A while back I had the pleasure of collaborating with industry heavyweight Gail Severini on a series of posts addressing the costs of change management and what it will take to reduce them. It came up in conversation with a senior leader who used a very familiar phrase in the article! Here’s the first post by Gail- reposted with permission from The Change Whisperer.

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”—Lao Tzu

There is a back-room mindset in times of change: “Change the people or change the people.”  It means either convince (or coerce) the existing staff to adapt to the new way of working or fire them and hire someone else.  This phrase has always irked me.

Looking for some objectivity and additional insight for this series, I partnered up with senior change practitioner, Jennifer Frahm. You may know Jennifer from her terrific blog “Conversations of Change.”

We applied ourselves to articulating why this mindset is a fallacy, to considering what leaders are doing instead, and then finally to whether advancements will actually make Change Management, as we know it, extinct.

“Change the people”

In this mode, organizations force change mechanically, like a bulldozer or a crow bar. The Program team designs/builds the new thing, implements, and then de-commissions old. The work is focused on driving implementation as quickly as possible.

The Program Team:

• Works alone on solutioning and design, assuming they know better than  others how to build a better mouse trap (i.e., “we’ll change what you do”)
• Pays lip service to communication with broadcast, compliance-driven announcements and progress updates (talking heads announce what, why, how, and when) (i.e., “we’ll change what you know”)
• Installs new capability with technical training to people who are largely unaware of, and ambivalent about, the reasons for the change (i.e., “we’ll change how you do it”)
• Implements a re-organization justified by the increased efficiency of the systems or processes; people are assigned different roles and some number of people are “downsized,” “packaged out,” or offered “early retirement” (i.e., “we’ll change who does it”)
• Repeats, program after program, as if one size change fits all

Sure, we are exaggerating some for effect, but not much.

This process basically assumes that people are homogenous, interchangeable and dispensable “resources.” Success assumes that when one changes out parts, that the machine will automatically function better. It is a hang-over from an industrial era when people were most often cogs in an assembly line.

There is a critical element that the “change the people” mode overlooks—people have discretion over their performance. We can ramp up to passionate commitment or ramp down to bare minimum compliance. This affects the speed of implementation and also quality of outputs. If for no other reason than this, Program Teams are waking up to deploying more effective change management.

Many of us have been on both sides of that industrial mindset, have felt that pain, and even exerted that pain. Further, we all know that this mode imposes irresponsible hard and soft costs on the organization, particularly in context of continuous change.

Without doubt, organizations do need to change constantly. We must be vigilant in the pursuit of relevance in a world dominated by rapid technological and social shifts. But is the answer really to “change the people” constantly?

Costs of “change the people”

Organizations seem numb (or oblivious?) to the reality that there are real costs to “muscling through” change and the more change the organization is experiencing, and the more transformational the change, the greater the costs.

So what costs are over and above the usual when organizations muscle through? Here are a few examples that come to mind for us:

• Lost productivity
• Resource churn
• Downgraded conditioning of the organization

1. Lost productivity:

Let’s take it down to a personal level then back to organizational. We have all experienced it—the agitation of uncertainty and or ambiguity. When we don’t have a confidence or clarity in our future we:

• Seek answers by talking the situation over with anyone who might have more information than we do, which has the unfortunate effect of fueling gossip channels
• Attempt to connect the dots, the pieces of information that we have, and often do so erroneously and head off in the wrong direction
• Hold on to what we know and hold back from moving into the future
• Create options, often including a personal job hunt

From a neurological perspective, our amygdala (the part of the brain where emotions are housed) goes in to hyperdrive and this prevents the front brain (where our clear, logical thinking is housed) from operating well. We can’t possibly be productive when faced with the threat of uncertainty: We’re thinking fight, flight, or freeze. For a great reference on this see David Rock’s “SCARF: a brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others”).

All of these distractions suck valuable mindshare, actual time, and momentum away from the transformation. Imagine:

• If this represents even 2% of employees’ time then it is 9.5 minutes a day
• Assuming a 40-hour work week, that quickly adds up to 9.5 hours/Qtr or about a week/year per employee!
• Multiplied by the number of agitated employees and their hourly rate this can add up to a pretty significant cost. For 100 employees impacted by a strategy that takes a year to implement and at an average hourly rate of $40 ($80K annual), that comes out to $166K.

Of course, this is an unscientific calculation with no justification. However, for argument’s sake, go with it for a minute. If we multiply by 50,000 employees, which many of our large global corporates have, we are talking about $83M. Of course, the counter-argument is that many of the business benefits of these large-scale transformations are predicated on a billion-dollar return being realized. $83M is chump change…but it’s not just about the short term.

The legacies of these kinds of forced transformations tarnish the future transformations. So the 2% of employees’ time becomes 4%. It’s a spiral of ever-decreasing benefits realization over the long term.

2. Resourcing churn:

This kind of cost takes many forms, including:

• Flight risk: Valued resources get nervous, fearful that their jobs will change and fearful as to whether they will have jobs in the new environment. They begin looking around and some will leave. This requires the organization to incur the additional costs of recruiting for their replacements, lost productivity while that position is open and while new recruits come on board, and lost institutional memory and the corresponding decrement in productivity. In cases where these are client-facing resources, there is the additional risk that they could go to a competitor and take some clients (or the volume of their transactions) with them.  One could put rough numbers to this fairly easily: What if two of those 100 employees left? What is the cost of acquiring a new resource? Consider the time to post the position and then to screen, interview, select, negotiate, and onboard. Hours of time goes into this and sometimes direct costs to professional recruiters. What if one of those fleeing employees took 2% departmental revenue?

• Re-org gap: Re-organizations are still practically a default tactic and we have done our share. To the extent that this is an entirely legitimate requirement of the transformation, what are the aspects unique to “muscling through”? When organizations bulldoze change they announce a re-org and check off all the required processes. They follow legal process for letting people go and often offer Employee Assistance and/or career counseling. For those staying in new roles or even in the same roles surrounded by change, they run various Town Halls and Team meetings. If lucky, within a week or two it is considered “done.”  But we have worked in organizations where this can take months. Regardless of the time taken to implement the procedural side of a re-org, the inconvenient fact is they have barely scratched the surface. There is a timeline for developing commitment to change that is not “done” with “understanding.” Positive Perception, Experimentation, Adoption, Institutionalization, and Internationalization all must follow to drive business results. What are the costs of stopping short on implementing a re-org? Most leaders probably assume that this will get worked out through business-as-usual coaching and through the performance appraisal cycles. The problem today, with the rate of change that we must accommodate, is that these operational processes are usually too little, too late. There is often a gap between installed and realized. We don’t measure benefits on adoption and institutionalization, only implementation.

3. Downgraded conditioning of the organization.

Every time an organization muscles through change, it is painful and costly. Somehow, the organization carries on.  It becomes normal. However, this suboptimal performance becomes part of the way we do things around here. This may be the most insidious of costs.

It reduces employee engagement and morale.  It robs the organization of the discretionary effort that employees want to bring to a job that fulfills them. What if that represented a gap of 2% across the whole payroll? (If your resources truly earn their pay every day then this is not even a true reflection of the “cost” to the organization because the lost benefit is closer to 2% of gross profit.)

Sure, this is not a scientific approach; we don’t think we need one. Anyone can cast an eye over these examples and come up with more or better. Do your own cost analysis on specific cases if it lights up your brain.

“Free” is not free

The point here is that “changing the people” is not free to the organization. There are indirect costs that are substantial and long term.

Furthermore, there is a case to be made that one can only “muscle through” a certain degree of change. Incremental change (single silo, stepped change) can be forced through, in reasonable quantity. However, transformational change (requires Enterprise adaptation, incurs political and system adjustment, is long term and emergent) is more akin to wrestling a herd of greased pigs than it is to shearing sheep.

The larger questions that intrigue us, are: Are there better ways? Is it justified to “change the organization”?

More on this in the next post.

Thoughts? Reactions? We invite you to comment.

Jen Frahm

Dr Jen Frahm – Author of Conversations of Change: A guide to implementing workplace change.

The post The Hard Work of Change: A collaborative conversation appeared first on Conversations of Change.

Ta da!! Drumroll – 2018 list of change management blogs to follow …

The landscape has definitely shifted. More bloggers have lost their mojo / reprioritised their sharing of content. I think much of this is owing to the ease of platforms like Medium and LinkedIn. You certainly get more views there — so the dopamine hit is harder than when you look at your google analytics!  Nevertheless, while there are people continuing to blog about change management, I’m going to continue to give them a big shout out and say THANK YOU for your efforts! The community is better for it.

As always, if you know of a change management blog that is regular and of quality AND primarily on change management please let me know.  I get quality is subjective. I’ll add it in to the list!

My perpetual plea –  if something resonates leave a comment (trust me it is the fuel that keeps us going), and share them via twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or in your internal platforms like yammer / workplace!

1. Heather Stagl http://www.enclaria.com/resources/blog/
2. Lena Ross, http://www.lenaross.com.au/#!blogs/vikss
3. Celine Schillinger http://weneedsocial.com/
4. Torben Rick http://www.torbenrick.eu/blog/
5. Simon Terry https://simonterry.com/sharing/
6. Change Quest http://www.changequest.co.uk/insights/
7. Bob Marshall https://flowchainsensei.wordpress.com/
8. Allegra Consulting https://www.allegraconsulting.com.au/blog
9. Christopher Smith https://change.walkme.com/author/christopher-smith/
10. Wendy Hirsch Wendy Hirsch 
11. Philip Jones Change Mission 
12. And ME! But you’re already here. The Watercooler

Special mentions to the following terrific content creators (albeit not quite blogs)

Change Management Review 

The Ironic Manager 

PS – if you are not across the previous bloggers who have stopped now, do go and have a look. The back catalogue is definitely worth the visit.

12 Change Management Blogs to follow

19 Change Management Blogs to follow

17 Change Management Blogs to follow

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Every so often you see a discussion flare on the topic of what to call change management.   There’s a general squeamishness among some with being called a “change manager” or even talking about something as a “change”. The sentiment usually goes something like this:

Change Management has a bad reputation – we need to rebrand it

People don’t like change – so we need to be careful not to call this change management

You can’t actually manage change, so we need to find a better name (see my thoughts on that one here!)

And I’ve seen it in practice – “we need to stop talking about change and use the language of continuous improvement, because that’s more positive”. Many organisations rebrand their change as a transformation project.  However, now transformation has become code for offshoring.

I get the argument.  As I have alluded to in an earlier post semantics and language is power.  What we call something does matter. But for that very reason, I would argue we must continue to use the term change management for the activities of managing change.

When we “spin” change as “continuous improvement” we run the risk of not communicating the scale, scope and speed of the intentions. It’s disingenuous and false.

If organisations are to truly become agile in order to operate in hyper connected environments, they must be comfortable with change. And part of being comfortable with change is to normalise it.

Heather Stagl of Enclaria has just published “You don’t have to call it change management, just do it”, and it’s a great case of study of a company that has made significant changes without using a formal change management model or plan. It’s kinda what I mean by normalising the activities.

In a similar vein, I would say you don’t have to change the name, just do it well.

Your thoughts?

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How good is it when you find a new ‘go to’ blog? Recently I stumbled onto “Once more unto the change’ (aka ‘Bring out your dead!). It’s the work of Joe Gergen. Joe’s based in the US and has worked in process re-engineering for fifteen years. I’m really loving it — it’s a great combination of humanity, humility, learning and change.  I think the tricky thing for many of us who blog on business topics is mastering voice and writing style. Joe’s got that one in the bag — mainly because he *is* a writer. If you have time make your way over to his other non-business blog “Fortress of Dissolitude”

Anyway I asked Joe if he’d mind if I re-posted one of his pieces and the original is here, I’m pleased he said yes and said I could use this one. It was developed in collaboration with Megan O’Neal. Enjoy!

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a change agent?

The Secret in Secret Change Agent

Is a change agent a job or is it a role? Do we approach change management as a project or is a project endowed with change management?

A true secret change agent has a secret mission.  Except that it’s not a secret.  Anyone can manage a project that will change the organization.  The change may be as small as verbiage on a letter template or as sweeping as shutting down a department.  But without a secret mission, it’s just another disruption to the team members. The role of a secret change agent is to transform every project into something greater by becoming part of the team, by building trust with them so you can promote change from the inside. You are doing the project with them, not to them.

So what is your mission, should you choose to accept it?   

The key difference between a Secret Change Agent and your run-of-the-mill process engineer is the mission.  And the mission is to change the culture.  It doesn’t need to start as radical change – we’re not talking “smash the state” kind of culture change.  Think of it more along the lines of “gradual enlightenment”.   With every problem identified, the organization has an opportunity to grow.   Our reflex may be to slap a band-aid on the problem and desperately hope the blemish never shows its ugly face again.  But the opportunity presented is one of learning.  It’s not just about solving the problem, but rather about furthering a problem-solving culture.

I love it when a plan comes together

Every secret mission needs a good plan. Your job is to look at the project and the secret mission and figure out what lessons can be learned about problem-solving. It could be one simple process method. It could be a set of tools to use. It could be feedback loops. You could even be planting seeds for future learning. And as always assess the current capabilities and understanding of the team members. Your job is to set them up to succeed in the learning because that feels good, creates a sense of achievement that they’ll want to repeat.

So bring the people in 

By involving the people who live the problem, hopefully the people who identified the problem in the first place, you are taking the first step toward an inclusive learning culture.  People are always sensitive about projects and change so it’s your job to bring the right attitude. It’s your job to guide them not drag them. Take time to understand both the people and the process. Then make an effort to let them know you understand. They’ll appreciate that and you’ll build the trust necessary to move farther and farther ahead.

So what did you think? Enjoy it? Looks like I’ll need to update the 15 Change Management Blogs to follow …

The post The Adventures of a Secret Agent appeared first on Conversations of Change.

Thought I would touch on the topic of perceived control this time.

Perceived control is a very important construct in acceptance of change.  So often you hear that people just don’t like change.  I take issue with that. People don’t mind change if managed or introduced well. But that often means ensuring that the employee involved has some perceived control.

So what is it and why does it matter?

Perceived control is your perception of your ability to be effective in the world.  It reflects the degree to which you believe a situation is controllable and that you have the necessary skills and ability to make a difference to the outcome of a situation.

The basic theories suggest that the higher the degree of perceived control, the better your physical and mental health and ability to adapt to change. Take away perceived control and people retreat to coping mechanisms that are not as useful as others. If you perceive you have some control when faced with a stressful situation (like some organisational change) you move towards problem-focused coping strategies (as opposed to emotional coping strategies).  If you want to avoid performance dips, consider the degree of perceived control.

Does the type of change matter?

The studies suggest so. High perceived control leads to higher performance and organisational commitment in survivors of layoffs ,  greater success in diffusion of innovations, and openness to change in reorganizations.

How can you boost perceived control?

• Consult employees before making decisions or introducing change
• Ask for their thoughts on how to introduce the change
• Avoid random processes
• Provide as much information as early as possible
• Assist in bolstering skills and abilities to cope with the intended changes
• Provide your teams with opportunities to make collective sense of the change

Of course perception is a tricky thing. It’s influenced by a locus of control, negative/positive disposition, and past experience. Your employees will have varying degrees of perceived control when faced with the same change. It’s why one-size-fits-all processes rarely work.

Having said all this, caution is advised in trying to manipulate perceived control for an easier change outcome. Trying to control perception will reduce trust and commitment. As one friend sagely noted, “you can’t control someone’s perception, but you can help to shape it”. Let’s just hope it’s not a case of shape up, or ship out!

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#ChangeBlogChallenge – Change Readiness

And we’re up to Q3 of the #changeblogchallenge – and the topic is Change Readiness. Heather Stagl and I are challenging you to share your thoughts on change readiness.

As a reminder:

What is your perspective on change readiness? Here are some starter questions to get you thinking about what to write, but what you write about readiness is entirely up to you.

• The brain and change readiness
• If change is constant, what does perpetual change readiness mean
• 7 signs you’re not change ready

Write up your blog about change readiness, and share the link in the comments.

If you have followed my work for a while, you know that I highly rate consideration of readiness for change, much more than resistance to change.

The origins

Change readiness was initially defined as ‘the cognitive precursor to the behaviours of either resistance to, or support for a change effort’ (Armenakis, Harris and Mossholder, 1993, p.681). Today the construct at least at a practical level has come to include considerations of organisational support as well, so not just “will they”, but also “can they” (eg do they have the skills, knowledge, resources, training, infrastructure, assets). You can have all the will in the world and be emotionally and intellectually supportive of change, but without the resources and capability you are simply not change ready

Twenty years since Aremenakis et al  seminal paper “Creating Organisational Readiness for Change”  in Human Relations, Rafferty, Jimmieson and Armenakis, (2013)  published “Change Readiness: A Multi-level Review” . For those wanting to dive deep I would highly recommend getting into this. The review primarily focuses on the cognitive (thinking) and affective (feeling) responses to change (so the “will they”) and not so much on the factors that result in the “can they” . For this Weiner’s (2009)  “A Theory of Organisational Change Readiness” paper is useful.   – What they both point to is a lack of multi-level attention to change readiness. Change readiness occurs at an organisational level, a group level and an individual level and also in practice while the organisational and group level is often addressed, we see individual readiness to change neglected.

I prefer to focus on change readiness rather than resistance. In some ways it presents as way to do the Lewinian force field analysis  eg are the forces for change greater than the forces against change? I think when you focus on change resistance that’s all you will see. And for a whole host of reasons which I will explain in a later post, I think change resistance has limited use to change practitioners.  However, by focussing on change readiness and you shift the energy a little bit.

Change readiness in practice

In practice – it’s measured in a number of ways – full blown quantitative surveys, pulse polls (short series of question to take the pulse of the change), pulse checks – (checking in with change networks as representative of the audience), focus groups, and manager assessments. Done well, this data provides you information on how, where and when to intervene to improve the likelihood of success when the change goes live.

In about half of my change engagements the change readiness assessment is aborted. The reasons being:

• The organisation has survey fatigue
• There is no time or resources to do anything about the results
• Leadership is uncomfortable with hearing if the audience is not ready

This is a real shame. Because one of the hidden benefits of a change readiness assessment is it is a form of engagement and opportunity to reinforce the key messages of the change.

In one project where there was resourcing, time, and political understanding of the importance of the activity we developed an audit tool to assess the business unit before go-live.  The tool listed a series of practices which were known to either hinder or help the change once implemented with a 5 point scale.  It provided a scoring scale eg what your score means, and a contact point to return the audit. The business unit leaders were asked to rate their business unit on these practices.

To be honest, I expected the business unit leaders to inflate the responses – I didn’t mind that. Even if they were scoring themselves a 5 (when the real practice was lower) by thinking about the question they were being reminded of the key practices that needed to occur and saying to themself (Oh boy, we are going to need to change this!) But the answers came in quite honest and realistic. This enabled us to consolidate the results by business unit and provide the change leaders with a focus on where to intervene with coaching / workshops / discussions on the changes to occur.

In other projects I have been able to include a communication audit with the activity and provide critical information on understanding of the key messages and what has missed the mark, so it really is not an activity to be done in isolation.  In crafting the change readiness activity make sure you review what you want to do with other key stakeholders. You may be able to get more bang for your buck!

What I will note is more often than not these days the pace of change has accelerated to such an extent that you have very little time to do a readiness for change assessment and then act on it. Which is problematic. I’ll pick up on this in the next post.

Hint. Mop. Bucket.

But over to you – what experience have you had with change readiness? Would be most keen to hear.

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Deep breath. They’ve done it again. They’ve invested heavily in installing a change without thinking about the people who will use it, or thought about adoption, OR the impact on customers. In short: There’s been no change management expertise involved. 

You’ve been called in really late in the piece or after go-live.

People are resisting.

They won’t use it.

They’ve come up with workarounds.

They’re not adopting the new values.

The callout has been made: “Mop and bucket in aisle three!” 

It’s a horrible mess, and you need to clean up. 

Frustratingly, this is a common change management approach, so let’s talk about some of the different versions of it.

We all saw it coming

Somebody thought it would be a no-brainer, it’s been really costly to implement, and they need to get benefits, pronto. 

We all  knew it would be a mess, but ego or obstinance got in the way. The mess is made worse because it could have been avoided – as with a modicum of consultation and early engagement there would have been a heads up, or at the very least a hint, at the way things were going to go. 

This usually happens because the sponsor of the initiative has no understanding of the link between change management and benefits realisation OR the sponsor is not ready to hear views that are counter to their perspective. 

Mop up tactics:

Swing that mop! Get in, work out who can influence the decision-maker who has created the mess, do a lot of coffees and high touch engagement. Validate the experience of those who have disengaged or are actively resisting. Work with them to understand how it can be salvaged. Actively broker a compromise or agreement with the disaffected parties. Conduct a ‘lessons learned’ once enough time has passed. Make those lessons public in some format (yammer, lunch and learn) as a ‘mea culpa’ to the employees damaged by the change. 

This may buy back some goodwill for future change – but it also educates up and coming leaders in the organisation of the costs of not doing change management work upfront. 

The nature of the change necessitated it. 

Sometimes there are types of change that prevent early engagement and consultation or change impact analysis. Specifically, I’m thinking:

When you deploy a cloud-based software platform that is not able to be customised. 

When there is sensitivity of an industrial relations nature and you are working with an adversarial union entity.

When there is a commercial sensitivity, and you need to align your change communication with market announcements.  

Mop up tactics:  

When you find that you are implementing a change where there is no opportunity to co-design, co-create or have input on what the change should be, you need to focus strongly on managing expectations and being explicit as to why there is no consultation. You can often provide an opportunity to co-design HOW the change happens though. So, if you are being brought in just before launch, focus heavily on understanding the communication and training expectations. 

If the change has a heavy IR implication such as layoffs or outsourcing, the best you can do is focus on anticipating the likely scenarios and preparing for them. It’s likely there will be some clues from previous change – but get close to the HR teams and corporate affairs to understand the nature of the workforce and the likely public narrative about the change. 

Similarly, when the change has a commercial sensitivity you need to work really closely with the corporate affairs team and the market launch team – so you can make sure that all of the communications are deployed at the same time, and there is an over-production of material, communication and training support for affected employees. 

Depending on the number of employees impacted you may be able to use NDAs or confidentiality clauses on key personnel to make sure they are ready to support. 

It’s cheaper to clean up in the short run. 

In some circumstances, the cost of doing a short intensive clean-up period – roadshows, additional floorwalkers, and/or training materials is less than having a change team working from the beginning. 

Make no mistake though this can often just look like a PR campaign and while it might be cheaper from the beginning, it’s costly in the long run as employees become distrusting. 

The legacy of poorly executed change lasts a long time. 

Mop up tactics:

I’m not sure beyond “do what you need to do” – make aware, inform, educate, train, report on that there’s much else you can do. 

Bring your flack jacket – you may be facing into some significant unrest as a result of the lack of early consultation and design. If the decision to not resource change up front has been a financial decision from someone with a short term focus it will take a lot of work to change that mindset. 

You’re likely to see more of this with this type of company – so ultimately you need to think about if its an organisation you want to stay with. It’s going to be hard work ongoing.

“Late is never great” in a change environment, particularly if you aren’t aware of the scope and distribution of the mess until you arrive, mop and bucket in hand. 

What do you think? 

Are there other scenarios to consider?

Do you have your own preferred style of mop? 

I’d love to know.

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It’s the last quarter of the #changeblogchallenge and the topic is Change Leadership. There’s been some great contributions.

Gilbert Kruidenier gets a bit cranky with “What Change Leadership?”

Rebecca Cattran poses the question “Who needs to lead change?”

Aldean Jakemen provides this great evolutionary perspective with Evolution of a Change Leader

And then Lena Ross, my partner in crime in the Agile Change Leadership Institute posted this beauty from her upcoming book.

I was so grateful as I think it is hands down the clearest role delineation between change managers and change leaders. And it’s needed! Because I see a lot of change practitioners assuming the role of change leaders and this is really problematic. You NEED to have leadership on the hook for change.

I use the analogy of Roadies and Rockstars – it comes from a talk I provided at Convergence in April 2018 (and btw, stay tuned, it looks like Convergence will be back for 2020!)

Change managers (or change consultants, or change facilitators, whatever you call it) are the roadies. Their job is to do the heavy lifting.  They make the leader (Rockstar) look good. Actually, maybe they are roadies AND publicists, and wardrobe and the tour manager?  But basically, they DO THE WORK of creating change. The hard grunty work. The analysis, the strategising, the setting the right people up for success, the engaging, the fire-putter-outers. Organising workshops and making sure the environment is conducive to great conversations.

But, but…

Does it mean they are not influential? Hell no, that’s part of it.

Does it mean they are not providing a form of leadership with role modelling the change and initiating the ideas? No, that’s part of it too.

Does it mean they can’t then use co-creative approaches and models of change like appreciative inquiry? Absolutely not. In fact, it is usually the change manager who will evaluate the environment and make the recommendation to use positive psychology as a way of designing and implementing sustainable change.

But in the music world when approaches changed in how music is created and delivered (think streaming, and in the lounge room concerts), it’s often because the support crew suggested the idea, made the preparations for doing it differently, and coached the rockstar in the new way of performance.

But they are not the leaders of change in the business. They are the support crew for the leaders of the business who are accountable for change.

The leaders of change?

They are the Rockstar, we wheel them out to do the engagement, the speaking, the sharing of vision – some of them are great, they are doing pop-ups and ninja gigs, like Amanda Palmer, and working the change vision with the fans in an organic fashion.  But most of them, they’ve got businesses to run, companies to run and lots of very important decisions to make. They’ve got multiple changes to drive and they just don’t have the time to be checking attendance records to the next appreciative inquiry workshop and working out what the skills gap is in the group of employees to move to cloud-based working. All that, and there’s still the multitude of conversations that change practitioners have in order to make change happen somewhat seamlessly.

While rockstars have a sense of what the fans want and how they behave, they rely on their marketing teams to provide them deeper behavioural analysis on what will land well and what will not.

Whenever a binary / dichotomous model is put up, inevitably someone will come back with an argument about oversimplification. I get that, as above Amanda Palmer is a HUGE rockstar but behaves atypically of her ilk. It works for her.  But in my view, it’s easier and more effective to work with a simple foundation and build our own model of who does what from that.

Remember the trade-off in model creation: You can only ever have two of the three (simple, generalisable, accurate). If you are looking for something that is accurate and generalizable to multiple scenarios, it certainly won’t be a simple dichotomy.

Where I think this distinction does not work is in organisations that don’t have dedicated change management resourcing. Size matters. Here the rockstar needs to be the high profile busker and do their own heavy lifting or share it with others. And anyone who has tried it knows, life’s pretty difficult busking. You do want a roadie around.

And in signing off, how much would I love to embed Amanda Palmer’s Do it With a Rockstar clip. Alas, its NSFW.

Kind of like change managers doing the work of leaders in the organisation

The post The Roadies and Rockstars of Change appeared first on Conversations of Change.

So this week Tim Creasey, Chief Innovation Officer of Prosci had a bit of a rant about the likes of the people who like to claim “Change Management is dead”, those that protest “Change Management is obsolete”. It was a good rant – the gist of it is regardless of how the environment changes (the volatility, the uncertainty, the complexity) the need to support, and enable people to deal with change, does not change. And I couldn’t agree more. It took me back to a post I wrote nine years ago, yes, nine years. In those days, the lament was “you can’t really manage change” — and I argued that meant the person saying it had a limited view of what the word management meant, and were confusing it with control. I think it’s still applicable – so hear it is here…

 Sigh. Yesterday I read another blog piece that went along the lines of “there’s no such thing as change management, you really can’t manage change, organisations are too complex to manage change. We need to find another word for change management”.

It’s a prevalent view on Linked In Discussion boards, articles, and blogs. Particularly since systems thinking and complexity / chaos science has come back into vogue in change management forums.

Well…

 Bollocks!!

You can manage change, whether it be in your personal life, your organisational life, or your community life. If you have hired a consultant who is telling you otherwise then revaluate the terms and conditions of the contract. And find some-one who can manage your change needs for you.

I think I understand where this view comes from – it comes from an assumption that managing is controlling. And if that is the substitution, yes, I would be hesitant to say change can be controlled. But that’s only part of the change manager’s role.

How do we define ‘management?’

Let’s revisit Henri Fayol’s 1949 commonly used definition of the functions of Management in relationship to organisational change: Planning, Leading, Organising and Controlling/Co-ordinating

Plan: A change manager can plan for the intended change outcome, looking at milestones, resources, stages and what it is going to take to get to  the benefits the change sponsor is looking for. In today’s project environment this usually involves project management methodology. It’s  a way of representing what the thinking is on how the change will roll out. Will everything go exactly to plan? No, never, but that’s why you hire a change manager who is sufficiently experienced and flexible to adapt the plan as new information surfaces.

Leader: A change manager needs to lead the stakeholders and key project personnel in the desired change outcomes. Many of the stakeholders will be specialists in their own field and have no idea of the principles of change, and how people react. That’s why a change manager takes a leadership role, and sets expectations of what is appropriate through stakeholder engagement.

Organising: A good change manager organises the resources, and the activities to ensure that the change goes well. When complexity threatens to drown the change program, it is the Change Manager’s role to simplify and strip out the critical path from a change perspective and wrangle the competing demands that are creating the complexity.

Controlling / Coordinating: So do change managers control? You bet. But they control by communicating, shaping, nurturing, encouraging and empowering their stakeholders.  They control by understanding that change is not a linear process and that they will have revisit previous stages and reinforce, or amend aspect of the change plan. Co-ordination requires flexibility with the changing needs.

When we use Fayol’s definition of management, then organisational change can be managed. This is of course is a nod to scientific management thinking, which is in its essence highly linear. But just because PLOC emerged from linear thinking doesnt mean it can be only used in that context. All these functions work in complex systems.

Change management and complexity

The beautiful thing about the re-emergence of complexity theory in our thinking today is as change managers we are provided with additional tools to manage the change.

• Change resistance as an autopoetic response? Great – find the circuit breaker.
• Randomness, instability and diversity can be resource for change. Use them, don’t lament them!
• Identify the organisational systems attractors and plan for the potential responses to bifurcation points.
• Don’t dismiss the potential of small changes
• Pay attention to the stakeholders on the boundaries of the system

Babies and bathwater

Please don’t get me wrong, managing change is not a simple task. I agree there is too much jargon associated with the field, and we could all benefit from some plain English lessons. But is Change Management dead? I think not. Should it be. Definitely not.

But I also think to get rid of the term change management, throws the baby out with the bath water. Let’s do a better job of educating clients and organisations of what change management is and what change managers can do.

The tools and templates, frameworks and models are support systems, not the panacea. Organisations are complex and therefore introducing change is a complex task.

But the first step in achieving your change program benefits is hiring some-one who understands that managing change is a complex and creative endeavour and absolutely possible to do.

The post Can’t manage change? Puhlease… appeared first on Conversations of Change.

One of the unique aspects of ‘Conversations of Change: A guide to implementing change’ is that it is delivered in the structure of four adventures. This means it caters for managers who are in different scenarios and you get to choose which adventure you navigate through the book.

At the end of each chapter we review what the contents mean for each of four adventures. The four adventures are based on three variables.

• How well do you know what the change is to be delivered?
• How much internal resourcing do you have for change management?
• How much budget do you have to hire specialist resources?

Depending on your answers to these questions, you could have very different adventures ahead of you. Regardless, they all start with Chapter 2 as this a baseline understanding of what you will be doing. The next chapter helps you distinguish between those who know what they are talking about and helps you ask the right questions. Part one of this book is all about the decisions you need to make to get yourself set up for change success. Part two covers the elements that are necessary for a successful change and Part three addresses components of change management you hear about and might want to consider.

But back to those adventures ahead of you.

Adventure 1:

• You do not know what the change is to be.
• You do not have any internal change resources.
• You do have budget.

Adventure 2:

• You do know what the change is to be.
• You do not have any internal change resources.
• You do have budget.

Adventure 3:

• You do know what the change is to be.
• You have internal change resources.
• You do have budget.

Adventure 4:

• You may or may not know what the change is to be.
• You have no internal change resources.
• You have no budget to hire anyone.

So, chosen your own adventure? Let’s go…

Order from my website (Australia only) or Amazon for paperback and Kindle. 

The post Choose your own change adventure! appeared first on Conversations of Change.