Leading change as if humans were involved..

Its Sunday morning and my usual Flipboard reading treat. Came across a Forbes piece on organisational change.

It rang true immediately. The writer is kicking off a new series of posts on this topic and his name is Carsten Tams. His first is linked below.

As is: Set the vision from the top, cascade down, guide and support adherence to the changes within.

Thats it. And as Carsten points out it logically assumes that if change does not come from the C-suite it will flounder, drowned in a sea of politics and starved of resources.

However there is little or no room in this model for every person in the business/organisation to intuitively feel that the changes required are theirs. So unnecessary friction and confusion results.

From his piece

"The traditional model views change management as an intermittent project, with a discrete beginning and end, addressing one or two big-ticket items, such as restructuring the organization or implementing a new IT system. Upon completion, the organization will fall back into its 100-year slumber, until management forces through the next project. As Carl Rogers put it, true change is a process, not a state of being. It has a direction, but there is no destination. From this perspective, the role of change managers is less to push through discrete change projects, but rather to design the organization in a way that enables continuous adaptation to an ever evolving environment."

This is the challenge which I see time and time again. Big Projects Fail. They are sexy, generate BIG headlines and deliverables and are so far out of the BAU (Business As Usual) operating model that they sit remote from the way the business actually runs and how people in the business actually work and collaborate.

Less fun and less sexy is remodelling that BAU - it means setting up a healthy, supporting, living model of collaboration and open working across peers, business areas, specialisations and layers. It's tough and challenging but it sets the scene for a more organic corporate entity which accommodates change without even thinking about it.

More on this next time when I will pick up the theme of Carsten's second post - Sheep or Lions?

Keith