Change Management

Hello colleagues and welcome back to yet another episode in Weekly Lean Series, namely Change Management.

Change is the single constant in our lives. We see it, we experience it and we adapt to survive. In professional life we see change in company policies, market demand, administrations, processes and many other aspects. The question is how do we react to those changes.

Let's start with organizations. Here I think we should discuss a little bit about Ashby's law of Requisite Variety. William Ross Ashby (1903-1972) was a pioneer in cybernetics and systems theory. His law outlined that for any system to survive the responses created by the system have to exceed that of the stimuli from external sources. Three main points out of this context can be summarized as ;

• You can only manage variability through variability.
• A system survives to the extent that it can successfully match the range of situations, threats, and opportunities it faces.
• Change and reaction to change are the only ways to survive in the long run.

So change is not only a nice to have but rather it is essential for any system to survive and continue its existence. Commercial organizations are also systems that are designed to create a desired output with given resources and the same principle applies to them as well.

The Doppler & Lauterburg Model offers a good explanation on how the impulse pressure and reaction time to that pressure effects organizations. Here I added the example of Nokia, Apple and Tesla on the model. Nokia ,for instance ,is a successful company also today , but the reaction to smart phones market was not as fast as other companies and the original Nokia products soon were cleared out of the market as the demand for smartphones increased. On the contrary Apple was producing Macintosh, portable computers and became also a pioneer in that industry with focus to product design and its reflection on human behavior with user friendliness. Tesla, is also a very strong change player, where the company revolutionized the automobile industry may be changing the pace of moving from traditional cars to electric cars. So time to adapt and how to adapt may be the two key ingredients of change management for organizations to the surrounding environment stimuli.

How about people? As individuals we do not like change much. Change requires effort, thinking and action and generally of course with exceptions people do not welcome change so easily. Therefore during a change pattern people can react either aggressively or adaptive depending on where they stand about the topic and not surprisingly aggressive reaction is more common. Aggressive reaction, in its core, has the power to make others act instead of yourself. Therefore, it aims to keep things as they are while pushing change to others. In contrast adaptive reaction is more of an internal questioning and walking towards the change. The most important thing to keep in mind is both reactions are necessary for change management. You can not adapt to all things only by yourself but also you cannot stand still while the world is moving. Therefore it is important to know which reaction to choose at which specific situation.

Therefore in any change we should keep both people perspective and organization perspective together and Kotter's 8 step model is a very clear way of approaching change. In these 8 steps, especially in the first two we focus on the human factor and establish a strong coalition of change. With a correct vision and right set of tools we can move our organization to the target situation. Needless to remind change management is not easy and your plan will be tested and retested at every step. Therefore patience is also a key ingredient in the overall setting.