The Reasons Why Many Change Programmes Fail - Disregarding the Domino Effect (part 9)

Have you heard of the domino effect??

Are you disregarding it??

In this week’s newsletter, I’ll be sharing my personal experience and observations of organisations “disregarding the domino effect”.

What is the Domino Effect?

Firstly, let’s remind ourselves of what we mean by the domino effect…

When a person or group of people in an organisation, with all good intentions, makes a change in the business to address a potential issue, and that change goes wrong, it negatively impacts other sections of the business.?

This often occurs when the change is only a symptom, but other times it is a genuine root cause.?

I have found over the years in consultancy, this is far more common than we ever wish it to be, and as I said, it’s often driven by good intentions.?

However, it’s also driven by inappropriate management and management infrastructure.?

There are a few main reasons for this happening.?

1. Individual budgets where individual managers are only driven by their own department’s success.
2. Lack of communication between different functions and areas of the business.
3. Lack of planning and attention to detail.?
4. “Group Think” - Where departments think alike and lack creativity.?
5. Lack of the use of problem-solving methodologies that promote the testing of ideas before implementation.?
6. Lack of holistic thinking leading to “reductionism”.?
7. Binary thinking where people believe things are only joined in a logical linear fashion.?

Reductionism is when an individual or group looks at a single symptom but does not holistically see the connections between things.?

Inside any organisation, everything is joined together.?

(Yes, everything. In one way or another, just like a ball of cotton wool!)

Reductionism is the curse that prevents a good understanding of change management and causes many problems.?

You must know of many examples yourselves!

Here are some I see quite often:

1. Increase in sales without the manufacturing capacity to match the volume.
2. Maintenance budgets are reduced and then long-term chronic issues affect production machinery.?
3. IT upgrades that prevent the functionality of end users.
4. New commitments by managers at meetings without any understanding of the details.?
5. Despite having well-formed plans and objectives, a senior manager tries to address an isolated incident and therefore sends everyone into a tailspin.?

How Can You Prevent This??

It’s pretty simple really…?

1. Use a problem-solving methodology that promotes thinking and gaining an understanding of the consequences of one change against another. For example, the use of force field diagnostics or even simply a SWOT analysis, mind-mapping the potential weaknesses and threats of such a change.?
2. Make an agenda point of a cross-functional management meeting an item where everyone shares what they’re doing, and any highlights and discusses concerns about it.?
3. Ensure you have a plan-do-review-improve mentality to adopt more thinking when reviewing and improving the implementation of ideas.?
4. Find many opportunities for cross-functional communication.?
5. Use multi-functional teams when problem-solving, even if it’s perceived that the problem is in only one area.?
6. Join the business up with the NewLeaf International OGSM Process where every department and every location is connected to the top-level business objectives and vision.?

In a good OGSM implementation, every department and location are joined together to work on strategies/projects which are interconnected with each other.?

This is something we specialise in, so if you’d like to find out more, you know where to find me!

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Oh, and one more thing…

If you’d like to learn more about our Integrated Framework strategy and OGSM, we have created a FREE eBook for you to access.?

Here is a quick sneak preview of what you can learn:

If you’d like to see more, please feel free to get in touch! I’d be happy to get it over to you ASAP.