Most business leaders have been conditioned to believe in the ‘resilience fallacy’ by business schools and large technology vendors. They have been told their enterprise should consist of resilient integrated technology components and that, in itself, will protect the enterprise against future shocks ... as resilient parts add up to a resilient whole.

Sadly for every organisation, the exact opposite is true.

Let’s replace the word ‘resilience’ with ‘invulnerability’. The difference being resilience resists change and invulnerability can indeed benefit from it.

What the Future-Proof Paradox tells us is, ‘...that for an organisation to be invulnerable, it must be composed entirely of vulnerable constituent parts’.

The dirty digital secret is that invulnerable or resilient constituent parts harm, and in some cases, can kill the host enterprise.

Anyone who has tried to replace an ERP, embark on a digital transformation or create a new customer service offering has experienced the pain and cost associated with addressing the entrenched incumbency of legacy systems. Organisations don’t save money by doing something new and efficient, they save money by eradicating everything old and inefficient. Unless the ‘old’ can be quickly discarded in its entirety, then savings are difficult, if not impossible to achieve.

In this digital age, each of your constituent technologies need to be treated as a throw away commodity for the whole enterprise to survive.

Becoming future-proof is possible.

I love pancakes. I enjoy making, cooking and eating them. On Sunday mornings, at my house, you will always see a warm stack of pancakes ready to be topped with fruit and maple syrup. Yum!

But pancakes are filling, and no matter how hungry I am, a short stack is more than enough to satisfy my cravings.

Given our own human experience with pancakes, why is it that we pile them into to huge stacks and expect our organisations to rapidly digest them?

'Pancaking', or adding another project, process or system on top of the existing stack, is a pitfall that I see so many organisations repeat time and time again.

So, before we we reach for another pancake, maybe we should decide what to remove from the stack to make room for something so delicious yet filling.

I can be very focused on getting to the destination. Packing the car full of food, family, pets and equipment, setting the sat-nav, then micro managing my travel speed and stops to optimise travel time, with little thought as to where the journey started.

In this simple navigation example, the start is a location and time, but for an organisation the start of a transformation journey is much more. The start includes many more dimensions such as business strategy, motivations, organisational structure, assets, financials, competitive position, people and processes.

Properly mapping this ‘as-is’ start is an essential precursor to any successful transformation journey. If you don’t and impatiently rush to the preconceived destination, more often than not, you will grossly miscalculate. Thus falling short of the destination. You will then need to hastily re-route, in flight, further complicating the journey.

Until recently, mapping the current state of the Extended Enterprise was arduous, frustrating and expensive. But with the advent of a rich set of Business Architecture tools, mapping the ‘as-is’ start (Enterprise Archaeology) can be quick, economical and safe.

Where to start? At the start.

If life is a journey, then surely you will need to bring a rucksack to carry the essentials … maybe a map, water, food and cold weather gear. You might even need to pack your spare socks, sunscreen, passport, first aid kit, torch, rope, pocket knife, toiletries, smartphone, e-reader, power charger, coffee plunger, noise cancelling headphones… and so on.

If you stuff in too many possessions, essential or otherwise, your weighty rucksack quickly turns a potentially exciting adventure into an arduous and frustrating logistical exercise.

Too often, I have experienced clients embarking on a transformation journey with much more than a rucksack. They will pack legacy IT systems, end of life software and hardware, over-complicated processes, nice to have requirements, preconceived organisation structures and out of date beliefs and practices for the journey.

Do we spend enough time, at the start of a transformation journey, consciously deciding what not to pack?