THE 'i-PACE' PROCESS OF CHANGE LEADERSHIP

In my previous articles I have introduced the MUSICA model of the SIX CONDITIONS that drive people to change and tools for change leaders to create these conditions. In this article I will focus on the PROCESS of change leadership.

We have all experienced that change processes are not straightforward. Things always turn out differently then expected, people's reaction to a change situation will be different than what we prepared for, it is very common in change programs that we have to reconsider our plan because of unforeseen events or changes in conditions. In spite of this commonly shared experience, many of the "classic" change management models describe change as a series of definable steps we have to go through. In this article I will argue that these models oversimplify reality and suggest a false illusion. Change leaders should adapt a dynamic (agile) process that considers regular re-planning being an inherent part of change.

WHY THE "N STEPS OF CHANGE" MODELS DON'T WORK (AND CAUSE DAMAGE)

There are many models in change management which suggest that managing change means having to go through a series of linear steps, and that by the end of the last step, change will ?happen”. I call these models the ?N steps of change models”. The most famous of them is Kotter’s 8 step model, but there are many others like the ADKAR model of PROSCI and the countless "waterfall" change models that are all based on the "Prepare-Design-Implement-Sustain" logic. These approaches are very attractive because they are simple, easy to understand, but they are fundamentally wrong! Going through change in a complex human system like organizations and achieve real behavioral change of people is unfortunately not as simple as that. It does not follow a pre-definable series of steps.

Let's take for example the first step of Kotter's 8 step model: "Create sense of urgency". The model suggests, that this should be your first action, and when you are done with it (i.e you have created the sense of urgency in the organization), then you can move on to the next step, and "Establish guiding coalition". In reality it never works in such linear, sequential way. Although a very important action, creating sense of urgency is not a one-off step. When you start communicating about it, there will be people in the organization who will understand and buy-in to the message, while others will be skeptical, suspect some hidden agenda behind it, and there will always be people whom you do not even reach with a first wave of communication. It is unavoidable to re-plan and support the process with new actions on an ongoing basis.

An even more harmful category of the "N-step" models are the "waterfall" approaches of 'Prepare-Design-Implement-Sustain'. Many of such models are around. They basically suggest that a change process can be pre-planned and then implemented, which may be true for some very (very!) simple change interventions, but certainly can not be applicable for anything more complicated. I have seen so many times that change managers tried to use such a waterfall approach, and of course they had to re-plan all the time. The problem is, that in such cases re-planning is perceived to be a failure, a sign that we did something wrong.

THE i-PACE process

Instead of the "N-step"/ waterfall approaches, the reality of change leadership calls for a process that follows an agile approach: we do not even attempt to plan everything ahead but the change is run as a gradual, emerging, iterative, dynamic process.

It starts with INITIATING the change: thinking through WHY, WHAT and HOW we want to change, what is the target or rather the DIRECTION of the change, have a high level plan and then kicking it off. Then we follow a series of Plan-Act-Communicate-Evaluate (PACE) cycles. As many cycles as needed. I usually suggest to fix cycle time for 1, 2 or 3 months, the shorter, the more agile the process will be:

In the SIXCON change methodology the process is centered around the SIX CONDITIONS. In each cycle, we evaluate the progress of change along a dash-board of change/ transformation KPI's, the progress of planned projects and actions, how are people with the six conditions (questionnaire and qualitative information) and an issue log. Based on these information, for the next cycle the Steering Team plans extra focus and actions on those of the six conditions where most needed. At one of my clients we were already one year into a complex transformation process when at an evaluation point it turned out that people do not really understand the business strategy they were supposed to follow. In the next cycle we put an extra focus on precising and communicating the business strategy: the Board had a strategy review where the strategy was reformulated into a much more understandable format and we ran cascading workshops about the strategy in the whole organization. In the next cycle, we found that understanding of strategy was already good, but key projects were somehow slowing down, so we started to focus in this issue. Such progress based re-plans are inherent in the agile process of i-PACE:

About the author: dr. László Eszes is a transformation and change leadership advisor, author, speaker and educator. He has supported leaders of companies in over 15 countries of Europe. He is the author of the "Six Conditions of Change" (SIXCON) change leadership methodology. You can learn more about László and SIXCON at www.sixconditions.com: