A Change Would Do You Good
Pete Domican
I use strategy and change consulting skills together with extensive cross functional and cross industry experience to help businesses plan and manage change.
The role of change capability in organisations
Introduction?
Start ups and scale ups that lack change capability probably aren’t going to survive. It’s almost impossible for any company to achieve both exact market fit, a business model that works perfectly and an operations function that can scale effortlessly.?
In practice, these types of businesses are unlikely to refer to change as a distinct competence. The business is constantly changing, or as some like to call it (magic word coming up) ‘pivoting’.?
However, once businesses reach a certain size and growth begins to tail off, the ability to change (‘change capability’) can decrease rapidly leaving the business vulnerable to long term resilience issues, which we’ll explore in the last article on the SOCCER model.?
What Is Change Capability?
Change capability refers to an organisation's capacity to adapt, innovate, and thrive. It encompasses the skills, processes, and mindset that enable an enterprise to proactively respond to market shifts, technological advancements, and internal dynamics.?
An organisation with strong change capability embraces flexibility, fosters a culture of continuous learning, and efficiently implements strategic transformations. Companies with strong change capability can capitalise on opportunities, and remain resilient in dynamic environments, ensuring long-term viability and competitiveness in an ever-changing business landscape. Some like Amazon were able to make the most of COVID because of their ability to change and flex and that ability is very much hardwired (at least currently) into the way the business operates.?
All this sounds great in theory but it’s often difficult to build and sustain in practice. Let’s look at some of the reasons why.?
Leadership Support And Alignment
Change can often be seen as ‘risky’, especially when an organisation is doing well and the price of failure for leadership, should things go wrong, can often be seen as a price not willing to be paid.?
There can often be insufficient commitment and endorsement from top management. A programme or project can get the green light at board level, but can be hampered by a lack of universal support from senior management not directly connected to the project. This, of course, translates into problems for the project team in getting resources and in being undermined if things don’t go to plan.
Ineffective Change Processes
Poorly designed or executed change strategies and plans can lock companies into failure before they start. Managing constant change across an organisation requires strong programme management, governance and communication across the organisation and with suppliers.?
As an example, I conducted a workshop to map out what an organisation thought its supplier was doing vs what it was actually doing. They were, of course, completely out of sync because there was no process for jointly discussing the priority of scope of the work that needed to be done! Projects were poorly scoped and there were even ghost projects where there was a project title but no one working on it! Fixing it required putting strong governance in place to agree, prioritise and scope new projects and a programme office to better manage workload and progress.
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Capacity
Change requires people, investment, and resources. Often businesses that are levelling off in growth back off on all of these to keep improving profitability. Typically businesses start to run the operation at full or near full capacity, which is good in the short term and damaging in the long term.
In order to make change, there needs to be headroom; time to think about change, manage change and implement change. While things are being changed, capacity is reduced as people are trained, teething problems sorted etc. If the business is maxed out, then any change becomes seen as a problem to existing operations rather than an opportunity.??
We can see the effect of this in the National Health Service. There’s no shortage of innovation in healthcare, but there’s a shortage of clinicians to trial the innovation and put this into practice. Long term gains in productivity become secondary to current considerations.??
Organisational Mindset and Culture?
Change can be celebrated in principle but often resisted in practice. Living in an organisation that is constantly changing is tiring and tough. Managers want to feel safe and secure at work and asking people to be continually flexible and adaptive often only works for a limited amount of time without visible reward. Employees further down the chain of command may feel less or not involved and feel that change is being ‘done to them’.
Negative attitudes and resistance to change can become engrained over time and these feelings can become exaggerated if past change efforts have failed. Failure can breed failure just as success breeds success.?
In these cases, it often requires more specialised external interventions to overcome the cultural norms that may have developed. This is often combined with exercises such as redefining the vision and values for the organisation.
What Does Good Look Like??
We’d recognise organisations that are best practice through observing the following traits
Businesses that prioritise and develop change capability can stay competitive, seize opportunities, and thrive in dynamic and unpredictable markets, ensuring long-term sustainability and growth. We’ll discuss all this in more detail next time when we talk about endurance and resilience.
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