Preparing planning teams to adapt, turning change into momentum

Change in planning is a certainty. Sometimes it's pushed on teams by regulatory reform. Sometimes it comes from within the team through initiatives to improve the way it works. Either way, processes constantly need to adapt.

Change is hard. Change at scale is harder.

Teams have many moving parts, from the people designing and overseeing processes, to those executing them. That creates a problem of scale. It's not just about how you adapt individually to a change, it's about how well the team does as a whole.

Combine change with scale and things get complicated fast. There's more to weigh up when you plan (more moving parts) and more uncertainty about how it will land (what will trip the team up once new steps hit the real world).

With regulatory change, there’s often another layer: anticipation. You know something is coming, but until it lands you don't know exactly what it will be - let alone what it will mean in practice, or for the industry as a whole.

It's easy to get stuck

We see two versions of this.

Some teams freeze. They avoid changing or developing their processes at all — either because a regulatory change is looming, or because reworking how they operate feels like too much on top of the day job.

Others spin their wheels. They get stuck in the planning stage with no execution and no feedback. Scope creeps, effort climbs, and nothing goes live where the team can actually respond to it.

Both slow evolution down.

Feedback loops are how teams learn

Every time a team runs a full cycle - idea, to execution, to measuring results - it learns. That's the crucial part. A feedback loop forms, and both the idea and the execution improve with each turn.

The components have to work together. Without ideas, organisations stand still. Without execution, changes never stay grounded in reality.

The speed you iterate is the speed you evolve

Some organisations don't let uncertainty and complexity slow them down. They accept both, and put their energy somewhere more useful: making it easier to iterate. The speed at which a company can iterate is the speed at which it can evolve.

Bring that back to regulatory change. Once the changes are finalised, how quickly can you move from idea, to execution, to measuring results? The teams best prepared - for regulation and for continuous improvement alike - are the ones that accelerate this loop.

What we've learned about change (the hard way)

Change is not a one-and-done. Early on, we'd work with planning teams trying to perfect their templates upfront. It always got too complicated, too many changes at once, until the whole thing ground to a halt.

So we switched. We prioritised the most obvious changes, got something out to the rest of the team, and used that to learn where they saw the most room for improvement.

Feedback from execution is a gold mine. It's grounded in the truth of people actually doing the work, and it keeps everyone focused on the changes that will actually turn the needle. Now we're focused on how to accelerate these loops.

Where the friction actually lives

This varies depending on the part of your processes you’re looking at.

By way of example, at Rico, we focus on initial assessment and decision-making processes. Today these usually live in Word documents - checksheets, templates, guidance notes. Word is fine to write in, but it's fragmented and hard to manage change across. So every time a team wants to adjust its processes, it hits friction. For example:

• Processes spread across multiple templates, so planners have to update the same thing in several places - and risk it falling out of sync if they miss one.

• Teams using the wrong templates, where an old file lingering on someone's desktop gets used instead of the current one, leaving the process out of date and exposed at review.

Regulatory change makes this worse. A change can update existing plans or create entirely new ones - and the references to them, often detailed and scattered through checksheets and compliance assessments, each need updating. What should be a quick change becomes a liability.

All this mechanical friction wastes time and pulls teams away from the work they're actually trying to do. It's stressful when you're under the pump responding to regulation, and a drain when you're simply trying to improve. The resources for enacting change are usually thin but crucial to the quality and efficiency of the work - so making them work well is a force multiplier.

Two things to take away

First, if you haven't already, build feedback loops into your team so that ideas, execution and measurement work together to launch, test and refine changes.

Second, once you have them, accelerate the cycle. Strip out the mechanical friction in each turn of the wheel - it's a drain on the initiatives that evolve the way you work.

And when you look at the technology and systems you rely on, ask one question: will this be a friction, or an accelerator of your evolution?

Embrace both and you'll be readier for whatever change comes your way - and more capable of continuously improving how you work, delivering better and better results over time.

If you're curious to learn more about what we’ve learned helping planning teams initiate or adapt to change, get in touch - we'd be glad to share more.