Duck 5, Communication: Everyone impacted by the change must understand its importance. Duck 5 is a tricky one, but it is essential. What you do not want is to put in place all the desired changes only to have no one actually do anything differently. All the effort, money and resources invested in making the change would be wasted! Yet most businesses report that up to 95% of their improvement project fail, and the biggest cause of failure is the change being rejected by those impacted.

Duck 3, Skills: The project team must possess or have under their control the skills necessary to design and implement the change. A skill is an ability to perform a prescribed task. What Duck 3 says is for a change to take place or a project to succeed that the project team must have the ability to deploy people with the necessary skills to do all the tasks that will be required. Ultimately this duck requires the project team:

Duck 2, Motivation: All members of the team implementing the change must be motivated to see that the change is successfully accomplished. Just because every member of the team agrees on what the end objectives are, what success and failure would feel like and what special actions and constraints get added to get and keep everyone aligned, does not mean every member is motivated to the extent required to make the project successful. Any project will always be just one of many things a team member is motivated to see happen, and it may not be important enough to get the investment of attention, sweat, and tears to make sure the project is a success no matter what.

Duck 1, Comprehension: All members of the team responsible for designing and implementing the change must all share the same understanding of the change objectives. Two people can share an objective but have completely different perspectives on how the objective will be achieved, what will be the consequences of achieving the objective, what will be their roles in achieving the objective, and what will be the consequences of failure. There could be other ways two or more people perceive the impact of a change to how they will live their lives and how others will live theirs.

In our blog post “Understanding How To Lead; From An Idea To A Fully Mature Enterprise” we described each of four stages of development that must be completed to create a self-sustaining enterprise. We described how the strategic imperative of each stage is to get to the next stage of maturity. A good specific strategy for a given type of business, with a specific leader, involves figuring out what is the smallest set of actions and resources required to progress to the next stage. As external developments can derail efforts, the best smallest set of actions and resources should have the characteristic that they have a high chance of getting the business to the next stage under challenging real world scenarios.