“I don’t talk about change management anymore.” With an eyebrow raised, a colleague responds, “oh, why?” “Because I don’t think we can manage change anymore.”
This is a conversation I have had a many times over the last few years and while it may seem like a semantic debate, I genuinely believe we need to rethink our view on traditional change management. By this I mean the kind of process that is rational and linear, which generally starts by identifying the change need, creating a group of supporters, communicating the plan, and delivering the change. What I characterise as ‘problem, solution, adoption.’ These are the sorts of models that have translated well for the myriad training courses on change management (a search for change management training on Google yields a staggering 2,890,000,000 results!), which is probably why they have gained so much traction.
These approaches are useful for understanding the historical development of organisational change but for me have a number of weaknesses:
- Once and done: linear models are based on a notion of change that assumes a beginning and an end. You complete a change programme, wrap it up nicely and move on to the next one
- Their analogue origins: many of these models were conceived in a time before the internet, email, AI, machine learning and so on
- Outmoded employment structures and job roles: the early change management models are based mainly on corporate sector, large, hierarchical organisations. They also tend to assume fixed career paths and long periods of tenure in defined roles
The changing nature of change
| From: | To: |
| A point in time | Continuous |
| Reasonably paced | High speed |
| Analogue | Digital |
| Fixed roles and career paths | Flexible working and multi-careers |
| Time to respond | Immediate and multiple |
We are now dealing with not only a face pace of change, but change on multiple fronts at the same time. If you think about the kinds of changes we’re having to cope with on a daily basis at the moment, managing them all feels like an impossibility. This highlights the VUCA environment we talked about last year and how working with change has to adapt.
- Volatility: Unforeseen events have significant impacts, which is linked to the speed of change. It is harder to respond when more things are changing faster
- Uncertainty: the more uncertain our environment is the harder it is to predict
- Complexity: handling significant, complex, and inter-dependent factors. It is difficult to have all the information we feel we need and it is harder to analyse
- Ambiguity: The information we have may be incomplete, inaccurate, or contradictory so we can’t always draw clear conclusions. It is harder to interpret the world we’re in.
Any one of these factors can have a significant impact, and the fact we are now dealing with them all together means our responses to the ongoing changes have to be flexible, fluid, and versatile.
How might we do it differently?
- Thinking about managing transitions instead of change
- Taking account of the emotional as well as the rational
- Using action research and action learning methods – don’t map out an extensive change plan and try to stick to it. Experiment and test!
- Being ready to change course
- Taking small steps. You still need the big hairy audacious goal but if you focus on that too much most of what you will see are the barriers to achieving it.
- Working collectively. New insights can no longer be the preserve of designated, senior roles