Change Management & Organizations

I can hear a lot of groans coming from my readers. Probably because you have experienced a lot of pain in one way or another when it came to this topic. I mean we all have been taught that people are resistive to change, change is disruptive, and we have heard things like "if it is not broken don't fix it", " We have always done it this way", "Doing this will be too expensive" or at least some form of it.

I am sure we all have been there at one point but any change management really begins with a problem definition. It is the Why. Why we are trying to change is probably the one key question we do not spend a lot of time answering properly. Before you disagree with me, let me paint a picture for you. Go ahead and imagine with me the following scenarios:

Scenario A: You are an engineer who finds that the product you are working on is not ideal. You come up with a better solution and you want to implement it. Your engineering buddies think it is a great and elegant solution that increases the product efficiency. You take it to management and they reject it because you did not consider the financial implications. What they are saying is you did not give us a why we should consider it from our perspective. What is our investment, who will pay for it and what is our return on investment (ROI)?

Scenario B: You are a consultant and you are suggesting a new process or a new machine. You present it to your customers as a great solution that will make them use the state of the art process or tools. They reject it because you did not explain to them how this will really benefit them. Why should they spend money to do this change? Why should they advocate for learning new skills or processes in their organization? What is their ROI?

Scenario C: You are a CEO and you have this great idea that will increase the company value, You roll it out to your organization and tell your employees how it will increase the shareholder values. Then you get surprised when it is not going smoothly. You find out that low level managers and workers are prioritizing their status quo tasks and activities or are even jumping ship to your competitors. The why is because you and your leadership failed to address it from your employee perspectives. What is in it for them? What does it mean for them?

If one or more of these resonated with you, then you see why clearly defining the problem from different perspectives matter. It cannot be all rational system perspective or natural system perspective or whatever perspective you choose, you have to define it from ALL perspectives. Are we in agreement? Great!

There are many types of change that you can consider. You can see below Whatfix list for they types which I think is a pretty good list. You have Strategic, people centric, structural, technological, unplanned and remedial. Regardless of which one it is, change is change and it has to be managed.

Now we defined the problem, let's go do it!...….. Hold your horses! Not so fast! Let's take a look at your problem definition with the discerning eye of Lewin's force field analysis. Sounds cool, right? You need to consider the forces that will drive your change and forces that will restrain and resist your change. You want the driving forces to be stronger. This is a game of chess after all. You need to build up your driving forces and reduce the resisting forces. You must strategize on how to do that. And to do so, you must ask yourself one basic question. How much power do you have to influence others?

Now let's use John Kotter's approach to change for this along side Lewin's.

As you can see the first grouping is creating the climate for change. That is you building up your driving forces and reducing the resistive ones. That is your buy in! You can educate people about the change, communicate to them, involve them in the change discussions, facilitate the overcoming of differences or if you have enough power to do so, roll through resistance, although I don't recommend using that one often. Whatever you do the first step of this is to bring the problem to the forefront of your stakeholders, build a sense of urgency, build your champions and brothers in arms coalition that will help you drive that change and build a vision of the greener grass on the other side.

Next you need to engage and enable the organization. You need to make sure your organization share that vision. Everyone in the organization need to see it, believe in it and embody it, starting with.... you guessed it, the leaders. Leaders should walk the talk and should advocate this often and be proactive about enacting the changes. People in the organization should be empowered to remove the obstacles to enacting the change. And most of all, you need fast short term wins to keep people motivated. The end goal is great but people need those small wins to keep going.

Now I have to take a pause here to talk about two classical points. The change continuum and classical change management process. Many organizations tend to swing between the two extremes of the the change continuum. Either there is a secret very senior group working together and then spring it rapidly on the organization or, and you can see this more often in engineering, it is slow, takes time to do unless there is an urgency to it like a crisis of sorts. Often organizations forget the middle of the spectrum. You need to determine carefully how fast that change need to happen and strategize accordingly because implementation can be vastly different.

Now classical change management processes, we are familiar with. All our organizations have it. Request the change, plan the change, execute the change, close the change. Although sometimes we face those oddballs who do not believe they need to work within the organization change management, being cohesive is rather important. Those pariahs forget that they are part of the system, what they do impact others and they need to be dealt with quickly to maintain the integrity and reduce the cost of poor quality in the organization. So keep a watchful eye for those.

So now you have made the change. Job done? Not yet! You need to make sure it sticks, right? You need to consistently monitor and train people on the new changes to ensure people do not fall back into old habits or bring bad habits from old job places. Comfort zone can be a bad thing and if you are not moving forward, others are simply passing you up!

I hope you all are successful in your change initiatives!