Beyond Performance 2.0: A Proven Approach to Leading Large-Scale Change

In 1996, Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter published the best-selling book Leading Change. In it he reported that only 30 percent of all change programs succeed and offered an eight-step process for managing change. The popularity of his work triggered an explosion of thinking. In the 15 years that followed, more than 25,000 books were published, hundreds of business schools built change management into their curricula, and many organizations created change-management functions.

By 2011, when the first version of Beyond Performance was published, one would have expected success rates to be much higher. The facts, however, were clear: multiple studies, including one by McKinsey & Company, had shown that the odds of leading a successful change program remained unchanged. The field of change management, despite its prolific output, hadn’t improved success rates.

Almost five years after Beyond Performance was published, enough time had passed that the efficacy of the approach it detailed could be tested to know if it was helping leaders beat the 30 percent odds of change success. A second global survey of 1,713 executives who had been part of at least one large-scale change program was conducted. The sample represented a full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures. The results spoke for themselves: 79 percent of those organizations that fully implemented the Five Frames of Performance and Health methodology reported their change programs were successful.

Beyond Performance 2.0 is distinguished in many ways, one of which is the rigor behind the recommendations. The underpinning research is the most comprehensive of its kind—based on more than 5 million data points drawn from 2,000 companies globally over a 15-year period. This data is overlaid with the authors’ combined 40 years of experience in helping companies and public-sector organizations successfully achieve large-scale change. As senior partners in McKinsey & Company, consistently named the world’s most prestigious management consulting firm, Keller and Schaninger also draw on the shared experience of their colleagues from offices in more than 60 countries, with unrivaled access to CEOs and senior teams.

Beyond Performance 2.0 also dares to go against the grain—eschewing the notion of copying best practices and instead guiding leaders to make choices specific to their unique context and organization. It does this with meticulously balancing the focus on short- and long-term considerations, and on fully addressing the hard technical and soft cultural elements of making change happen. Further, the approach doesn’t just focus on delivering change; it builds an organization’s muscle to continuously change, making it healthier so that it can act with increased speed and agility to stay perpetually ahead of its competition.

Leaders have a choice when it comes to where they put their time and energy in making change happen. Beyond Performance 2.0 makes the research-backed assertion that the key to delivering successful change at scale involves putting equal emphasis on performance- and health-related efforts, where performance is what an organization does to deliver results to its stakeholders in financial and operational terms and health is how effectively an organization works together in pursuit of a common goal.

Most leaders intuitively are drawn to the idea of putting equal emphasis on performance and health, yet very few can describe what that means specifically in practice. In Beyond Performance 2.0 the anatomy of a successful change program is methodically broken down into five stages, in each of which a full suite of insights, methodologies, and toolkits is provided for both the performance- and the health-related aspects, all illustrated by real-life examples. The five stages are as follows:

• Aspire—Where do we want to go?
• Assess—How ready are we to go there?
• Architect—What must we do to get there?
• Act—How do we manage the journey?
• Advance—How do we continue to improve?

Among the most powerful insights and related tools shared are those that come from the field of predictable irrationality. These enable change leaders to foresee otherwise counterintuitive and unpredictable (and extremely frustrating) barriers to change and masterfully use them to accelerate progress and maximize impact instead.