Taking a break from Change

When I started work at the back end of the eighties, there was a feeling that companies had been organised and run the way they were for decades. Change was feared and avoided if at all possible. It was expensive and we had survived perfectly well for years doing things like this, we were told. The status quo ruled.?

Then, through the nineties and the decades since, Change (or Transformation) has grown and grown as an accepted and even continuous function of the business; specific roles, whole departments, even whole businesses were created to feed the desire for more and more change. Most organisations have Change Directors, Change Leaders and Managers, and Change Programmes, Projects and other change activities.?

Continuous Improvement (CI) has become an industry standard; we are expected to be improving (therefore changing) our internal, organisational systems and processes all the time. I don't mean improving the systems and services you provide to your customers... but the organisational transformation and change we feel we need to be inflicting on ourselves, all the time.

Change has become a business-as-usual characteristic of our everyday working lives. But is this a good thing?

Do you ever feel like you don't get the chance to benefit from a change activity before your organisation ventures into changing that system or process again??How often are you able to think "at this time, I don't have to worry about any organisational change activities that affect me ... I have the space to just focus on doing my job really well with the structure, systems and processes currently in place, even if they are not perfect."

I bet many people can name several change activities going on in their organisation, which means that some systems and/or processes they rely on are in a state of flux. Most of the time we are dealing with many change activities all running in parallel... with all the inter-dependency risks that entails too.

The crucial task of measuring success in meaningful ways is sacrificed so we can quickly get on with the next change project.

There seems to be a common optimism that change projects are worth the effort and cost, despite the fact that it feels like many fail to deliver the business benefits they promised. Sometimes, they even make things worse than they were before.

So, I wonder if this level of change is good. Maybe it makes us agile and adaptable? Being able to deal with change is a good thing, right? Yes, but does change need to be continuous??I think it might be beneficial for organisations to consciously plan gaps in their change roadmap, to allow their people to take a break from change now and again.?Or at least for change projects to be planned so that some functions have a chance to recover whilst other functions are executing change.

Imagine the business that decides that nothing will change for a few months in their corporate change calendar; to actually plan to halt change activities for a period of time that is meaningful for the organisation.

'There will be no change to our structure, systems or processes for 3 months, everyone!'

This would let the organisation's people focus on the business and their core roles, rather than always having to deal with another process or system or part of the organisation structure going through another transformation in the hope that improvement and efficiency follows.?

I would think this would be good for mental health, to take away this common reason for work-anxiety ('change fatigue'), even just for a short time.?Change leaders and their teams can benefit too; they can focus on measuring the realised benefits from their latest batch of implemented change activities. They can reflect and report on the levels of success from those activities (and learn from what went well, what went wrong).?

What do you think? Does it make sense to plan for breaks in a change schedule? I'd be interested in your views. Has your organisation taken a change break?

Thanks for reading - views are my own.