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I already mentioned IBM’s The Enterprise of the Future survey, revealing that companies are more and more bombarded by change. The winning businesses will therefore be the ones having developed a real appetite for change. Lead, drive, facilitate or manage change: the wording isn’t really relevant; what is important is that the people impacted by change eventually adhere to and take ownership of it. The fact that some changes  (M&A’s, cost reduction plans) seem more difficult to adhere to than others (HSE initiatives, implementation of attractive tools) should not mislead managers from the principle that what really counts is what is done to prepare and implement the change. So let’s start with preparing. Here are 5 ways to be on good tracks:

1. Adopt a project approach not only to bring structure but also visibility to what you are trying to accomplish. As soon as possible, you should select a project team that will cover a wide range of skills (managerial, technical, behavioural) and business areas. For a Product Quality project you should have people who know what they’re talking about but not only qualiticians! People who represent various areas of the quality chain, different sites if it’s a multi site project, 1 or 2 person that may seem reluctant to the change but can bring an expertise, are all possibly good candidates. Then of course there is a question of team dynamics. Adopting a project approach is also about defining your project terms of reference: “plans are nothing but planning is everything” said Eisenhower. In other words it is not so much the result but the process that counts. Take time to define your ojectives, deliverables, project milestones , scope and activity plan. Identify and analyse the risks. Determine your project KPI’s.
2. Decide on a vision, a main goal for the change. Do it in a simple, clear and precise style. Avoid business buzz words and ask yourself if any of your shop floor or front office people would understand. As an example, Shel, for its Technical Integrity program came up with: “our assets are safe and we know it”, simple and compelling. Asking yourself “what could success look like?” should get you on good tracks.
3. Identify the key benefits of the change for each group impacted. Bare in mind that what seems a benefit to you as a manager (profits, performance improvement) doesn’t necessarily apply to everybody else. People have different views about why something is attractive and this is what must be identified. If your project team is sufficiently mixed they will find answers.
4. Find out how the various stakeholder groups will react to the change. An excellent tool for that is to design a stakeholder map: start by listing all key stakeholders (groups or individuals who have an interest in the change), position them on a matrix indicating their level of support to the change and their level of influence in the organisation. Doing this job will help you determine how to speak to and involve those various groups. Which leads me to the last point
5. Involve people and assign responsibilities as early as possible in the process. Set up additional teams, tasks forces, action teams or whatever you want to call them to work on subjects, tasks that will make the change real. Give them enough responsibilities so they can heavily influence the way the change will eventually look like. 

What makes us buy change?

An ex-MBA colleague of mine wrote his final dissertation on a subject close to something like “using the Kotter change leadership framework to acquire new clients”. At the time I really thought it was a bit of a long shot to make this analogy, until I recently received an unexpected request from an entrepreneur struggling to generate sales leads: could I help him develop a new communication strategy that would help him make his prospects want to change, a change that he would bring and help his clients to implement.

This person had spoken about the wall of resistance he was hitting to an HR person that made him aware that change can be lead and managed, something he hadn’t really thought about before. When I think about it now, it does sound trivial: acquiring an initially reluctant client can be a similar process to acquiring senior support and stakeholder engagement in a project. Accidently, just yesterday I came across a tweet mentioning this post from Jo Ann Sweeney’s blog, rightfully reminding us that change cannot be forced or imposed. Success depends on the ability to create the conditions enabling end-users to embrace change, in a similar way that commercial success depends on the ability to create the conditions enabling potential customers to desire a product or service. Jo Ann mentions a useful tool to put this in practice, whether in a sales/marketing or change context: the AIDA model describes the process that will make people buy(-in) a product/project. First grab Attention, then create an Interest, develop it into a Desire and give people the means to turn it into Action.

Another useful way for change leaders to draw upon commercial knowledge is to define the change’s marketing mix (the good old 4P’s):

• Define the change as a Product: what does it look like? What is it designed to do? What are its key attributes?
• Determine the change’s Price: what must people give (up) to use the change?
• Define the Positioning of the change compared to other project, situations and changes at hand
• Build the Change’s Promotion plan: decide how you will generate Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.

In what other ways do you think commercial and change processes have common ground?

I couldn’t seriously have this change leadership blog without mentioning the work of John Kotter. His 8 steps for leading change model formed the basis of the knowledge and experience I personaly gathered in the field, first during my MBA, then in the consulting firm where I was employed. For those who are not familiar yet with these 8 steps, based on research about why transformation efforts fail, here they are :

1. Create a sense of urgency
2. Creating the guiding coalition
3. Developing a change vision
4. Communicating the vision for buy-in
5. Empowering people and removing barriers
6. Generating short-term wins
7. Don’t let up
8. Make change stick

This recipe for success has always been present in the change projects I worked on through various ways: to help designing the change program, to help analysing problems and identifying their solutions, to get new ideas and simply to use as a checklist during the change effort. My personal learning from applying the model and from hearing senior professionals advices, has told me that:

• The steps don’t necessarily have to be chronological, ie you can do step 3 while you’re doing step 1 and in fact…
• Step 1, creating the sense of urgency is continuous, it hardly ever ends because feeling this urgency during the whole process is what fuels people to action; and so as Kotter explains himself below, it is probably the most important of all steps

It seems to me (please tell me if you think I’m wrong) that no other framework has had such an impact on the way change is lead. A lot of people, consultants firms have come up with their own model, many of which are adaptations of Kotters in 3, 5 or 9 steps.

From knowing to doing

Nevertheless, one could argue that despite the widespread use of the model, the organistations’ ability to lead change hasn’t really improved:  success rate remains stuck at a worrying 30% . What does it mean? Is the model outdated? Do we need something new?

In his excellent online community of change mangement professionals, Rick Maurer, while looking for ideas for his next book, sparked a very interesting debate about what people felt was missing in the current literature. The conclusion was: nothing is, but what people need to do is to close the gap between knowing and doing. In other words, moving from doing the right thing to doing it right. To me that fits very much with what I’ve seen happening in organisations recently. An example of that is the necessity to generate quick wins. A lot of managers talk about quick wins but there are enormous differences in what they each call a quick win and how they actually make it happen. The same thing applies to  ”involving”: “we need to involve those guys” is what we hear all the time; yes that’s easily said but how? Do you consult them, do you empower them or do you just inform them?

This knowing-doing gap is probably one of the biggest challenges everybody faces today, because all the ideas, models, recipes, tools, methodologies are available, but what do we do, practically, what actions do we take and how? This is precisely why external help is still necessary but perhaps in different ways (many of you will be more qualified than me to verify that statement): more than knowledge it’s about skills like creativity, analysis, communication, rigour, energy and drive.

Kotter 2.0

So what does this leave us with, with regards to Kotter? The model is still valid as Kotter’s own research seems to prove and we need to get better at applying it by closing this knowing-doing gap. As we enter the entreprise 2.0 era, we have lots of new possibilities to communicate more interactively, to empower and collaborate, all of which are key levers to help us implement the strategy dictated by the 8 step model.

New year, new decade, new changes: M&A’s, strategy changes, new markets, new products, new customers, new sustainable development policies, new ERP/Information systems. Everywhere is more change. Here are 5 new year’s resolutions for better anticipating, preparing, leading and managing change in 2010:

1. Assess your Change Capacity: to prepare change implementation, analyse its strategic compatibility, attractiveness and impact
2. Listen to your stakeholders; don’t try to push the change too hard, show empathy, a quality that every change leader should have.
3. Decode resistance to change by identifying first of all if it comes from a lack of will or a lack of skill; time spent doing this will be time saved during implementation
4. Make people want to change by conveying a message that emphasises the threats of inertia as well as the opportunities of change
5. Enter the change 2.0 era, by making use of the so-called 2.0 communication and collaboration tools (blogs, wikis, forums, tweets etc.); these are already radically transforming the sales & marketing functions and to a certain extent the way people work together. These tools are a fantastic way of involving people and generating new ideas and bottom-up initiatives, that are so essential to the success of change.
6. Any other suggestions?

I recently  had the pleasure to meet Lizette Tucker from US based firm Arrowhead Strategic Consultants in Paris. Lizette is looking to expand her business in France, as she seems to like our country very much. I did warn her that the initial enthusiasm may fade away as she slowly discovers the downsides of our country: in other words she may go through a steep change curve!

• Avoid bad surprises: anticipate, understand resistance to change, and therefore prevent it from causing damage at the wrong time and jeopardising the project.
• Help building momentum: by installing a sense of urgency to change and giving people responsibilities, opportunities to take ownership of the change. The result is that they will start taking their own initiatives that will install the change, initiatives that the change leaders wouldn’t have thought about themselves
• Develop a know-how: engaging, empowering, explaining, listening, adapting; all of which are actions that, done over and over again change after change, will enable the organisation to change faster, naturally.

I’d like to share with you a few slides which purpose is to give some hints for successfully implementing a sustainable development initiative, viewed from a behavioural change angle. Acting “greener” is something relevant to many of us (it should even be all of us) and is very much about how we can install new behaviours. I’d be very interested in your (constructive) feedback and comments.

On his excellent blog, “think for a change”, Paul Williams is asking: “what kind of innovator are you?”, referring to all the innovation specialty areas one can think of such as R&D, innovation management, new product development etc.
Reading this article reminded me of how change management/leadership/facilitation is often seen as a vast, unclear and too conceptual business area, particularly by SME’s managers busy with practical and operational business issues. To quote an ex-colleague: “my dentist could say he is doing change management”. Yes this has to do with how to explain change management in the most simple and practical way, but also being able to break it down into distinctive niches.
Thinking the exercise might be beneficial for myself, here is what I would call an early imperfect an incomplete attempt on a Mindmeister mindmap.

From this early version, it is already clear that change management involves a wide range of specialties and competencies. Developing and rolling out a communication plan is very different from analysing the organisational impact of a change. From this, 2 questions:

1. What is my line of change management expertise?
2. Where do I need partners?

Image via Wikipedia

The McKinsey Quarterly published an excellent paper by Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller, that explains why change management theory often doesn’t work just like that. The background to their work is a 2008 McKinsey survey confirming that the success rate of change programs remains stuck at around 30%, more than 10 years after John Kotter’s similar survey leading to his famous 8 step approach for leading change.
Aiken and Keller’s approach is not to challenge the widely accepted principles of change management but to look at what makes the theory successful or not, from a psychological angle. In other words, this isn’t about the right change management things to do; it is about how to do it right.
The base to their work is a McKinsey model suggesting that four basic conditions are necessary before employees will change their behaviour:

• a compelling story
• role modeling
• reinforcing mechanisms
• capability building

While the model makes perfect sense and is a good reflection of common change management theory, things can be quite different in practice as Aiken and Keller explain:
“The prescription is right, but rational managers who attempt to put the four conditions in place by applying “common sense” typically misdirect time and energy, create messages that miss the mark, and experience frustrating unintended consequences from their efforts to influence change. Why? Because when they implement the prescription, they disregard certain, sometimes irrational—but predictable—elements of human nature.”
From their research they have therefore identified nine insights into how human nature gets in the way of successfully applying the four basic conditions for behavioural change:

1. What motivates you doesn’t motivate most of your employees
2. You’re better off letting them write their own story
3. It takes a story with both + and – to create real energy
4. Leaders believe mistakenly that they already “are the change.”
5. “Influence leaders” aren’t a panacea for making change happen
6. Money is the most expensive way to motivate people
7. The process and the outcome have got to be fair
8. Employees are what they think, feel, and believe in
9. Good intentions aren’t enough

Each insight is described in details in Aiken and Keller’s article. As simplistic as these 9 points may sound, I think they will help change leaders tremendously .
Access the full article here (free access through the Forbes website) and see other selections of change articles