The U-Turn, Pivot, New Paradigm, and other management-speak: When is change good, or bad? (Issue 6)

As many a philosopher has said, change is an inevitable part of life. To fail to change is to fail to live. And so on... add your own favourite cliché here!

Change is also something all business leaders and management teams need to consider carefully. Achieving positive, successful change is central to the longevity of a company, whether it involve a new product, a restructure, changing to hybrid working, or a complete change of direction in the nature of the business. Falling short, or managing the process badly, can cause very real and long-lasting damage.

Effective change management

As with many topics in the field of management, we don't really have an agreed common ‘best practice’ for this, but several competing models (here’s two examples: Harvard Business School and Association for Project Management). However, much of the variation is in language, the order of the steps in the change process and/or the relative importance placed on each one.

Whether your chosen approach has 4 steps, 5, 6 or 2, almost all of them share the common themes of: identifying a need, preparing the organization/consultation/obtaining buy-in, planning and defining the vision, implementing or executing the change, embeding and improving it, and measuring success/analysing the results.

Nothing too controversial there, and all fairly logical. The key part that many management teams have skipped over the years is the ‘prepare the organisation’ bit; the communication stage. This is crucial because, even with the best will in the world, humans resist change. It’s just part of our flawed nature. So, to make your plan a success you have to invest time in consulting people, getting their inputs, reflecting those inputs in your plan, working with empathy and social leadership techniques to get the team on board, even enthusiastic about the change(s).

This is a great lesson for leadership generally, not just for managing change. ?

Change gone bad

Sometimes it can feel like our leaders have pulled a new idea from thin air (putting it kindly), or they’re chasing after the latest shiny object, conveniently forgetting the months of work you put into the last one. The team may be left with the impression ‘management’ are making decisions by some blind method involving a dart board, with the various options written on it in place of the numbers. Or that they’re serving their own best interests rather than those of the organization (or country! Damn, I nearly made it through a whole article without a hint of politics..).

But let’s be fair to those leaders and give them the benefit of the doubt because this is rarely the case, it is much more likely that they’re simply bad at communicating the reasons for the change of direction and they haven’t explained the logic behind their decision.

That’s one example of what a bad change looks like, others include making a strategic pivot on a whim or as a knee-jerk reaction to something; basically, any U-turn that is ill-conceived or poorly thought-through. Another common error is attempting to impose a change without consultation or reference to the wider team (see my thoughts on autocratic leadership, elsewhere!). Some of these methods may work in the short term or by luck, but even if they are successful they will come at the high price of lost trust and diminished respect from the team.

Which brings us onto the question of ‘the gut’ vs ‘the data’. When initiating and following a change process, which of these offers the best foundation for decision making?

Should leaders trust their gut feeling?

Or is it better to rely on data alone?

If we define the gut feeling as the sum of past experience and instinct, then this can easily lead a company down the wrong path. At the same time, if we define data as actual, verifiable facts then we may never have enough data to make a decision.

A few weeks ago, I offered up a quick poll on this subject, and the results were closer than I expected (see image to the right). Thankfully the blindfold & a dartboard approach got 0 votes!! ??

Personally, I’ve always preferred to err on the side of verifiable information (even if that data takes the form of a majority view from trusted colleagues rather than 'hard' ones & zeros). Ironically, I always had an instinctive distrust towards those leaders/managers I’ve worked for in the past who made decisions based on their own gut feelings in the face of overwhelming data.

What I’ve learned since then, and which seems to be borne out by the small sample in this poll, is that a combined approach is probably the best. Rely on what data you can get, but accept that you’ll never have perfect information. And even if you did, data can’t always capture the human elements of an equation. So, use your instincts and best judgement too.

Today that’s the way I approach my U-Turns, Pivots, New Paradigms and other fun words for ‘change’.

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