There is no shortage of methods, books, and opinions on the subject of change in organizations. Whether we are adopting an agile way of working, in the middle or a large reorganization, improving innovation, or undergoing a fusion or takeover, change is everywhere. And despite all the knowledge and expertize about change management it seems to be a painful process all the time. But there is something else going on as well with the concept of change itself that forces to take another look at the way we manage change: Organizations and processes are becoming increasingly complex, it seems increasingly hard to keep a business model relevant and competitive, and large corporations are threatened by small nimble startups in all industries. Organizations operate in a time of high uncertainty and a high pace of change and adaptability is needed.

What are the flaws of current change methods? What is a better way, better suited for complexity?

What can you expect from this article?
  • A better understanding of the flaws of current change management approaches.
  • An overview of better methods which are more suitable to deal with complexity and high paced change.

From A to B transformations to continuous change

There are many different ways organizations deal with change. But there are some common characteristics we encounter many times: Change is plan driven and assumes we can define a plan for change in advance and follow it, it is being executed in a top-down manner, and it usually is a linear from A to B process. Let’s investigate how these characteristics fit within the current demands to facilitating change.

The biggest mistake I encounter in dealing with change is that change is seen as a temporary state between the current and the new situation. We plan the change, execute it, and then we are done. Granted, this is somewhat simplified, but the facts remains change is supposed to lead the organization towards a new desired state after which the state is completed at some point. Change is regarded as a project with a beginning and end date. It is my opinion that change needs to be continuous in this fast moving world. This means we must always change. It is not a project with an end date; we are always in a state of change. WE cannot afford to postpone change until, the moment it starts to hurt, for example, when margins are down or a business model is declining. That is too late. We must continuously search for new opportunities and promising value propositions, and new and better ways of working.

There is another undesired side effect to the project based A to B approach: it is radical and dramatic for the people involved, because change executed that way always seems to be large, painful and urgent. It leads to a lot of uncertainty before things calm down again. And just when employees start to recover from the last reorganization, the next one is announced already. Continuous change leads to smaller continuous changes which are much less dramatic. The impact of change is gradual and non-disruptive.

A continuous flow of small changes allows us to keep up with the current competitive landscape and is much less dramatic for those involved.

From top-down to participatory change

The radical effect of traditional change methods is amplified by the top-down nature of it. During our workshops we regularly ask participants to list a few changes they have gone through and indicate whether they experienced the changes as positive or negative. We then ask them to group the changes into internal and external changes. External changes are started from outside of your team or you. Internal change is initiated by you or your team. It will be no surprise to hear that people value internal changes much more positively than external change. And yet, a change is almost always announced by senior management and seldom starts from within employees.
The result of this is: resistance to change. Traditional change management deals a lot with resistance to change which is totally unnecessary. Resistance to change should be reframed to dealing with change. In our experience a change is much more successful and lasting if it happens in the form of a continuous flow of small experiments initiated by employees themselves. Het is not just a matter of involving employees, employees should initiate and execute change. This participatory method of change management fits the demand of today much better.

Change yourself first

By the way, this doesn‘t means that change does not need support from top management. It does. But even here we can learn something. If we ask managers what they feel needs to change, we often get answers like ‘the teams need to take on more responsibility’ or ‘departments should learn how to work together’.

When we ask employees the same question, we typically get answers like ‘Management needs to learn to trust us’ or ‘Management does not understand what we need’. Do you spot the trend? We have the tendency to see the need for others to change. If you as a manager want to support a change, change yourself first. And be very transparent about it. The second thing management needs to do is to stop managing people directly, but instead create an environment in which it is safe for people to change themselves and initiate change.

From plan-driven to feedback driven change

The problem with a plan-driven approach is you simply cannot plan a complex change. Creating a detailed desired end state is also not feasible. At least not in a complex environment. There are simply too many variables to control.  You have to discover the future instead. That doesn‘t mean we don‘t value planning as an activity, we just do not rely on everything going according to plan. Discover the future means we continuously conduct small safe-to-fail experiments to discover and learn. Change is simular. If we plan, we make assumptions. These assumptions need to be validated through short feedback loops using small change experiments that are carefully reviewed. This allows us to adjust course based on what we learn.
So change is not a linear plan-driven process. It is a feedback-driven process. We continuously scan our environment to gather insights in trends, challenges, things that work well or don‘t, and new opportunities. We then plan and execute safe-to-fail change experiments, initiated by employees themselves, and gather fast feedback on our assumptions by reviewing the experiments. That is change management 3.0 in a nutshell.

Conclusion

In a world of fast change and increasing complexity the traditional methods of managing change are not optimal. The usual from A to B approach leads to big painful dramatic changes. Instead we should adopt a strategy of continuous small changes. Change becomes the default state. Not stability. Change also needs to be initiated and executed bottom up, not only top-down. This totally changes the game in terms of resistance to change. Management that wishes to support chnahge must start by chnaging themselves. And finally, change needs to be feedback-driven instead of plan-driven, meaning we continuously conduct small change experiments and learn from the outcome. 

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