. If we see such scenario and data points which are in a declining mode, it’s always better to initiate proactive action to control it and take it another stabilize and growth cycle. This is where we see various strategies play a role e.g. disruption, innovation, diversification, etc.
Many times we ignore the early signs and as a result, see the decline phase of the S Curve. We could see Growth and reach to a specific pick point from which it starts to decline. Early action in the decline phase provides us the opportunity to push the business to the next S Curve cycle. In case we miss those early signs and start any change management later stage, it has to be more strategic as it comes to a DO or DIE situation. Such situations face a lot of pressure, emotions, and bottlenecks. The overall approach has to be different than the proactive change management process.
The management expects magic from the change management process and expects the change initiatives to give results quickly with a short span of time. Most of the time the result expectations are more driven by emotion than reality. The expectation is so overestimated that there are high chances of breaking the overall Change Management process. Here the first part is breaking the complete process into short change management milestones. The milestones need to be realistic and it has to be supported by the required resources. By keeping small milestones, we also ensure the need for resources to be in control. Here we see may strategies like making team lean, consolidation of business to keep it based on strengths, milestone by milestone progress, and tracking.
No one wants to be in the decline phase of the S Curve and hence it’s very important to keep watch on internal and external factors proactively with possible change management process well defined along with the stakeholders.
Here are some of the factors which we can track –
Internal:
- Ownership and involvement of stakeholders
- Collaboration among stakeholders
- Continuous Research & Innovation
- Talent Management
- Finance Management
External
- Voice of Customer/Market
- Economy and its trend
- Finance Issues
- Policy Changes
- Political Climate and Public Sentiment trend