AVOID #5 - Ambition: the 20-55-25 rule

‘You mentioned that Stan informed managers about the transformation framework and then basically asked them to take it and run with it. And Henry listened to people, gave them some advice, and let them run their show.’

‘Don’t you call that ‘autonomous teams’?’ the young manager asked. ‘It’s a hip concept.’

‘Yes, very hip. But it has a serious drawback when it comes to transfor-mations. I read a paper that analyzed the ambition profile of 2,500 teams. Teams in all kinds of industries and countries and facing a wide variety of transformation topics. These teams got a questionnaire with verifiable multiple-choice answers asking for the actual situation and the ambition.

The researchers divided that ambition into two dimensions. First, how many questions did the team earmark for improvement in the next six months? It ranged from ‘None’ (no questions earmarked) to ‘All of them’ (all questions in the questionnaire had to be improved in the next six months). Second, how much improvement would there, on average, be? That ranged from ‘None’ to ‘A lot’ (the exact boundaries are in the paper).

This is how teams score,’ she said and slipped him another note.