Managing Change
It’s impossible for business change to be wholly confined to systems and processes – people are always involved too and therein lies the key difference between project or programme management and change management. The first two are primarily concerned with delivering tangible changes while the later is focussed on enabling the people impacted to accept, adapt and take ownership of their new environment.
Resisting change is a part of being human, we all opt for the familiar and secure over the unknown and high risk most of the time. Change = Risk. Individuals are naturally risk averse or risk seeking to different degrees and that’s something that a change manager can’t do anything about. So to manage change effectively we need to use other, more accessible levers.
In order for change to achieve the desired results each individual involved must
- be dissatisfied with how things are right now
- share a vision of what things can be like in the future
- understand the first, concrete steps that they can take towards that vision
AND
- the product of all of these three must outweigh the individual’s resistance to change.
This is the Gleicher formula (usually written as: D x V x F > R where D = Dissatisfaction, V = Vision, F = First steps and R = Resistance) which is one of the fundamental theories of change management.
Ensuring your business is sustainable is much more than being careful about the resources you use. You need to consider if all your processes and systems will work in the real world, with real-world competition, real-world resource constraints and of course real people inventing, manufacturing, delivering and buying your products and services.