Change is the new normal!

Introduction

One of my clients is trying something interesting, they have thousands of staff, and they are trying to make change an integral part of everyone’s role. Essentially, they are democratising change, making it clear that to move the business forward takes everyone, not a few senior managers at the top. Our experience so far has led us to realise that this is at least a two-step process (I think we will find more steps along the way but I am sharing what we have learnt so far!).

Step 1 - Involve everyone

Everyone must accept the responsibility for change. For this to happen, we are encouraging everyone to adopt the following description of their role:

“As you go about your day to day work, integrate getting your day to day tasks finished, with thinking about how you might improve how you and your colleagues do the work.”

To make this a reality, it helps if everyone from senior managers downwards can provide examples of how this might work in practice. For example:

• As I am leading the weekly team meeting I think about new questions to ask that will turn the meeting from a standard progress up date to a lively creative session that produces new ideas.
• As I am working my way through a stack of invoices I think of ways I can group them so I can create more efficient use of my time.
• As I am preparing information for a customer I think about what they might read first, what questions they have and what they are going to do with the information, to see if I can improve the way the information is provided or add more information.

Step 2 - Make it easy

The second part of this revolution is to move the change from the an improvement one person can make, to scaling it to become the new “business as usual”.

Its great if you can improve how you do your work, introducing innovation and improvements that increase your work rate, reduce errors and led to better levels of service for your customers. But you also need to be able to effectively share this with your colleagues so the change moves from a single individual to standardised new ways of working.

I think this is the essence of the next wave of change management capability. How do we enable thousands of people who are not change managers to lead change?

1.      Let’s make it their job – everyone is responsible for doing their job AND improving their job

2.      Let’s have a common understanding of what we mean by a successfully implemented change.

3.      Let’s make change an easy skill to acquire – up-skill people on the most relevant aspects including the psychology of change, how people react to change and the most common causes of resistance.

4.      Create a toolkit of pre-prepared checklists, example agendas, questionnaires etc so that any change management activity is simple, intuitive and can be carried out by anyone.

5.      Organise Key Performance Indicators (because what we measure is what we concentrate on) to measure the number and variety of changes successfully implemented.

If this is something your organisation is starting to think about, get in touch, I would love to hear your ideas. If you want to read more about creating networks of Change Agents throughout your organisation, read this paper. If you want to train your Change Agents, apply for the new Agile Change Agent qualification-based course.