Making Change Acceptable - Predictability Embraces Change:? A? Business Transformation Perspective

Has the word "change" leave a bad taste like the poison apple for Snow White? Would your team associate change to a bitter pill? Avoided at all cost? 

Unrequested change is stressful. Alleviate the headache of change rhetoric with a business transformation perspective.  

Change is wonderful...as long as it results in beneficial consequences. It is difficult to stay static in the face of change. Maintaining status quo, fearing, and rejecting change like the plague, means that you are fixed to be unready for the inescapable.

Unsurprising that the Journal of Change Management critically reviewed five published instances that identify a 70% failure rate (Hughes, 2011). Not a confidence booster when your chances of success is working against the odds of the average change effort. 

Looking at the glass half full at the other end, there is a perspective to moderate the effect of change. The authors of Reality of Change wrote about "There is a predictable, observable pattern that accompanies the undertaking of any significant change. " (Johnson & Metler, 2015, December 21). Positive change process requires great self- leadership to steer the management of outcomes in a structured and planned manner.?  

Successful change persuades your employees to use the new tools, procedures, or experiences. If your employees are motivated and enthused about going in together on the planned improvements, your change project will be considerably more likely to succeed right away. Of help is a palatable business and people management strategy that views change as predictable occurrences. Predictable changes are transitions for you and teams to expand options in countering a certain transitional situation.   

Similar to the caterpillar transforming into a beautiful butterfly, we have to focus on the end results of the change. As a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly, it might be difficult to transform or transfer to the next stage. The change morphs into a fulfilling transformational experience instead of deteriorating into a torrid event. This metaphormosis lesson will teach you how critical it is to transform yourself and your company to be successful, just like from the hairy caterpillar to the beautiful butterfly. 

Having the other common perception that the majority of change initiatives fail is harmful since it feeds into our inherent fear of failure. 

Change With Fear  

Resisting uncertainty is our inclination. It is fear that breeds hesitancy. Fear is an emotional setback blocking your clarity to act. Being afraid limits your potential to grow in any aspect of life.   

We are not afraid of change per se. It is the fear of losing control that prevents us from venturing beyond the uncertainty surrounding change. Often, the hardest changes to understand and adjust to are the ones that are unexpected and out of our control – a recession, a global pandemic, or a major disaster. They pale in comparison to our minor daily changes of clothing, meals, and other routines. Major changes of upheaval magnitude can be difficult face, but you will often find that your experience of them can be made better or worse depending on your reaction and your attitude. As life usually goes, the unanticipated happens! 

Over time, we are more responsive to change as it rests a presence in our lives. It was said that “Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times” by Niccolò Machiavelli.  Achieving repeatable successes require you to conquer change consistently.

Accepting Change is Possible 

Imagine the scenario of replacing your hardwood floors with marble floorings. It is a wonderful shift. While expecting a difference when you walk the new floorings, your positive response is still mixed with the strange cold marble upon your feet touch the floor in first few days. In time, you enjoy the difference. This renovation scenario shows that our response to any change can be immediate and decisive, although we have anticipated earlier. Sometimes, the initial reaction can be dislike. Given time, we can adjust to the change under a condition of openness and acceptance. However, it is understandable if there are some change cases that we are adverse to.  

Back to our renovation experience, when you consciously accept change in welcoming the differences, it leads you to the comforting joy of receiving your victorious transformation rewards afterwards. Changes with chaos are an essential characteristic of life in modern organizations. The famous  Peter F. Drucker defined the late eighties' turbulence with changes in enterprise management. Successive management philosophy focused on managing change in an altered environment of knowledge enterprise. Basic types of change in the organization with predictable qualities are: 

•  Operational changes - such changes have no significant effect on the change of processes and other organizational resources.
• Development changes - such changes cause further changes in the processes and resources. (Drucker, 2020). 

When predictable change occurs, Lazarus (1993) recognised that the function of emotion-focused coping mechanisms is either a) the way we attend to our stressful relationship with the environment (either vigilance or avoidance) or b) the way we interpret what is happening, which reduces stress even when linked to the actual conditions that the remain the same as before the change happens.. 

People tend to cope with change in one of two ways (Lazarus, 1993) : 

1.  Escape coping: Avoidance is the foundation of escape coping. To avoid the challenges of change, you take intentional steps. For example, you may purposefully skip training for a new working method or arrive late for a meeting on an impending reorganisation.  
2.  Control coping: A proactive and constructive approach to dealing with stress. You will not accept change as a "victim." Instead, you learn to regulate your emotions, seek help, and do everything you can to contribute to the transformation.  

In reality, most of us manage major changes by employing a combination of flight and control techniques. Control coping is typically the preferred option because it is impossible to ignore the reality of impending change. 

Move Past Fear to Favour Change 

People are portrayed as opposing change in Lewin's change process models, which represent leading and dealing with change as distinct entities faced by the organisation. Much of the stress caused by organisational change can be eased if individuals in charge of the transition focus on people as well as strategy and other organisational issues (Woodward & Hendry, 2004). Failing which, competencies and talents for leading change can be undermined.  

On the surface, we are tempted to presume that changing needs of organisations, work, and jobs in the organisation are influenced by the belief that change cannot be designed. Thus, the idea of unfacilitated change frustrates your people. This is where leaders contribute as change agents to help people cope in lessening their fears of change.  

Revealing the status of change from a leader's position counts on the leader in anticipating the change outcome. Staying in the existing conditions of business as usual is an option with the comfort of inside-the-box to avoid exposure to uncertainty. The risk is your organization can lose relevance when competitors catch up or overtake you.  

Predictable change allows response time for control coping through preparation, whereas seeing change as unpredictable is a knee-jerk reaction. For example, the notion of 'lifetime employment' and an 'organizational career', once prevalent in many financial service organizations, has been severely eroded (Hendry & Jenkins, 1996). The retail banking sweeps through a radical change requiring a new way of thinking about employment and its meaning for them (Littlefield, 1995) . A focus on change management through training that benefit your people and your organization supports the business transformation exercise

During times of transition, be gentle with yourself. Changes are taking place in your mind, body, and soul. Doing this through anticipating and preparing certain scopes of change is a transformation strategy. Thus, we address change by forgoing  the common misconception that uncertainty, turbulence, rapid change, dynamism, and disruption cause the world to turn out harder to predict.   

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We Evolve with Change 

Since the beginning of time, nature and environment moulded our brains to gravitate toward predictable outcomes.  

Anticipated results assure our survival instincts. So that our mindset programming is default to negative thoughts along the way. However, have you asked why is it change in our daily tasks less alarming?   

Daily we are not alarmed when exposed changes in the forms of minor routines like choosing our clothing to wear, the selection of meals we eat and so on. Why are we accept daily changes as non-threatening? In fact, we welcome them in anticipation, such as change of position in a promotion exercise, selection of attire on a date and others.  

Preference to change reminds your mind to gain back its hardwired nature to evolve. Change might be difficult at times. If you refuse to let change go through all of the stages of change, nothing will alter or flourish in the end. You will remain the same, and your capacity to advance to the next level will be delayed.  Growth is no longer possible for yourself, team, and organization.

Good news is that advancement in science found our mind is flexible enough to react to change by adapting and responding to different situations, even if they are radically different. This means we are able to acquire a transformative mindset toward change. Extending from this view, change in the world of business transformation is predictable.

Managing Predictable Change Is A Choice 

 An astonishing story unfolds when an aging eagle reaches 40 years old. Here is the predictable part! All eagles are said to go through this change as a choice to live longer and stronger. If not, it will die. 

The eagle seeks refuge at the top of a mountain. Then, it goes into self-exile. Through a painful rebirth, it emerges victorious to live for another 30 years or more. Regardless if this classic story is truth or tale, it strikes a transformational chord with leaders and organizations. Like the eagle expecting to change through transformation, accepting change as an integral part of life helps to you to manage it. 

When you reflect on the story of rejuvenating eagle, you realize certain change  characteristics connect to our post pandemic new normal. From the unexpected discomfort of facing a disruption to our routines in lockdowns to the gradual return to a different reality of work and life.

Aptly reported in the recent survey by KPMG, which involved 500 CEOs worldwide, it is noted that 45% do not expect to see a return to normal until sometime in 2022, while 31% anticipated it will happen “later this year” (KPMG, 2021, March 23). Thus in response to the pandemic, a favourite voice shared by the companies is that our workplace landscape has changed indefinitely. 

Upon hindsight of many change experiences we all have gone through in our lives, the latest disharmony caused by the pandemic can ring a bell of familiarity. Think about our new year resolutions, our career progression, and other areas of our professional plus personal life.  

 All change situations that we faced are similar to the stories of the transformation of eagles and workplace told earlier. Cutting across all these change stories is the fundamental notion that change is a conscious effort of choice. We choose to change for the better in an altered world.  Displaying acceptance of change shows the open mindedness to new ideas and diverse proposals. This is the point of demonstrating a willingness to do differently.  

Charting New Altered Transformation 

Dynamic change relies on addressing or mitigating the risk factor of turning an organization to a new direction.  Whitewater rafting is exciting with a dose of danger. Leading to the other side is for you to manage change by working differently. The benefit of change for Netflix through the disruption of DVDs by mail using streaming subscription "resulted in its capability to transform and adapt to the digital world"(Profit, 2019). Netflix change management succeeded "to meet the needs of the consumers that would begin to watch content online" (Profit, 2019).? This is an example relating to the majority of change projects that are biased to structural modification and cultural transformations. That is to say, successful precedents offer a historical change story to reinforce the predictability of the organizational transformation exercise.  

In summary,  changing business and operations need correspondingly adjusted behaviour to support the transformation endeavor. Predictable change in the context of business transformation has the comforting benefit of allowing existing organizational practices to be modified or rebuilt in order to ease into the new way of working.  

References 

Drucker, P. F. (2020). The Essential Drucker. Routledge. 

Hendry, C. and Jenkins, R. (1996) ‘Changing expectations. Editorial’, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 11, No. 7, pp. 4–8. 

Hughes, M. (2011). Do 70 per cent of all organizational change initiatives really fail?. Journal of Change Management, 11(4), 451-464. 

Johnson, F., & Metler, P. (2015, December 21). The Reality of Change. Retrieved June 16, 2021, from Amazon.com website: https://www.amazon.com/Reality-Change-Fred-Johnson/dp/098210507X 

KPMG. (2021, March 23). KPMG 2021 CEO Outlook Pulse Survey. Retrieved March 31, 2021, from KPMG website: https://home.kpmg/my/en/home/campaigns/2021/03/kpmg-2021-ceo-outlook-pulse-survey.html 

Lazarus, R. S. (1993). Coping theory and research: Past, present, and future. Fifty years of the research and theory of RS Lazarus: An analysis of historical and perennial issues, 366-388.  

Littlefield, D. (1995) ‘Banking futures depend on staff employability’, People Management, Vol. 1, No. 21, p. 15. 

Profit. (2019). 7 Real-Life Examples of Successful Change Management in Business. Retrieved April 4, 2021, from Profitand.com website: https://insights.profitand.com/blog/real-life-examples-of-successful-change-management-in-business 

Woodward, S., & Hendry, C. (2004). Leading and coping with change. Journal of Change Management, 4(2), 155-183. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Wong Siong Lai

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