The Future of Change Management

Here is a hot-off-the-press draft of the conclusion to Impact - 21st Century Change Management, Behavioral Science, Digital Transformation, and the Future of Work.

The Kindle version is already out (here), the paperback will be out mid to late-August. Join my mailing list at paulgibbons.net to get further excerpts and to be informed of launch events. Workshops, meetups, webinars, and book tours coming soon!

Conclusion - Humanizing Change Management

 “You can't lead the people if you don't love the people. You can't save the people if you don't serve the people.” — Cornell West

When I discovered change management and organization development in 1994, I fell in love. I’d seen in my own life how expert advice, scientific knowledge, and reason were insufficient to drive the sorts of changes I wanted to make. Maybe I would find some answers to how humans learn, grown, and change? I was a strategy and risk management consultant and had seen up close how useless recommendations and even well-planned projects were without human engagement. Maybe I could add real value to clients, help them more than think big thoughts, but also do big things?  Clients and consultants colluded to suppress the truth of failed implementations: clients had spent big bucks and had no interest in owning their part of the failure. Consultants, well, we hustled onto the next engagement. Maybe I could put an end to that accountability gap?

My efforts to educate myself were sometimes poked fun at by colleagues – a master’s degree at night, workshops on the weekends, a degree in Humanistic Counseling, and hundreds of books by the bedside. Little did I know that even that level of education was just an ante. Change management looks very different on the ground than it does in books! (God knows many of the books then were full of error[1].) Dozens of clients, hundreds of projects, and thousands of workshops later, I had achieved a modicum of competence. Newcomers to the field often ask me “how” and “how long” and blanch when I tell them “a decade” and layout a curriculum!

With those 25 years’ perspective, I often get asked where the field is going. How is it different now and how will it be different in 2030 and beyond? So out comes my crystal ball. Here is a list of changes that I’ve seen, that I foresee, and that I’d like to see: an admixture of the descriptive, the predictive, and the prescriptive. (This is a recap of ideas from this book and The Science of Organizational Change.)

1.      Develop models and tools that work in managers’ hands, not just those of specialists. Change management is too critical to be left to the specialist; change is most of what occupies managers’ attention. Managers lead change day in and day out: re-organizations, product launches, piloting new ideas, and more. They need models to help them think through what they need to think through and do what they gotta do without picking up the phone to overpricedchangegurus.com.

2.      Put culture first. Change and OD experts should focus on long-term capability, not projects. Get the culture right and not only is top-down strategic change easier but creativity and change “bubble up.” Creating cultures such as this are priority number one, a long-term board priority, and not an afterthought at the bottom of a step model.

3.     How good is the evidence? Stories aren’t proof. The plural of “anecdote” is not “data.” Question authority especially popular gurus who are mostly better at marketing than thinking. 

4.      Speak agile. You might not be a scrum master or product owner. You may prefer traditional planning, but agile is hear to stay. Agile methods have a ton of built-in change management, as specialists will recognize. Change leaders need a deep appreciation of the language, tools, and rituals so they can oversee (and cheerlead) agile teams. 

5.      Learn to use new tech to engage stakeholders and enable change. We understand that technology is a driver of change and frequently the content of change. It is also the “how” of change in ways that could not have been foreseen in the dark ages. Leaders need to be up to speed and digitally literate enough to use it. Video > images > text. (So why do I write books you may ask.) Some OD/ change people are technophobes preferring face-to-face communication. Who doesn’t? Use both.

6.      Think scalability. As well as high-touch methods for key stakeholders, such as workshops or town halls, think about ways of reaching people that are swift and scale well. One way to do that is to use the power of networks to multiply the power of your message. Imagine making a video sizzle reel that gets shared, liked, and discussed. If you can build excitement, fans, followers, and virality around a project, your communications effectiveness grows, and such communication contains valuable stakeholder feedback.

7.    Harness self-organization and emergence. Emergence means that the behavior of the whole cannot be understood in terms of the behavior of the parts; you can’t entirely explain love as electrical and chemical signaling in the brain. (That would make for a boring rom-com.) When you are trying to change the whole (team or business), controlling the parts will not do it. You can’t, say, just change rewards or just restructure. In emergent change, leaders set parameters (vision, strategy, high-level goals, constraints, and metrics) and you allow the parts (people) to self-organize. As we saw earlier, this can vastly improve quality and efficiency.

8.   Adapt to bottom-up change, open innovation, democratic models. The change models born in Medieval times, Conner, Kotter, and Prosci were based around grey-haired white guys deciding what to do and hoping to persuade their organization that they knew (without talking to them) what was best. Power has evolved from concentrated to diffuse to networked, from push to pull, and is moving from position/ age to expertise/ engagement and from broadcast to dialogue. Our change models need to evolve for new organization forms; two of the tools we have discussed here are technology (such as Slack) and behavioral science. See Heimans and Timms, New Power for a wonderful discussion.

9.      Think systemically. This includes considering root causes rather than symptoms, eschewing monocausal attributions, avoiding the Fundamental Attribution Error, and understanding self-serving and egocentric biases. That word salad means: Don’t blame people, get the mote out of your own eye first, get to the bottom of things, and realize that most problems have multiple causes.

10.  Learn and use behavioral science. Kant said, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Learn the kinds of errors in thinking people systemically make. Advances in behavioral science help change leaders recruit cognitive biases rather than be stymied by them and help them change behavior rather than use “spray and pray” communication. Change management is about changing behaviors, but behavioral science has not been fully integrated to the specialist’s toolkit. As we concluded earlier, change management needs the behavioral sciences, and behavioral scientists need change management.

11.  Complete integration with project management. In agile project management, change management is built in. This is not to say that agilistas have nothing to learn from change specialists, but traditional project management needs stakeholder engagement on standard models, not just on Audi and Tesla models. Similarly change experts need to understand the context and tools of large-scale project management to partner seamlessly with them.

12.  Stop calling it resistance. When people speak up, welcome it. Sheep don’t innovate. Incremental improvements come from shop floor insights. Or, as I often say, “resistance is engagement.”

13.  Kill the myths. 70%, “urgency”, Kübler Ross, learning styles, MBTI, step models, Lewin all need to go. écrasez l’infame as Enlightenment revolutionaries used to say.

14.  Reform business education. If business education were like medical school, we would spend two years on theory, and two years seeing patients while still studying, then eight years as a practitioner with significant oversight (residency.) Teach stuff people use daily (change, leadership) as well as grand theories of marketing, finance, strategy, and HR.

In 1492, with Columbus, “discovery” was invented. His voyage showed that there were vast continents yet to be discovered; in 1491 there wasn’t even a word for that. Scholars devoted their attention to the past, to Aristotle and Aquinas, the contemporary world was “fallen” and insights of long-gone greats were where one looked for wisdom, insight, and learning.

Change is like that today; we still recount the ideas of “ancient” scholars only some of whose ideas stand the test of time (e.g. Schein.) The change profession should not be racing to keep up with the pace of business change; our ways of changing should lead the charge. Expert practitioners can lead the way. It isn’t sufficient to fix our gaze on today; what we do has to have an eye on the future. Again, as with digital transformation, shifting workplace demographics and culture will affect how we lead change. 

The future of work, AI and robotics, will change workplaces as much as desktop computing and the internet did and as much as the assembly line did before that. The human side of business needs to keep up, and that includes how we change.

[1] What were the good ones? The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook has never been surpassed, nor has its sequel The Dance of Change. Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows was decades ahead of its time. Flawless Consulting by Peter Block is unique and insightful. And Anything by Argyris or Schein stands up well even today.