In a recent presentation on change management for a large financial institution, I found myself explaining change management in businesses in the following way:
You’ve decided your friend should take up running as a hobby. They don’t want to take up running. In order to get them to do what you want, you need to convince them that they want take up running and help them then take steps towards achieving this goal.
In companies, this is how change is often facilitated, except if you were to observe it, it looks more like a relay race for three. A badly run race at that.
At the starting line, you have the Boards/management/strategic team all excited and ready to go. They decide there’s a problem that needs to be fixed. They sit in a silo trying to devise the best possible solution and once satisfied, pat themselves on the back. The baton is now handed to the implementation team. The implementation team get very busy running the middle of the race, working out all sorts of interesting ways to light a fire under the final group who are actually impacted by the change. Unfortunately, this last racer often isn’t involved in anything until they’re handed the baton. Half the time they wouldn’t even know who else was running the race in their team. They’re also usually quite exhausted from all the other races they’ve been forced to run and so giving up, complaining, dropping the baton and looking for ways to cheat are all possible outcomes.
There’s a reason why failure rates in change management have an alarmingly high statistic of over 70%. Change is hard to do if you don’t have the whole picture and are only involved in a snippet of the relay.
Without holistic oversight, it’s really common to encounter problems such as:
- Designing a solution that doesn’t fit in the environment
- Selecting a poorer quality solution from the available options
- Active resistance and sabotage by the people expected to adopt the change
- Reverting to old ‘pre-change’ behaviours soon after implementation
- Costly delays as unforeseen problems continue to arise
Admittedly, the types of problems you’re likely to encounter depend on the type of change. Regulatory change is surprisingly easy to implement but has some of the poorest long-term adoption of change. Organisational change is often met with a lot of distrust initially because of the high level of uncertainty and the threat to individual job security. Continuous improvement or process change can be met with early enthusiasm but easily get pushed further and further down the to do list as other more urgent priorities take hold.
Michelle holsman 