Change management has become a joke!

“Right now things are changing more slowly than will ever be the case in future, so if you think now is fast you’d better buckle up.” Kate Burleigh, Intel Managing Director Australia & New Zealand

Our research certainly validates this. The majority of business leaders (53%) agree that change needs to be completed faster and when it comes to internal changes almost three-quarters (73%) of CEOs expect HR to implement change faster than they did three years ago.

Such aspirations may be reasonable if we had mastered the change process however, despite decades of effort to master change management, success rates are still woeful.

50% of change efforts are clear failures, 16% have mixed results and only the remainder are successful according to CEB. We’ve heard this before but we don’t seem to be listening.

We need to change our approach to change management if we want to change the likelihood of success.

My colleague Brian Kropp PhD shared with us this month a concept called ‘open source change’. The term and practice is common in the tech world and Brian argues it should be equally ubiquitous when it comes to change.

Too often change is driven from the top down, however research by CEB with almost 7,000 people found that:

when employees co-create the change strategy the probability of success increases by three times more than the success of programs set by the organisation's leaders alone.

To the contrary when change programs are primarily owned by the leaders of the company the probability of success actually goes backwards (see graph below).

No wonder most change efforts fail or have mixed results as 82% of organisations predominately rely on seniority to decide who should be involved in major change decisions.

Part of the reason why top-down change management fails relates to a game I loved growing up known as Chinese Whispers. Such a term fails today’s standards of political correctness as surely as the practice itself is making change initiatives fail. In corporations there is no place for this game however that is exactly what happens with top-down change.

The further down the organisation you go the lesser the understanding of what changes are really going on.

Perhaps the most alarming bit about the graph above is that across 6,686 leaders just over 25% of the top leaders in the company reported that they don't even understand what’s going on, despite the fact that they are setting the change agenda! Heaven help us all.

Fortunately ‘open source change’ provides a solution. Brian suggests some great questions to help determine who should be involved in the change process.

• Who would be surprised by this?
• Who is likely to opt out or reject the solution?
• Who is knowledgeable about this and may not speak out?
• Who might care about this despite not being directly affected?
• Who is outspoken about this?

I would add a few more questions to this list.

• Who does everyone listen to (often not the outspoken ones)?
• Who has survived, if not thrived, following significant changes previously?
• Who is synonymous with the old way of doing things?

Answering these questions will likely flag names that have been excluded from the dialogue and decision making about change to date. The good news is it is only too late if you never do it. Start today by genuinely including these people in the discussions and decisions.

A related concept that takes ‘open source’ to the next level comes from the father of Appreciative Inquiry and The New Change Equation Professor David Cooperrider who promotes ‘whole system’ change as the most effective, lasting and positive approach to change.

By ‘whole system’ Cooperrider is referring to not only all employees but everybody that will be impacted by the change including business partners, providers, suppliers, investors, customers, and clients. Even the employees’ families may be involved should the change taking place require their support and understanding.

And before you think 'involving that many people would take forever' guess again. Cooperriders’ process can be implemented with whole systems in as little as one day.

I can do little justice to Appreciative Inquiry here but David’s TED talk provides more context and the AI Commons website goes into further detail. As you will hear on the TED talk this approach has been used to bring about positive change on a global scale. (disregard the title of the TED talk as it is not about resilience).

We used Appreciative Inquiry on a much smaller scale as part of a $4b merger between two former arch rivals in the telco sector and the results in the short term were remarkable.

We took five key steps (5D's) to bring the cultures together.

1. Decompression - we gave people the opportunity to express how they are feeling about the changes in a non-judgemental context. Psychological safety was established by having leaders kick off the discussion by sharing their own personal concerns and fears as well as hopes about the change taking place. Chatham House Rule applied. We gave people the opportunity to map their emotional journey on a timeline since the change was announced and share that with others.
2. Discovery - the next step was to explore with the best parts of the past, i.e. the things people loved about the old way of doing things. Some of these things had to be let go but having them acknowledged made it easier to do so. Some however could be pulled through to the future and were important to our ongoing success. Clarity about what stops and what continues was the key.
3. Dream - having acknowledged the past this step was about imagining what is to come. Here all employees had the chance to consider building a new way together, embracing the best parts of the old world and imagining a bright new future. This stage required everyone to think not just outside the box, but in a new box and we utilised a range of creative processes to break paradigms and create new ones culminating in expressions of a the future that engaged people rationally and emotionally.
4. Design - with the future now more clear and compelling the design step was about establishing a pathway to get there. This is where systems, structures, processes, roles and other organisational components were considered. The design step is about mapping out the tactics to get us from here to there.
5. Destiny - the final step involved assigning responsibilities, timelines, milestones and feedback loops to promote the likelihood of the dream becoming our destiny.

For us the 5D process was rolled out around the country in a series of one day workshops involving thousands of employees, as it was not practical to have everyone together on the same day.

By making a decision to involve all employees in an open source fashion, not pushing the change from the top-down, the speed and buy-in to the journey was exponentially improved.

If I had my time again, involving the broader ecosystem of partners, suppliers, providers and customers would have taken the process and experience to a whole new level, but as it was

we leap frogged many months forward in terms of bringing the two cultures together and created a level of certainty and excitement about the future which was previously in question by many and missing altogether for some.

Thanks for reading this article to the end. No doubt you now need to get back to your own change agendas. My hope is you have taken away a few key points or questions from this article to discuss with your team.

Failing that, or in addition too, I would like to leave you with one final question to consider re the change journey your organisations are on. Are you talking with your employees about change or telling them about the change? As Professor Cooperrider says…

“People don’t resist change, what they resist is being changed.”

Please find below links to my previous monthly posts.

• Are you ready for the third age?
• What matters most in a post-truth world?
• Never waste a good crisis
• Your best bet yet for a year of success
• What will your New Year's Evolution be?
• Are you ready for the 'gig economy'?
• Are you working with an energy vampire?
• From counting people to making people count
• Five novel tactics for better leadership
• Mid year reviews: Ubiquitous but ridiculous
• Talent pipelines are broken
• Australia: The innovation immigration correlation
• Time to reimagine HR
• The secret to successful disruption: The innovation colony
• How to survive and thrive in the supermatrix
• The biggest predictor of career success is...
• The secret to high performance is not what you think...
• Where are you on the digital vortex?
• Diversity does not equal inclusion
• How to catch and hold the rebound expat
• The e-factor is the new x: the ultimate growth multiplier
• Are you working with a waste of space?
• Iron Man needs you!
• Collaboration: the new super skill
• Leading innovation from the Australian subsidiary
• Insurgent or incumbent: the key to a future every company wants is...
• Why the talent war is over
• How 'the other GDP' is causing a talent crunch

Rich Hirst is a Director of CEB's International Executive Forums, providing a range of services specifically and exclusively for the most senior executives in the Australian operations of foreign-owned multinational corporations.  

CEB's International Executive Forums operate four peer groups: the International CEO Forum with over 3o0 CEO members; the International CFO Forum with almost 180 CFO members; the International HRD Forum with some 160 HRD members; and in 2016 we launched the International CSO Forum for heads of sales functions. In addition to our peer group services, we also provide a range of opportunities for our member companies to develop their up-and-coming talent through a series of events with a particular focus on women and emerging executives. For more information please call +612 9955 2848.

CEB is a best practice insight and technology company. In partnership with leading organizations around the globe, we develop innovative solutions to drive corporate performance. CEB equips leaders at more than 10,000 companies with the intelligence to effectively manage talent, customers, and operations. CEB is a trusted partner to 90% of the Fortune 500, nearly 75% of the Dow Jones Asian Titans, and more than 85% of the FTSE 100. CEB is now part of Gartner.