Accelerating Change in Consumer Packaged Goods Enterprises

By Geoffrey Moore

Author – The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality

I had the pleasure of engaging with a team of executives from a Global 2000 Consumer Packaged Goods company, and as always from such encounters, I learned something new.

The team is focused on accelerating change, and I was sharing with them the zone management model, and how each zone is intended to keep a characteristic pace.  The Productivity Zone, by design, goes the slowest because its job is to take extra time in order to reduce risk and cost.  The Incubation Zone, again by design, goes the fastest because its job is to take extra risk and pretty much ignore cost in order to reduce time. 

What the team made me realize is that, given all the change coming at them (and, yes, we had been talking a lot about Generative AI and related technologies), they needed their Productivity Zone to speed up, come what may. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this is not just a single CPG enterprise talking.  Every Volume Operations enterprise at its core runs on processes.  There is no other way to operate at scale, which means the Performance Zone is completely dependent on them.  But here’s the thing—all those mission-critical processes are invented, maintained, and improved by the Productivity Zone. 

So, here’s the challenge in a nutshell: How can you possibly speed up something that is inherently designed to go slow?  Or, to make the goal more specific, how do you incubate a truly disruptive process and then, at the right moment, use it to transform your most conservative organizations?

Readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear me advocate for aligning the zone management framework with the Technology Adoption Life Cycle as a roadmap for how best to navigate these waters.  Here’s how it plays out in four acts:

• Act One: Incubate, focusing on early adopters who are looking to explore the opportunities, leveraging a project model.  You intend to prove the feasibility of the new process, and you will do whatever it takes to do so.  Your goal is to show what good could look like while at the same time taking technical risk off the table, leaving adoption risk as the primary remaining challenge.
• Act Two: Transform, focusing exclusively on a single underperforming function led by pragmatists in pain, leveraging a solution model.  You intend to use the breakthrough technology to completely revamp the process in question, taking it from underperforming to stellar.  Your goal is to create a credible set of references to support your transition to Act Three.
• Act Three: Perform, focusing first on processes adjacent to those addressed by Act Two, ones that are performing adequately but could definitely be improved, led by pragmatists who are reluctant to change until they see others go first.  You intend to create a groundswell of adoption that will convert their reluctance to change into a fear of missing out.  Your goal is to lead with a “killer app,” highlighting whatever portion of your technology that can deliver a quick win, and then follow that up with a complete roll-out.
• Act Four: Secure, focusing on the revamped process end to end, monitoring quality from final deliverable back through each step, working with process managers who will be maintaining their portion of the new system.  You intend to continuously improve following a data-driven approach supplemented with whatever analytics and AI can provide.  Your goal is to operate at scale with unprecedented productivity and agility.

The key point of this framework is that it is linear.  You take it one act at a time, and you do not skip over any acts.  Your key metric is time to complete, both at the level of each act and of the whole play.  With respect to anything transformational, know that most people appreciate it may take more than one year, and no one will give you three years.  So you have a maximum of eight quarters to get to Act Four (which will be ongoing thereafter).

That’s what I think.  What do you think?

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