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.

Case Study: Facilitating innovation

A product team had been challenged to come up with some truly innovative ideas for a Personal Loan product.  The Product Manager asked me to plan and facilitate an innovation day which would enable the team to think outside the box.

The first step was to ensure that the venue was ‘off-site’ in an environment that would not trigger business-as-usual thinking patterns.  I asked the team members what techniques they had used before for creative thinking and developed the whole day around methods that were new to all of them.  The final programme involved varied and occasionally shocking techniques such as Reversal, Provocation, Random Input and Concept Fans.  Between the innovation exercises I ran warm-up, team building, conflict and trust exercises to ensure the team were really Performing.

By 5pm the team was completely exhausted but very pleased with themselves.  They had come up with many flipcharts’ worth of ideas that they had never thought of before.

Case Study: Facilitating board meetings

The MD of a small business had recently invested in a training course on how to chair meetings more effectively.  He had recognised the value in the techniques given by the course and tried hard to implement them  when he return to work.  However, he found that the techniques prevented him from having the level of detailed input that he was used to and he felt that the quality of decision making dropped.  A discussion with several board members and a review of some recent minutes made it clear to me that, this being a small business, the MD was actually needed to fulfil an ‘expert’ role as well as be the meeting chair.   I facilitated the next 3 board meetings and specifically took on the role of ‘meeting manager’ (eg ”mediator’, ‘time-keeper’, ‘topic sheepdog’ etc.) and left him with the roles of ‘expert’ and ‘decision maker’. This worked well and prior to the fourth meeting I spent time coaching the MD’s PA to fulfill my role on a permanent basis.