How to Improve your Chances of Change Success
Most transformational change in non-crises situations fail.
Change born of real crises tends to write its own agenda, the
issues here are now to do with tactics and timing rather than
the three big questions of change; why, where to, and what;
because these have usually been answered for you by external
forces. The real test of an organisations change leadership
capabilities is not, when we have to, but when we ought to.
When the obvious mandate for change is weak, other forces need
to be brought to bear to create that strong mandate. Without
it, the rhetoric for change stays as just that, rhetoric;
peoples behaviours remain the same and the change targets set
begin to slip.
The creation of a mandate for change comes down to leadership.
Leaders (at all levels) recognising (before its obvious) that
the current ways of working are either sustainable or
scaleable. This can be hard to do both conceptually and
practically when the current business metrics look solid.
One of the things not often not understood about the timing of
change it that performance is usually a lagging indicator of a
change/leadership vacuum. The argument made not to change
‘because of the strength of the current numbers’ dangerously
misses the point. Waiting until the numbers nosedive before
changing will create a performance gap, because any reactive
changes will take a while to kick in.
This connects to the second problem. Changing when things have
already gone wrong means working from a reduced set of
options. Suddenly, change has to be fast(er), and cheap(er),
anything else will not resolve the immediate performance gap.
From our own work, the third most common problem why change is
postponed is the mysterious disease of ‘change fatigue’. This
seems to affect many people, and organisations, although
interestingly the more successful the organisation the less it
seems susceptible to the symptoms (cynicism, negativity,
workload issues, etc.). It’s not change that causes the
fatigue, but initiative overload, done superficially and
reactively.
When change is clearly connected to strategic objectives,
underpinned by extensive supporting/reinforcing mechanisms,
owned by the people is affects, aligned with values of the
organisation, and implemented before it’s needed, people don’t
suffer change fatigue but change excitement.
An organisation’s change capacity is not a function of purely
how much change, but mainly a function of the quality of
change. When the change processes meets the above criteria the
organisations ’capacity’ for chance increases. Change starts
to be driven as much bottom up as top down. It becomes the
natural order of things like a family with young children. The
‘young child family’ is an interesting analogy. Because
children’s changes are inevitable, they can be planned for and
coping strategies developed, before they occur. What every
(effective) parent has done is cross the threshold of
conviction. They believe the changes will happen, so have the
motivation develop the appropriate responses. By definition,
part of bad parenting is not dealing effectively with the
growing up (changing) of their children. The crossing of the
threshold of conviction for people in an organisational change
context is critical. For that move across the change needs to
answer three major questions for each individual affected:
- Why and why now?
- Where to, over what time period?
- What’s in it for me?
It’s obvious when people have crossed this threshold, they
don’t need to debate why, or why me, only what next? When they
understand the where to, all the focus can move to the how?
And when they get what’s in it for me, their emotional
investment commits to making it work.
If you would like to pick up on any of the themes in this
overview or talk more specifically about any organisational
change issues facing you please contact:
Lynn Joy
e: lynnj@predaptive.com
t: +44 (0) 1789 734333
f: +44 (0) 1789 734401
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