How to Measure Your Team's Change Readiness

Two third of the organization transformation initiatives continue to fail. Organization change gurus, e.g. John Kotter [1], Rosabeth Kanter [2] and many strategy consulting firms took extensive initiative to understand and formulate well-defined change management strategic frameworks across multiple decades. Often organizations miss-implements these change frameworks and fail at multiple touch points. One of the frequent missteps is either not assessing if the team is ready for any major transformation or focusing on the wrong metric of change readiness assessment. Companies often overemphasize the soft side of change, such as leadership style, corporate culture, employee motivation. Though these elements are critical for success, change projects can’t get off the ground unless companies address harder elements equally and perhaps the harder elements first. I strongly recommend using a structured framework to assess the change readiness of a team before initiating any transformation. My favorite is the DICE score card, championed by Sirkin, Keenan and Jackson [3]. One of the great aspects of DICE is that you can also use DICE after launching a project—to make midcourse corrections if the initiative veers off track and ensure each critical milestone is on track.?

What is DICE?

DICE is the metric for essential hard elements for any transformation project. These elements are - Duration, Integrity, Commitment and Effort.

? Duration: The duration is the measurement of time until the change program is completed if it has a short life span; if not short, the amount of time between reviews of milestones. A long project reviewed frequently stands a far better chance of succeeding than a short project reviewed infrequently. Problems can be identified at the first sign of trouble, allowing for prompt corrective actions.

? Integrity: This is the project team’s performance integrity; that is, its ability to complete the initiative on time. That depends on members’ skills and traits relative to the project’s requirements.?

? Commitment: This measures the commitment to change by the top management (C1) and employees affected by the change (C2), e.g. line managers and team members. Simply put this is senior executives’ and line managers’ dedication to the program.

? Effort: The effort over and above the usual work that the change initiative demands of the employees i.e., the extra work employees must do to adopt new processes—the less, the better.

How to use DICE:

For each projects taken under the change initiative, DICE assessments need to be done before it begins and frequently and periodically to measure progress and estimate risk.

Companies can determine if their change programs will succeed by asking executives to calculate scores for each of the four factors of the DICE framework—duration, integrity, commitment, and effort. They must grade each factor on a scale from 1 to 4 (using fractions, if necessary); the lower the score, the better. Thus, a score of 1 suggests that the factor is highly likely to contribute to the program’s success, and a score of 4 means that it is highly unlikely to contribute to success.?

Use the following questions and tables as guideline for DICE scoring -?

Duration

• Do formal project reviews occur regularly??
• If the project will take more than two months to complete, what is the average time between reviews?

Integrity?

• Is the team leader capable??
• How strong are team members’ skills and motivations?
• Do they have suf?cient time to spend on the change initiative?

Commitments?

Senior Management Commitment (C1)

• Do senior executives regularly communicate the reason for the change and the importance of its success??
• Is the message convincing??
• Is the message consistent, both across the top management team and over time??
• Has top management devoted enough resources to the change program?

Local-Level Commitment (C2)

• Do the employees most affected by the change understand the reason for it and believe it’s worthwhile??
• Are they enthusiastic and supportive or worried and obstructive?

Effort

• What is the percentage of increased effort that employees must make to implement the change effort?
• Does the incremental effort come on top of a heavy workload??
• Have people strongly resisted the increased demands on them?

Overall scoring

Once all the individual hard elements are scored, calculate the combined score as following:

Data (shown below) collected over 225 real change initiatives show how DICE score prediction model performed compared actual outcome. For example, out of all change initiatives having DICE score of 21, only 2 of them were moderately successful while 13 were very unsuccessful. DICE prediction was accurate 87% of the time!

Any organization transformation, by nature, is extraordinarily complex because it is deeply intertwined with the soft and hard/analytical/quantifiable components of the company. There is truly no monolithic recipe because each company is unique in its signature and, thus, each transformation must be formulated individually for each organization. However, the use of structured approach, like DICE, or Change Wheel or McKinsey’s 7S framework, provides significantly better clarity and deeper insight before/during/after any transformation project. The biggest benefit of using a methodical approach, such as DICE is that it provides a simple yet powerful scorecard approach and an iterative and structured problem solving mindset for change leaders. This also helps in treating transformation initiatives like any major projects instead of a company memo-driven roll-out which often ignores whether the team can handle the change.

Reference

1. J. Kotter, "Leading Change", Harvard Business Review Press, 2012.
2. R. Kanter, "The Change Wheel: Elements of Systemic Change and How to Get Change Rolling", Harvard Business School Publication, 2012.
3. H. Sirkin, P. Keenan, A. Jackson, "The Hard Side of Change Management", Harvard Business Review, 2005.