How can change readiness assessment help reduce resistance and increase engagement?

One of the important step. It could be an assessment or analysis to ensure everything is set before embarking on the change journey. As a change leader, you need to ensure that everyone in the implementation team clearly understand the analysis and well equipped on taking it further.

Change readiness is the confluence of three things, technical aspects are ready to deliver capabilities necessary to deliver desired outcomes; every individual as competent in their assigned new ways of working; and individuals are confident that they can succeed without struggle with new ways of working.

One of the common mistake, we do as change leader is take resistance as a bad actor. Sometimes resistance brings ideas which are missed during assessment or analysis and critical for the change process.

Mapping out and seeing all the players at once, on the chessboard, will help you incentivize them along the way. My first client told me: "You are here to learn, not to be smart. Shut up and listen." He was right. Your first job is to understand the landscape of the project ahead of you, to know if is it worth the feat at all. Some projects are not mature yet to happen, but that is OK. Some should never happen because they are not worth the trouble. If the project should happen, you need to understand who are the people you need to work with and what's in it for them to make sure the project is not just a pretty idea that never took off the ground.

Assessing the views of the end-user or target audience creates insights into where they are on the journey of acceptance and adoption. When done well, the assessment findings will enable a more targeted roll-out, identify obstructors, and create a more compelling and relevant case for change that resonates with the audience's specific needs.

Performed between a people leader and an individual, change readiness brings readiness requirements and issues to the surface so that they can be addressed by people leaders working with solution teams. Technical facilities of change readiness, if it begins early enough in the solution design process reveals requirements (via User Stories and Epics) that that can be continuously adapted so that change impact and readiness at the individual level can be adapted as well.

I would expand this confluence to include ongoing two-way communication between the project team -- especially the Change Management Lead -- and the impacted stakeholders. This confluence is about people, and these people, stakeholders, want and need to be heard throughout the project lifecycle. When the analysis of our communications demonstrate that people are listening and being heard, the other aspects of this confluence become more efficient.

One recent project's large scope and number of impacted stakeholders guided my two-step approach. First we assessed the change from a business perspective: which groups were affected, type of change, stakeholders impacted, etc. Our review and summary of the proposed change informed the 2nd part of our readiness assessment: an analysis of the organization's culture, leadership styles, memories of past changes, level of employee readiness for change, etc. Using the information we gathered during the first assessment, we selected a smaller, representative group of employees who provided feedback throughout the project as we monitored organizational readiness. The results of this research became part of our strategy and communications plan.

The classic Change Readiness Survey is a diagnostic approach that never leads to a productive prescriptive solution. Conditions change too much and too frequently. This approach always leads to slight variations to a standard set of Communication and Education interventions. Change is not a technical challenge. Change is a divergent adaptive challenge. It requires a dialogic approach to a series of iterations leading to sufficient readiness to launch. Move change readiness assessment to people leaders and individuals; engage those people in solution reviews; adapt readiness interventions as the solution and conditions change.

I agree that change is a challenge and that it is change should be managed by people leaders and individuals. In fact, this is the part of the role of change management professionals. The Association of Change Management Professionals states, "By integrating with other disciplines like strategic planning, project management, organizational development and process improvement, Change Management provides value by enabling people to adopt the change and operate in the future state. The more seamless the transition is for an organizations’ people, the more effectively and efficiently the organization will be in achieving the benefits of the desired future state."

Not A Change Readiness Assessment, Continuous change readiness assessment. Continuous assessment and adaptation brings people, process, technology and culture into alignment to produce desired change outcomes.

The challenges to the left are eliminated or minimized by treating change as a divergent adaptive challenge. The approach that I have outlined above has its own challenges. Adopting the approach is a convergent adaptive challenge that only enlightened leaders (lions) embrace, and command and control leaders (mules) reject out of hand. Adapt application to conditions using dialogic techniques from the get go.

Let's see..."A change readiness assessment can be challenging, as you may have to deal with complexity and uncertainty, manage time and resource constraints, and balance the rigor and flexibility of the assessment." This challenge is part of the foundation of change readiness assessment. Your first step is to gather what information and feedback you can, and then begin to work with the project team to suggest a strategy and determine what the team and sponsor will support. When you define and document your plan you'll include the risks and mitigations you found to inform and guide the project team. To be effective you'll repeat this analysis regularly as the project evolves and, hopefully progresses.