How fast should your organisation modernise? Four ways to view this are (1) through the eyes of your key customers – ideally modernise faster than their changing needs (2) relative to your competitors (3) relative to peers in your sector who aren’t your competitors and (4) fast enough to stay compliant with the regulator of your industry.

Each of the four may prompt different kinds of modernisation. And because there’s a lead time to implement modernisation, it’s desirable to start sooner rather than later – modernisation is a journey of discovery, not just a journey of planned changes.

Modernisation via evolution (little and often) is generally less painful than modernisation by revolution (sudden and big).

As with human suppleness as a precursor to improving human fitness, the more flexible your organisation is, the easier it should be to achieve business modernisation. Business flexibility is actually a catalyst for modernisation (a catalyst by definition enables conversion, but itself remains unchanged).

Lastly, organisational values and Board politics need to continuously favour modernisation – moving fast and making mistakes, over staying complacent and playing a blame game over every setback. Also, if you set up a complex layer of approvals, it will both slow down innovation and stall innovation, if just one approver in the chain says no.

Simon