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The most important competency for a change practitioner is sense of time.
“…understanding current change capability and capacity requires the horizon of a CM to extend back into the past.
And ensuring sustainability requires a perspective further into the future.” Gail Severini from blog post.
Thanks Gail. This is pulled out of a longer post focused on the difference between CM and PM practitioners, but may be the key to a lot of what change management is about.
The Present
In a way does not exist. It is gone at the speed of thought. A Change practitioner must understand the concept of present. For it is in those spots, those frozen moments where change happens and where it gets recorded. The present is a moving line that represents completion and transition. The present IS status quo. Present is a reality that exists in each stakeholders head. It is something to be acknowledged. It is a grounding spot to illustrate before, transition and after.
The Past
Very much exists- even though it shouldn’t. Because after all it is gone. Where is does exist is within each stakeholders realm of comfort. The past is predictable, immovable- like a concrete foundation. The past is visible to everyone, even futurists. Its negative is the difficulty of erasal. Its positive is as measurement. Numbers and facts come from the past. Predictions and plans arise from those numbers.
The Future
May or may not happen. It will arrive in some way, but like the present is quickly gone. What is interesting about the future is that it is the past transitioned through the present to again be the past. The typical mistake here for CM is to see the future as a transition from the present (think current and future state). Remember the past does not go away. So the future in terms of change should be the end state arrived at through the lens of the past, the capacity of the present and an eye to the next future.
Where does this “most important competency” come in then?
A CM practitioner must be able to recognize and articulate the past (in all its glory and stranglehold), put it in perspective and then feed that assimilation into a dialogue and description of the end state. They must not let the past or the present hold the future hostage.
They leverage that with their innate sense of what happens when you tweak these three views of time in any given direction. Clients should expect change agents to quickly recognize what will happen when different levers are pulled, or pushed. Change agents will know the relative resistance power of timing, demands, resources, communication, collaboration etc.
CM’s, if they are good, know there will be stakeholders living in the past (sounds bad, but not necessarily), intent on checking things off in the present (even if the list is twice as long as it needs to be) or travelling at the speed of dreams (thanks Jimmy Buffet for that one). They all stand on the timeline of change.
You might say the Change Management Practitioner is the driver of the DeLorean, with the capability to travel back and forth in time and across the future, separate from the stakeholders and the initiative.
…and wouldn’t you know I saw a DeLorean for sale the other day…
Technorati Tags: Big Picture, change awareness, change management consultant, End State, future state, Garrett Gitchell, vision, vision to work
Change Management like project management, leadership and the implementation of strategy is not immune to insidious scope creep.
Inclusive Creep
“George, over there will need to be involved with this”. “Sue has a hand in this we should include her in this meeting”. Choose your comment, the list is long. All are based on a misunderstanding of what it takes to guide change. The change process has an end state, that is where you are heading. So inclusion is based on the journey to that end state. It is often a fine line in deciding who genuinely needs to be involved.
Guilty until proven productive is the mantra.
As an external I personally assume someone does not need to be there and then look for signs that I might be wrong. Juxtapose that to the internal players (especially those smack in the middle of the organization) who think everyone should be involved. Admittedly there are also practitioners and models that basically say “the more the merrier”. Merry maybe; effective questionable.
Too little, too late, too low Creep
Yesterday’s post http://horizontalchange.com/2010/07/looping-in-leaders-uphill-change-management/ illustrates this phenomenon. When change resources are brought in too late are to few in number and are placed below the owner, creep is essential. It is essential because, obviously, the scope was wrong in the first place. But rather than one by one roping in those left out it is better to hard stop and reevaluate scope. As with consulting contracting if the time and money will not support the new parameters then the change must be reduced in size.
Structural Creep
Think committees. Think pretend matrixed organizations (those that are simply inclusive rather than collaborative for results). Structural creep happens when the organization has built in expansion for every change. Usually created out of fear of change, and the decisions required and the results of bad decisions, structural creep mechanisms can literally stop change. Hence the saying “…where good ideas go to die.”
You cannot typically change structure easily (it is a change initiative all by itself) but as a leader or external practitioner you can help to guide decision-less pieces of the change into that structure while corralling those that need specific things to move forward into smaller, more nimble (and more authoritative) teams.
Creep is the result of poor planning and lack of front end work. Creep is also a symptom of either an incorrectly placed change agent or an inexperienced one who is always a little behind the change timeline or, usually, both.
Technorati Tags: Big Picture, business objectives, change awareness, End State, engagement, Garrett Gitchell, vision to work
Things begin to pick up for business (less fear, willingness to spend hoarded cash, new competition appearing from garages- not sure which is the cause, but things are picking up in the change arena) and the revisiting begins. Change anew. Except some of it is the programs that were cancelled a year or more ago. How is restarted change different?
History Doubled
The ability to move change forward is always effected by previous attempts (bad or good). To start something that did not finish on the first attempt is potentially tempting fate. If, in our current case, the economy can be blamed for the earlier stop, starting again just slots right into the business environment.
Care must be taken with communication for a restart because, excuses aside, a mistake was made. Sure, as a leader you do not think so – it was all part of the plan. The problem is to stakeholders it must not have been a good plan. Now the Pandora’s box of trust, faith in leaders (which is a specific kind of trust), I told you so’s and the appearance of mishaps is opened.
Address the double history issue with crystal clear as transparent as possible communications. You might want to recheck and possibly rethink the new plan- the last thing you want is two historical mishaps.
Second Chances
Everybody believes in second chances. You have one if you are restarting change. Some of your work may already be completed. Redo work can be done better. Mistakes can be corrected. And acknowledged. Which leads me to the “be careful”.
By necessity taking this second chance is assuming empathy. There is a difference between restarted change and any other- the empathy has to flow from the stakeholders to the leaders. Empathy should (I always hesitate to use this word, but it fits now) go from leaders to stakeholders, that is a given. To go both ways sets up an interesting dynamic. Maybe I should have said an effective dynamic because the core of relationships connected to accomplishments is shared empathy. Give it a double dose on your second chance restarts.
Rebuilding is impressive
Taking what you have, envisioning something different and better and then layering in additions is smart change. As with any remodel matching the old lines to the new can be difficult. Because that is an obvious component of rebuilding/remodeling everyone is impressed when the result is seamless. With your restart this is an opening for a view of the end state that includes overcoming and tackling obstacles.
For that to make sense as an explanation there must be honesty, transparency and camaraderie around stops and starts and the end states they can create.
With that you can restart and rebuild at the same time.
Technorati Tags: change communications, change failure, change management, End State, engagement, Garrett Gitchell, resistance to change, stakeholders, vision to work
Change can be the overall time line of moving from one thing to another, or old to new. It can be the moment the switch happened- you actually move into that new home. It can be the process itself of transforming and changing behavior. It can mean movement, perspective, action, technology and/or behavior.
Transition might well be the same if semantics are not your game.
As an English undergrad words and languaging are an environment all their own for me.
So I like to think of transition as that sweet period- sometimes short sometimes a longer transformation- from the end of the old to the beginning of the new. Perhaps walking through the door of that new home…
With change management and the process of guiding change that sweet spot is something to capture as difficult, discomforting, then interesting, then satisfying and if more of those transitions may be in the future, contemplative and measured.
Technorati Tags: End State, Garrett Gitchell
Change is always about action. Or for the historical, resistance approaches, inaction.
For action to happen there must be some stimulus that gets it started and keeps it going. The trigger/switch at the individual level is motivation. That foundation out of the way, who is in charge of the triggers?
The Individual
You would think it would start here. The individual most likely assumes it will start somewhere else. When an individual has chosen to do something on their own, say find a job, they are certainly responsible for motivation. They will feed that with the carrots and sticks of different opportunities. But when an individual is expected to do something they relinquish control of motivation.
The Boss
Which brings us to the first level leaders. They are the closest to core motivational action. They have the chance to effect action. Unfortunately they are the bosses- as my kids say, “stop bossing me around”. Doubly unfortunate is the fact that they are also individuals. They are saddled with the need to both act and be responsible for action. With so much action on the radar it is easy to forget that action requires motivation.
The Mid Level Manager
It is here that the carrots and sticks are stacked, measured, bargained for and grouped. Since carrots and sticks are a fairly weak motivator, force and coercion are often chosen as alternatives. So now we have an individual who is also a boss delivering blows and wishing they could somehow satisfy everyone- which would probably increase motivation and therefore the right actions.
The Acronym Leaders
At this level you get your title shortened, from seven and eight letters (and more) to 2- VP. Not only must motivation at an individual level (which of course includes the VP) be considered, but there is now an invisible core energy centered around function (read skill, focus and a certain kind of specific motivation) that has a powerful action/inaction lever. Competing motivators and competing actions (or not) appear. The more this person takes charge of functional motivators the more they tend to run head-on into disparate organizational motivators- especially if they are wrapped up in a change package.
Enter the Figureheads
SVP’s.
Their idea of individual now means something completely different. Their understanding of motivators has been tarnished by the rise through the other levels. My favorite motivator- make this make sense- has lost its importance next to, “here is the list make it happen”. The SVP’s have a confusing list of competing interests, all of our categories, plus functions in general, sometimes the combination of functions (who do not always get along- think sales and marketing), the board (since many of them sit there), which means shareholders (a category of individuals that has a serious, often detrimental effect on motivation and action)…
Which leads to the Founder/CEO/Evangelist
It is just as easy to say they are in charge of motivation as it is to say the same of the individuals. For both you might just be right. While this individual (mixing categories again) has the weight of the world on their shoulders they also have all the potential for motivation that can create both action and the motivation to act. They can guide systems, processes, structure and rewards. They can acknowledge (hint- biggest motivator for action), stir collaboration, mediate disputes and discrepancies and bring in the tools and resources to motivate worthwhile action (another hint- see make sense above).
We might have to call it a tie.
In the hierarchical structure, horizontal/matrixed or not, the top person is ultimately, on paper, in charge of motivation. In a democratic, each-person-is-a-shining-light culture, the individual is in charge of every action (not necessarily responsible, just in charge). So it is a tie. Since each person is an individual tie broken.
Which creates a nasty circular looped argument for change management to focus on the individual in terms of action. Search “change management” and you will find approaches that slot right in.
Motivation requires an input, which creates energy to stimulate action. Skip the input (makes sense is one) and go straight to the energy (urgency?) and you get…an equal and opposite reaction.
Approaches to action/change that look at the organizations world from an individual stakeholder perspective back at all the sticks, all the carrots, all of our categories and all of the other angles that influence motivated action (the best kind for change, read “Champions”) …work.
Those approaches create Vision to Work… for a change.
(couldn’t resist a plug )
Technorati Tags: Big Picture, business objectives, C level, CCM, CEO, change awareness, change failure, change management, change management consultant, End State, Garrett Gitchell, horizontal change management, Insights, resistance to change, vision to work
Good start. The primary competency of a change management consultant, I am beginning to think, is anticipation. Or ,so you do not confuse this with some fight or flight tendency (also well honed in CM practitioners) intuition might be a better word. We can tell you what will happen as each little action reverberates across the change web. We have probably seen something like this before, people are people and because of that, mistakes are consistently repeated from organization to organization and person to person.
Odds are you are not thinking of:
- How your assumptions effect your approach
- The true effect the change will have on operational efficiency
- The true effect operations will have on the path to the end state
- Importance of placement of change process- usually too low in organization
- Importance of timing of CM- usually too late
- The effect of leadership (different than the “importance of”)
- The power of one (how well is your approach going to acknowledge at the individual level)
- Context and big picture- will a stakeholder know where they fit and where you are in the process?
- Your performance system and its stranglehold on change
- Your leaders and their stranglehold on change (see previous bullet- not necessarily their fault)
- How you are dealing with assessment and measurement
- The difference between training and awareness
- Leveraging transformational initiatives for succession and professional development
- Accountability, responsibility and “ownership”
It is a much longer list, but you get the idea. Or do you?
If you really want to “transform” your organization looking at a much bigger picture is essential.
If your approach is the typical one of firing CM into the fray and hoping for little fall out this is an unnecessary list… until the next time you try to make a big change.
Technorati Tags: Big Picture, C level, CCM, CEO, change awareness, change failure, change management consultant, End State, engagement, External Consultant, Garrett Gitchell, horizontal change management, resistance to change, stakeholders, vision to work
Yesterday’s post had me peeling bananas upside down with a nine year old. Now I am wondering how many things I can peel differently in my own life as well as within my client’s organizations. This little exercise says a lot about change management.
- Change must make sense
- Sensible change must improve something (which makes sense)
- There will always be a little (or a lot) of hesitation (I will cut slack and say the a lot could be “resistance”)
- Even bought into the change, we have to transition
- All of this needs to be understood and acknowledged for the next person to change
- Change does not necessarily take time, but it does take a different focus
- Things are different after the change, which is a good thing
- If the change does turn out to make sense there is no turning back
From the end state back (admittedly in this case I am doing it with hindsight)-
This backwards banana thing makes complete sense (it is faster, cleaner and just fun). I will never peel a banana the old way again. It has not happened yet, but I will see someone peel the old way soon. I will notice. CM guy that I am I will understand what I went through to change and acknowledge that process for the someone. In this case it should be a quick change (and it can be easily demonstrated and measured). It will take awhile for both of us to instinctively “go monkey” and flip that banana over.
Odds are I will have to, short of and including the demonstration, illustrate the sensibility of upside down banana peeling. And I will have to pause and be patient during the hesitation. The worst thing I can do is take the hesitation as a no (or assume a no from the start) and begin to strongly push the monkey thing.
This monkey peeling makes sense.
Technorati Tags: Big Picture, change awareness, change management consultant, Context, End State, Garrett Gitchell, vision to work
 
and people, which we sometimes forget.
They are often left to make decisions on their own. When those decisions turn out to have positive results they often must jump in celebration alone. Depending on where they currently sit in the organization (and at times where their next seat seems to be) they may just have to guide someone else’s decisions. I can give you some first hand feedback from my service in those roles.
One of my cringe points is the way in which change models and approaches deal with leadership. Just like the change processes those models lead into some of the most important first steps are passed by and left out. I insist with my executive clients in a process that builds end state descriptions for all. Because the leaders will have the responsibility of delivering, deciding and explaining they must understand how their work fits in to the big picture, just like a first day employee.
They become champions of the connection of work and individuals to strategy and a bigger picture not cheerleaders for the new change/thing. Because they are the champions of that connection I would say it is their responsibility to make sure the change makes sense. It is their responsibility to make sure the train does not start until they can articulate the connection. Sorry senior leader client person that is not the role of the CM practitioner. Delivering that articulation and making sure it is heard and understood is. It is also not the role of your direct report (see previous sentence).
We can go on and on about all the things someone should do as a leader, but without the correct assumptions and perspective those fantastic leadership traits fall on dead ears and worse dead hands and change stalls or fails.
So if you are a CM practitioner start to acknowledge executives as stakeholders. If you are inserted into a change process that does not do that stand in front of the train. As a senior leader I hereby give you permission to ponder, clarify and get comfortable with your role as a stakeholder first and leader next.
Technorati Tags: Big Picture, C level, CEO, change awareness, Context, End State, Executive, stakeholders
Change Management is often a race to stay ahead of the setting sun. By setting sun I mean demise of the initiative itself. I am running out of fingers to count the times I have been involved in or seen the complete stop of major initiatives (most in the 7 figure + range).
Here are a few reasons why this happens-
- Change Management is added too late
- Strategy does not connect well to resources and motivation
- Strategy is not present, misguided or unrealistic
- Timeline is unrealistic
- The people are unrealistic (yes sometimes there is TRUE resistance- see bullet one through four)
Change Management is often seen as a training, communications, speed the project along discipline. I cringe when I see something like “provide training, communications and accelerate project implementation”. Cars accelerate.
As a result of this perspective (one seen in both practitioner and client I might add) change fits at the beginning of the implementation of the change, somewhere a little after all of the planning, all of the designing , all of the making of the task lists. Which is exactly where it falls 99% of the time (my stat). And one step behind the setting sun.
To make this worse, and effectively make Change Management even less relevant, the practice of CM is used as an overlap to other processes. The perfect example is placing the machinations (word chosen wisely-CM deals with people) of CM under the watch of the project manager. Or in the hierarchy having CM report to HR, or IT, or Finance or any function.
In both these cases, perspective and placement, CM will be well behind the setting sun on every initiative.
Unrealistic timelines. I will leave the timing of tasks to a project management/operations discussion. It is the timing of the coordination of people and their human nature luggage that is important here. With the change process weaved into the whole from true beginning to end state there is actually is the possibility of speeding up timelines. But that will only work when the original timelines included that human nature component. Which we know rarely happens because CM is added well after that planning stage.
Strategy.
This is corporate strategy I am referring to not the strategy of implementation. Many consultants and their clients confuse the plan for implementation as strategy. Use “strategic implementation” and you might be able to language and separate the two meanings. They are different and stakeholders are not only well aware of the difference, but confused when leadership and engagement leaders do not know or see the difference.
Corporate strategy is the vision of the leaders, the possibilities in the current (or near future) environment, the direction of the organization as a whole, the business objectives on a high level to get to profit, success and sustainability. Every one of your initiatives should, and most certainly does, connect in some way with at least one part of this definition. Why is it then that there is no thread or glue to make this connection?
If you have operational change management in your organization you might actually be able to have a component that looks like the current approach to change that makes sense and works. If you understand, as a leader, that change management is about the connection of work to vision and vice versa then you will provide the avenues for that connection to happen. If you understand that the moment of the “idea” for an initiative is about the time Change Management needs to be added…
…you just might get a polar version of a day where the day is long and the sun sets right at the end state.
Technorati Tags: Big Picture, business objectives, C level, CCM, CEO, Change, change awareness, Change Design, change failure, change management, change management consultant, change management strategy, Change Strategy, Context, corporate change management, corporate strategy, End State, Examples, Garrett Gitchell, vision to work
… and warning sign number one.
Because, for me, it is, “what do I need to know?”.
Doing before knowing is the mark of an inexperienced consultant (or the forte of a contractor). This question from a client is an indicator that some knowledge exchange between the two of us may just be the answer.
So what will I need to know?
The most important need to know is the description of the end state (not the current state, not the future state and not the black hole gap in between). There is a whole lot of why built in. This is not the why you are thinking of. It is not the “why” business case for the change (that will help in the overall description). It is not the “why we need this now” version. It is not the why we need this at this point. It is certainly not a search for justification. And it is not a question that gets a quick answer of because.
It is the why someone would be willing to participate and contribute to the effort. It is the why someone would want to be involved. It is the why the organization needs this (maybe a humanized and respectful business case). It is the why the future will be better when the end state is reached- yes a journey, yes difficult maybe, yes all of those things inherent in change- pretty and not so.
If I have marketed well in my own work , the owner of the change, the keeper of the cash, the leader the light shines on (the glaring one, not necessarily the one for the award ceremony) will be the person to open the gate for the path to the information.
The need to know will-
- Reveal the org. chart formal or hidden
- Illuminate structural flaws in the organization
- Illuminate cultural flaws in the organization
- Alert the hamsters on the wheels (which stop and look, which keep mindlessly running on the wheel?)
- Provide a broad stroke of the history of change in the organization
- Clue me in to the connection between leadership, stakeholders, vision and satisfied end states
- Provide clarity on the ability to take, give and assume responsibility and accountability in the organization
- The horizontal, vertical, diagonal and circular connections (that’s the hidden org. chart) present or not
Ok I concede this will create a list…
- A packed schedule of short interviews with a strategic mix of stakeholders.
- Somewhere in the mix of number one- a visual spider web chart of connections current, and connections needed, to first create and then get to, the end state.
- A list of the communication vehicles current (and connected to the change) and missing.
- My own secret list of movers, shakers, gatekeepers and agnostics (in general, not necessarily related to this change).
As with most clients maybe not what you were expecting?
Technorati Tags: Big Picture, business objectives, C level, change awareness, Change Design, change management consultant, change management strategy, Change Strategy, End State, Garrett Gitchell, Gate Keeper, horizontal change management, stakeholders, strategy, vision, vision to work
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