The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Transformation

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy helped me better understand organisational transformations. Here’s why.

Organisational leaders often encounter many problems to be solved: reducing profits, growing attrition, slowing and unpredictable project delivery. These problems can feel large, complex, and impossible to fully understand.

Faced with many such problems, and a growing bottom-line pressure to solve them, leaders may be tempted by sledgehammer transformation programmes implementing Agile, the Spotify Model, outsourcing, Salesforce, or otherwise.

Whilst none of these options are bad, large transformations by their nature usually require a lot of hard work and a lot of time before they even hint to whether they may tackle the original problems.

Focus accelerates progress, and focus comes from first asking ‘why’. Why are profits reducing? Why is attrition growing? Why is project delivery becoming slower and more unpredictable?

Venturing answers to these questions uncovers important learning, and focuses any solution on the underlying cause of problems. Understanding why profits are reducing would seem a better starting point than brainstorming Get Rich Quick schemes.

Bonus: Many problems usually also have the same underlying cause. By focusing our efforts on the underlying cause, we can solve several problems with the same amount of effort. Surely that’s the best kind of “buy one, get one free” deal!

In Douglas Adams’ novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, a race of hyper-intelligent beings build themselves a super-computer the size of a small city. They name this super-computer “Deep Thought”, and give it the task of calculating the answer to “Life, the Universe and Everything.”

But the calculation takes some time to run - 7.5 million years to be exact. Time passes. Thousands of generations come and go. When Deep Thought finally completes the calculation, the population gathers around Deep Thought to hear the answer.

“‘All right, the Answer to the Great Question ... of Life, the Universe and Everything ... is ... Forty-two,’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

“‘Forty-two!’ yelled Loonquawl. ‘Is that all you’ve got to show for seven and a half million years’ work?’

“‘I checked it very thoroughly,’ said the computer, ‘and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.’”

The takeaway? Start with ‘why’ to focus efforts on the underlying problem, thereby bringing better results, sooner. Hopefully 7.5 million years sooner.

This article was inspired by Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Image credit: DALL·E 3.