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.

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.

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!!

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.

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.

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