Change fatigue, kissing frogs and eating elephants

You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince (why is it never princess?). This is the same with change in a lot of organisations - you have to make a lot of changes to get to your optimal position, some will be successful and others won't. Sad really that we continually flog ourselves in our business lives to get to a position of 'optimality', but achieving this is often a meandering slog.

And worse, we're never sure when we've kissed enough frogs and found enough princes/princesses to achieve our goal - perhaps you can never have enough, perhaps we don't know what our goal is, or someone keeps moving the goalposts?

That's enough about frogs. The real point of this note is to try to write down the reasons why organisations experience perpetual change, and what can be done to minimise change if appropriate. I hope readers have their own ideas to add.

Change fatigue is experienced by most of us at points in our professional (and personal) lives. You can see it in other people when they roll their eyes, slump their shoulders, drag their feet, gossip and whinge etc upon announcement of another change - somewhat unexpectedly the small changes to things like organisational design often get the same reactions as more significant changes (shock, anger, etc). People are people - they have egos and personalities and whatever is changing around them they're looking at the following questions;

• what's in it for me?
• was I asked?
• when and how?
• how does it really affect the things I care about?
• why is it happening yet again?

Let's look at why perpetual change happens;

• because it can. Cynically it gives managers something to do. I don't really think this is common in the real world though, it is often about 'eating the elephant' - lots of changes ('bites') need to be made to enable the ultimate goal ('eating the whole elephant') to be achieved.
• Using the elephant analogy further, do we really know what the scale of the elephant is? Is there a corporate strategy that elaborates the desired end-state, and what the journey is to get there in terms of underlying operational strategies ? If this isn't clear, then there may be false starts, and false end, leading to the perception of piecemeal change and hence change fatigue.
• Will the elephant stand still? Clearly a lot of changes are foisted upon organisations by regulators, governments, local authorities, professional bodies etc, and these cannot always be planned for. Some of these changes will be planned, others will not. There are a number of other external factors that cause organisations to have to implement unscheduled change, such as competitive pressures, new products, business opportunities, M&A and the like.
• How many elephants do we have? Nursing a herd is harder than just one, particularly when the want to move at different rates, go off on diversions, sleep and eat at different times.... The elephants will always need a different degree of nursing too - how much management time does each project require, and can they be managed collectively?

I'm sure that I could continue talking about elephants further, but the point is that there are good and meaningful reasons often why there is perpetual change (sometimes there is not), and I'll list the things that can be done to minimise the change fatigue.

• Ensure that you have a strategy and a lucid desired end-state. And communicate it so that everyone knows where they are going and can learn to deal with it, and participate! If you tell a group of people that their roles are to be outsourced, then tell them everything (as far as you can), get them to meet their counterparts, understand the implications, get involved in the transaction and transition etc, as there will be a huge number of things that have to happen before the final transfer happens. It is in everyone's best interest that the change is a success.
• Have detailed operational plans and strategies that map into corporate level strategy. Makes sure that the managers responsible stick to agreed plans.
• Manage all change in one place - you should aim to get one view of all change across your organisation, and manage it as a cohesive whole at a macro-level. If anyone wants to change their plans, make an announcement or accelerate/decelerate, there is then a means of governance and ensuring that the implications of any adjustment are considered. This is a programme management or change director role.
• Ensure that there is clarity of sponsorship - knowing that there is a senior sponsor (or the Board for significant change programmes) overseeing what is happening helps calm nerves. But sponsorship must be earnest and visible, otherwise it will not help.
• Continue to communicate to all stakeholders throughout - once you've set along a path, keep coming back and telling stakeholders what is going on, and ensuring that there is two-way communication, websites, announcement plans and so on. This stops a lot of the worry, angst, gossip and wasted effort. If plans change, then communicate to people as soon as you can. If new things need to happen, communicate as soon as you can. You need to ensure that all key relationships are managed explicitly - if relationships fail, then you are more likely to fail.
• Design your plans such that there are 'islands of stability' - periods where nothing new happens, everyone has a rest, focusses on the job. This will pay dividends.

Of course, the list above is just a list of things to do for well-managed change initiatives, but that is what makes them well-managed and what helps prevent change fatigue. It is people that stop change, so if you don't deal with the people aspects of change there is the real risk that your change programme will fail.

The perils of not dealing wth the soft stuff - an IT perspective

John-Paul Kamath writing for Computer Weekly has laid down various opinions on the importance in managing stakeholders from an IT viewpoint.


I've blogged on this before, but the bottom line in the article is that if you fail to get people behind your development it will fail. There isn't a huge amount of further insight that anyone can give.

Neglecting to manage change..a poignant article

Dr Andrew M Jones of Lancaster University has published an interesting article in this month's Consulting Times entitled 'Neglect cultural issues at your peril'. Paraphrasing hugely, the article talks about the need to map cultural change aspects to changes in strategy, and indeed that shareholder value is often destroyed where people issues are not dealt with up front.

It surprises me somewhat that there is a need for this type of article in the professional press, and that the enlightenment is still only drifting through amongst leaders of large organisations (see previous posts). Dr Jones quotes Merck's CEO, Dick Clark

“The fact is culture eats strategy for lunch. You can have a good strategy in place, but if you don’t have the culture and enabling systems that allow you to successfully implement that strategy, the culture of theorganisation will defeat the strategy,”

I summarise this a 'people stop change'. You can have a great strategy, all the technology and cash that you could ever wish for, but if you don't manage your stakeholders you are setting yourself up to fail.

Let's think about a mythical organisation that has a new strategy for world domination. What could go wrong? Here's a short list;

• top managers don't understand the strategy, or indeed buy into it - they carry on working as before;
• clerical people didn't understand the previous strategy (any of them?), and don't understand this one or care - they carry on working as before;
• middle managers (the 'nougat' layer) don't worry about strategy, they just need to maintain their bonuses by turning out widgets - they carry on working as before;
• and so on.

People stop change - you cannot avoid addressing these people issues as a fundamental part of whatever your strategic change is - otherwise there is a real risk that nothing will change, or if it does it won't endure. Culture is a difficult thing to change overnight of course, and a huge amount of planning and execution effort needs to be applied, starting at the same point that the consultants come in to help you map out your change plans.

What isn't change management?

There's loads of confusion out there about what change management is (or isn't), so here's a summary;

It is;

- doing whatever needs to be done to make an event/change happen, with focus on getting all of the practical aspects and people aspects aligned. One needs to ensure that the change happens and sticks - it is people that stop change, not technology. Change management in this sense applies to cultural change, organisational design, behavioural change etc.

It is not;

- Change management in an ITIL, IT, project sense - this is better labelled change control and/or configuration management whereby the control is ensuring that all aspects of a change (to an IT component, a form, process etc) happens, rather than whether people buy into the change and it actually endures.

Rant over.

Networking to deliver change

There is a lot of fuss around on the on-line networking sites at the moment that is basically asking 'what's the the point of networking'. Here's the response I gave to a LinkedIn question on this subject...

"...The point of networking in my view is to build trusted relationships, providing a support and 'friendship' infrastructure - you have to give, give, give and occasionally you get to 'take'. Building these relationships might lead to sales, but it may not be direct sales, rather leads and referrals from folks that trust you to deliver. "

If we apply this to managing change, answering the question of 'what's the point of networking in managing change', I wouldn't change my answer much...

"The point of networking IN MANAGING CHANGE in my view is to build trusted relationships, providing a support and 'friendship' infrastructure - you have to give, give, give INFORMATION and occasionally you get to 'take' THE DESIRED (BEHAVIOURAL) CHANGES. Building these relationships might lead to CHANGE, but it may not be direct, rather STEPS ALONG THE PATH from folks that trust you to deliver. "

The point is that we need to build relationships with people, and build a network of colleagues, suppliers, partners etc that can help us achieve the ultimate goals of our projects - the enduring change that creates the value required. When I worked for a major corporate it was clear that my network helped me deliver, and working on a shorter-term assignments still requires these relationships to be built-up, only more quickly.

I deliberately left the term 'stakeholders' off of my list above - depending upon what you need to achieve, the stakeholder groups that are most affected by the change are probably those where your networking skills will be most valued. You need to nurse those affected by the change, whether as the sponsoring community (who might get fired if it fails!) or those directly impacted through the new systsem, company acquisition, outsource or whatever. It is ultimately 'people that stop change', so you need to ensure that you understand their fears, worries, crises and how you might steer them in the direction of accepting and embracing the change.

There are of course a lot of techniques to help you do this, but that is for another day!!

Developing relationships

Sorry for not posting for a while!

I was talking to a colleague about developing business relationships. I thought I would list my initial ideas for the real world....

• talk don't email - not easy sometimes, but relationships are built from trust and hiding behind an email persona is not going to build a trusted relationship
• network - link up with as many relevant people as you are able - maybe electronically at first (Ecademy, LinkedIn etc). You need to know people and be able to support relationships with introductions and information
• market - depending on the degree of transience that you expect business relationships to have, there is nothing wrong with advertising - it is how you turn the responses into long-term relationships if that is your goal
• join - clubs, professional organisations, rotary etc
• sponsor - put some money up for a 'good cause', business event or publications - particularly good where you need brand awareness in a reasonably small market place

That's enough for now.

Driving stakeholders to change

Rick Maurer commented on my previous post around the importance of building trust with stakeholders (also see Rick's great blog Change Management News).

Building trust is key to any human relationship. The stakeholders in a change programme will all be worrying about different things, if they're worrying at all, and will probably have different perceptions of what is actually due to happen, what status the change programme is at, and whether the desired outcome will ever be achieved. They need to see who is helping them through the change, giving them certainty and comfort, and it is important therefore that change and project people spend time and effort building trust through the human relationships.

In the real world people will be less worried about the interesting new system that you are developing that will save the company £xm, they will be worried about what it means for them. Our job is to act as the trustworthy 'oracle' or at least ensure that the senior stakeholders trust us and are trusted by those affected.

There are of course many things that one might do to build that trust, that extends well beyond the 'social' relationships. Here's a few suggestions - the importance of these will depend upon the stakeholder individual or group, where they are in their acceptance of the change etc;

• Always do what you say you will do;
• Be seen to deliver;
• World class project management of risks, issues etc
• Plan everything, with detailed stakeholder analyses, communications plans etc
• Communicate (in all its forms)

How important is being a 'trusted adviser' to clients?

I was asked this a few days ago, so thought I would quickly articulate my views here.

Without trust, it seems to me that relationships are ineffective. Individuals will never achieve optimum performance and the benefits from the relationship will not achieve their full potential.

As a consultant, one strives to become a 'trusted adviser' - as a professional person a consultant strives for client satisfaction as well as personal satisfaction - in a change environment one would gauge this as benefits delivered (exceeding those required if possible) along with the behavioural and process changes that ensure that those benefits endure. As a trusted adviser the consultant is taking the client relationship to the next level - not necessarily for mercenary reasons - endeavouring to use their skills and 'wise counsel' to support their client through whatever challenges faces them.

It seems to me that this is critical to development of a long-term professional relationship, with potential benefits to the consultant of further work and referrals.

Defining change management

I wrote on 4 January about the tensions between project and change management. The Change Management Learning Center have a great (short) paper aimed at giving a definition of change management.

Managing the financial impacts of change

I've had a few discussions lately about financial control in a change and project environment. Too much to discuss in detail here, but here's a 'top of my head' list of the things that you might do to keep financial control of your project;

• Build a narrative business case, and detailed plan;
• Align that to detailed numbers - implementation (revenue) expenses, capital expenses phased to show cashflow (cash is king!), and benefits case - what will be delivered when and what will the real impacts be;
• Develop a risk weighted NPV - use factors such as 'do we know how to do this?', 'do we have the resources?', 'budget?' to show an NPV - over time improve the NPV by adjusting the risk factors as you satisfy yourself that you can achieve it. The NPV (or ROCE) is a great measure to show expected financial outcomes.
• use qualitative measures to support your numbers (which of course you will monitor in detail weekly/monthly!) - are deliverables being completed or is there a bow-wave of activity building up with consequent cashflow impact, are the numbers and criticality of open issues/risks increasing etc
• Use graphs to compare measures - see the relatives as well as the absolutes.
• Make sure any numbers that you use are reconciled to source data (ie; are accurate), and preferably 'triangulated' to two sources

With proper (basic) systems and processes, much of this monitoring can be automated!

Enough for now!

Why do we deliver change...to create value

We deliver change to create value - that's it. I've written on this subject before but given one or two discussions I've had recently thought it worth reiterating the point.

Change is a difficult thing. But it must always have an ultimate goal - in corporate life we deliver change because it creates shareholder value (it is difficult to see any other reason), and in the social and governmental sectors we might go through a change programme to establish some social or environmental improvement. Why would you go through potentially gut-wrenching change for no good reason?

Facilitation for change - tools to support us through change

I've been along to a meeting today - these folks are all professional facilitators based in central England, and much of what they do is help groups of people achieve their change goals (as well as mediation, public policy and loads of other things). It is a long time since we could rely on things to 'just happen', and facilitated workshops, conferences, meetings etc help in ensuring that objectives are achieved.

This got me thinking - as change consultants/change managers what do we have in our armoury to help us through some really tricky people-related change activities. Here's my list off the top of my head...

• processes to support change analysis
• project and programme management approaches
• Communications expertise; and
• Professional facilitation of course

....but other than experience and common sense probably not a lot else.

If you want to get in contact with any of the UK Facilitators let me know.

Project Management and Change Management

There is a debate going on in another forum about the use of structured project management methodologies (eg; Prince 2) versus the management of change. We need to be clear that project management is not the same as change management - managing the project is part of managing the change, but it is a relatively mechanistic process, providing the assurance of technical delivery and to some extent the delivery of the benefits. Change management is about delivering the behavioural change that ensures that the benefits endure, that the technical changes are accepted, and that the expected outcomes are achieved.

Another way of looking at this is that there are many more people involved in delivering the change (the sponsor, Board, managers etc), whereas the project processes can be delivered by the Project Manager (who, if they are enlightened/experienced will be focussed on delivering the change as well as the technical delivery).

One thing that annoys me is where some third party suppliers/partners (in IT particularly) tend to come along after winning a contract and expect that they can simply implement their bit of technology and it will work and be accepted - they often get a shock and then cost overruns etc, and consequently relationships start to fail between supplier and customer....the real world is difficult!

Here's a link to a basic project/change role comparison from the change management learning center if you're interested.

Change training and development

I was asked today about change training and development.

I know there are a few public courses around, but in my view bespoke training related to a particular business sector is most helpful - different sectors tend to have different challenges, ways of operating, language etc, and all of these things are important in how people act and react to change. Probably the best course that I've run is a focussed 'advanced' training within the Financial Services sector, based on 'real-life' case studies and a little bit of role playing. This allowed participants to establish an approach to managing through change (at a very high-level inevitably) in a safe environment - and its loads of fun too!

If training can be supported by mentoring, so much the better.

The real world

I received the joke below in an email today - one of those things that go around at Christmas time. You can read the joke if you wish, but the sense of it is that the real world has changed so much that saying 'Happy Christmas' might upset someone. This is political correctness gone mad in my opinion, although there was an article in a national paper a few days ago that said managers are fearful of putting decorations up. Amazing. At the other extreme there are offices where you might see decorations for Diwali, Chinese New Year etc as well as Christmas of course, recognising a social and community approach to life.

The key point here for me is that in our professional lives we are impacted by whatever is happening in the real world, and it is sometimes difficult to separate the substance of an event or activity and the interpretation of the same. Any action will mean different things to different people, and will impact them in a variety of ways. We are all different, and will vary our mood and interpretation on different days. This is key in change management and transformation of business.

THE JOKE

I wanted to send out some sort of holiday greeting to my friends, but it
is so difficult in today's world to know exactly what to say without
offending someone. So I met with my lawyer yesterday, and on his advice
I wish to say the following:-

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes
for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress,
non-addictive, gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice
holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious
persuasions or secular practices of your choice with respect for the
religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their
choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all.
I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and
medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally
accepted calendar year 2007, but not without due respect for the
calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society
have helped make the world a great place (not to imply that any country
is necessarily greater than any other country) and without regard to the
race, creed, colour, age, physical ability, religious faith, or sexual
preference of the wishee.

By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms:
This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely
transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no
promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for
her/himself or others and is void where prohibited by law, and is
revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted
to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for
a period of one year or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday
greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement
of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the
wisher.

Disclaimer: no trees were harmed in the sending of this message however,
a significant number of electrons were slightly inconvenienced.

Cleaning out my sock drawer - let's be analytical

Ok, I haven't really been cleaning out my sock drawer - I'm not desperate for things to do! What I have been doing for the last hour was going through all of the masses of forms, analyses etc that I maintain in a folder on my laptop and making sure that they are all still relevant and useful. This is probably equivalent to folding socks, but it needed doing.

The point of course is that managing change (as for the remainder of project management-related activity) is an analytical process, that needs planning, monitoring and measuring just like any other activity. I know that is all about people, and people are fickle, have egos and desires, but whatever we do to address the needs of these people must be planned to ensure that we know what we need to do and when (and how much it will cost my accounting conscience annoyingly reminds me), and monitor and assess the success of our actions and then replan and so on.

The challenge of course is that monitoring is difficult -if we ask someone "How are you?", they will normally say "Fine!" rather than "My leg hurts and this new system will be rubbish!". But that is what makes it interesting...

If you need a document or process around any aspect of change management, please email me

Work/Life Balance - is it sustainable in the real world

My wife is retiring at Christmas aged forty-something. It is not that we're rich (we're not!), but work and life don't balance with a couple of young kids and a house and me to organise (I do my best...). Now she's working out what to do with her time!

In all of our professional lives, 10 hour days are the norm for many, and if you commute into a big city, you can probably add a two or three hours to that - leave home at 6.30am and get home at 7:30pm if you're lucky - I've been doing it a lot this year.

Why do we work so many hours?;

• because it is expected
• because everyone else is doing it
• because it is professionally necessary
• because we love work
• because we need the money
• because if we don't do it, then they'll find someone else
• because everyone else over-commits and we don't want to under-deliver

I'm sure there are more reasons that I could think of.

Today's business environment is getting faster and ever-more pressured, with results expected immediately, instant messaging, email, mobile phones etc (see other postings). It is all of these things that perpetuate the need for longer working hours, and less of a life. Let's get real and assess what is critical and not just important - there are critical things in our working lives that must be done, and surely our balanced home life is critical? This is a real world issue - how can people have a life and work, rather than work and a life. Should we talk about life/work balance?

Many large organisations have addressed this issue to some extent or other with flexible working arrangements, career breaks and suchlike - the recognition that people work to live, rather than live to work. You are a long-time dead.

Different ways of looking at things

A friend sent me a joke recently..something along the lines of;

Q: "Why do IT people confuse Christmas with Halloween"
A: "Because DEC25=OCT31"**

Whether the joke is funny is a matter for you, but it got me thinking about different peoples perceptions of the same situation and how it important it is for us all to think about our actions. I worked for a manager many years ago, and I dreamt up a great structure for the business, focus on sales and service etc - but it meant that there was only a role for him or his peer. I thought it was a great idea, would save a great deal of money, and ensure focus on what mattered - he thought it was not tenable and we went back to the drawing board! I learned a lot in that job.

A lot of the focus of change management analysis and communications planning is ensuring that the perceptions that the recipients of message will hold are positive (or can be dealt with if adverse). We need to recognise that people from differing personal and prfessional backgrounds will perceive the same piece of information differently. This is why being a change consultant is fun...

** Decimal 25 is the same as Octal (Base 8) 31 (3x8=24+1) - you can tell it is nearly Christmas

Big business - talking about the importance of people

Well, well, well. On today's BBC 'Working Lunch' programme (I do not spend all day watching television, honest), Ben Verwaayen CEO of BT spoke about the importance of people in this FTSE 100 company - watch the video. Mr Verwaayen was excellent, and tied BT's business strategies into the 100000 people globally who have to deliver them. He clearly has a grip on what makes companies tick, and the need to get BT's people behind him. What amazed me, was that it is rare that you hear a big-company CEO talking like this (and the interviewer's preamble outlines Mr Verwaayen's credentials from a people point of view).

Excellent interview if you're interested in change in the real world!

The whole point is to deliver value

I'm an accountant - but I'm not boring! I've admitted it, owned up to it. Done.

This admission is important - the reason that we implement projects and programmes is to deliver value......isn't it? So you would expect me to say nothing matters other than the financial impacts of the change activity. What will implementation expenses be, when and how are benefits realised, how can costs be capitalised, who has got the budget etc...

OK I would say all of those things - in the business world we have to deliver value to all our stakeholders, but we also have to think that there may not only be a financial business case that we need worry about, but all of the other impacts of our projects. Take the petrochemicals sector for instance - a project that develops relatively environmentally-friendly biofuels (see the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer's comments on this in yesterday's pre-budget report) deliver value in other ways, not just financial. This is important - selling the change on the basis of environmental benefit may be more relevant to some stakeholders than 'we save £xm over 10 years'. We need to determine all of the benefits and make sure that they're sufficiently developed to get people to accept the change. It may be possible to tweak a programme of work to (cheaply) gain additional benefits that make the change more palatable. Whichever way, it is critical that the benefits case is worked up in detail at the beginning of the project rather than the end!