The Past

One of the things I hear frequently is people talking about change management being new. I think if we look at history and the organisation we see that change management is not really new at all. Even today, one of the claims that is often made is “The only constant is change”  (Heraclitis date). Niccolo Machiavelli noted: “…there is nothing more difficult and dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things…” –“The Prince (1513)

If you trace the evolution of management theory, you will see that each paradigms of management dealt with change management albeit often with a singular focus.  Scientific Management dealt with task focused change,  Weberian reform dealt with structural change.  The Social Technical Systems (STS) and Human Relations era dealt more with changing systems and people.

What is perhaps new is the focus on change management as a profession and the charging of money for the knowledge in how to change companies.  I would argue that this practice emerged from the 1980s and we can thank the Big 6 consulting groups and Darryl Conner (one of the industry’s most influential change management expert) for the commodification of Change Management intellectual property.

It was at this time too, that many of the “seminal” works emerged ad gained purchase within in the field (Kotter, Senge).  The nineties saw Positive Psychology start to create strong influence in the field and by the 2000s, we had a wide proliferation of change models, and frameworks in existence.  This period also saw the multiplying of change initiatives – while once an organisation might go through a major change once every 3-5 years, the tempo of change increased so that by the next century most organisations were undergoing continuous changes concurrently.

By way of illustrating some of the core concepts that have dominated the past in change management (and are pervasive in the present), I have called out the the burning platform, the change curve, change readiness, change resistance and change communication as illustrative of what the change management profession has dealt with.

Here’s the slides (whitmans sampler part 1) for this part. Next week, I’ll post Part 2 (The present). In the meantime, what aspects of the past do you think are missing here?

The value of organisational capabilities and the use of the word as a corporate jargon really rose to prominence as a result of the strategic management researchers and popularised by strategy consultants.

McKinsey defines organisational capabilities rather broadly as “anything an organization does well that drives meaningful business results”

Within the Resource Based View of the firm, Barney (1991) and Wernefelt (1984) recognised that organisational capabilities are a major source for the generation and development of sustainable competitive advantage.

It’s not that far of a stretch to see why change management as an organisational capability has risen in popularity.  A company that is adept at managing change remains agile and can continuously generate sustainable competitive advantage.

The term capability is often used interchangeably with competence, but I tend to think in context of change it is broader than simply skills sets.

For me it comes down to answering a simple series of questions:

• What does it take for the organisation to be highly capable of change?
• What does it take for our managers to be highly capable of change?
• What does it take for our people to be highly capable of change?

Change capability then looks something like the following

• An organising structure for change management – this might be a governance model, a centre of excellence, or a centralised portfolio or internal consultancy
• Change management as a central construct in the learning and development systems (induction, internal courses, mentoring)
• Change management as a central construct in the human resources systems (recruiting, performance management, and recognition)
• Change as a cultural imprint within the leadership – lived values of innovation, agility, and of course, people
• Common supporting toolkits, frameworks, processes and templates that enable people to carry out successful change
• A multi level framework that distinguishes between levels of capability (first order skills, second order and so forth, think Quinn’s master and novice distinction)

How does that fit with you? Does your organisation define the term differently? Something similar — or an alternative perspective?

If you are looking for more resources on the topic, try the following:

• Dean Anderson and Linda Acker Anderson’s excellent chapter on the topic from Beyond Change Management hosted on the Change Leaders Network (2010)
• Two vendor perspectives -  ChangeFirst (PCI model) Whitepaper on Building Sustainable Change Capability and Accenture’s Creating Internal Change Capability
• A previous post from a Melbourne  Change Management Professionals meetup on the topic “Building change capability: a change management professionals conversation
• A post “Building organisational change capability” from Jude Berger (Dancing on Hot Coals) on the collected wisdom of a Canberra change management community
• A post and resources from Gail Severini on the tension between using internals and externals in building change capability (from the 2013 ACMP conference) - Optimizing internal and external change management presentation and tip sheet

I have to say, there doesn’t seem to be a LinkedIn update, best selling list, or conference outline that isn’t referencing Neuroscience and management at the moment.  Tis tres sexy! Get on board…

Rewire your recalcitrant employees brains, make the most of that neuro plasticity and create neural pathways that support change!

Or something like that…

So a couple of weekends ago, I found myself in a full day workshop on neuroscience and change management.  It was run by CMI and Sue Langley of Emotional Intelligence Worldwide and was top notch in content and facilitation.  Sue gave us a primer on the triumvirate brain (amygdala, frontal cortex and the lizard brain) and then walked us through David Rock’s SCARF model of change. For me it was a terrific consolidation of 18 years of formal and informal learning of communication, psychology, sociology, management, organisational behaviour and NLP studies.  Langley integrates science with well-being and emotional intelligence concepts and it packages up really nicely.  It confirmed for me why a number of the things I do work so well, and reminded me of opportunities to do things a little differently.

In a related Organisational Change Practitioners discussion on the topic, John Barbuto of Limbic Zen asks “ Is business ready to work with neuroscience for leadership and execution?  One of the thoughts shared in this discussion by Bill Braun that really resonated with me is that neuroscience (eg the diagnostic side, the MRIs, and brain imaging studies) prove what we always thought we knew from theory.

John writes, “I believe one problem facing neuroscience at this time is that the average person is not clear if it is a repackaging of long-standing psychology (new paint, new sales pitch, same building), or if it is difficult-to-use laboratory science (fMRI, high definition EEG, etc.).”

There may be a ray of hope in that – “What you thought you knew you now know for sure.”

If that psychology stuff is good enough for carefully crafted marketing campaigns (and it always has been, whether C-Levels are aware of that or not), and we now know why it works, then NS informing the theory and practice of management and leadership may have merit

So for instance, if you unpack the SCARF model there is very little new in the constructs. Each of the five elements (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness) are critical to reducing the potential for the emotional brain to over engage (what Daniel Goleman refers to as the Amygdala Hijack). When the emotional brain overheats – performance suffers, as does well being.

So for instance…

Status – if you reduce threat to status, people will cope with change better.  Threat to status has long been known to be a critical reason for “resistance to change”. From a theoretical perspective it can be explained by Mead’s symbolic interactionalism, and Goffman’s Presentation of Self

Certainty – the brain likes certainty, and uncertainty during change is a source of great distress.  Change communicators know the importance of communicating what stays the same, at the same time as communicating what changes. From a theoretical perspective it can be explained by Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory, and  Berger’s Uncertainty Reduction Theory.

Autonomy – I have blogged earlier on the importance of perceived control in change.

Relatedness – people trust people they can relate to.  As I have said in a previous post

Establish commonalities -  People are more easily influenced by People Like Them. It’s a tribal association thing hard-wired in the brain. When you are listening and seeking to understand you can find areas of commonality. This establishes that you are Like Them and can have influence.

 Fairness – perceptions of fairness and justice in change processes also reduce the Amygdala Hijack. Procedural justice has received a lot of academic attention in the change management literature – here is a good abstract of a 2006 study published by Deloittes from the  International Journal of Stress Management.

So the concepts and their importance in change management are not new. What is new is the packaging of the proof.  If you were to do nothing as else as a change manager or a change leader than design your interventions based on the SCARF model you would be in a pretty good position.

It may well be that simplicity and elegance of the SCARF model and “proof” of what we thought is true is true, is simply an entry for management to think about the more revolutionary aspects of neuroscience.

Later in the Organisational Change Practitioners discussion, Barbuto challenges us to think

In my view much psychological thinking proceeds on beliefs that are based on an old way of looking at the foundations of behaviour. To be sure, human brains are learning organs, and we can change our ways with proper stimulus. However, optimizing the processes of change now requires going deeper than many people go when employing psychological paradigms.

I like the challenge. It excites me to think that there is a deeper level we can go. Of course what is not discussed as yet (and almost too big a topic for an aside here) is the ethical dimensions of the neuroscience. In the same way that NLP can get a bad rap for manipulating people, a little bit of knowledge of neuroscience without consideration of the broader organisational context could be damaging.

It’s a fine neural pathway between using your super powers and knowledge for “good” and for “evil”?

Further reading and resources?

Highly recommend John’s blog on the topic - Limbic Zen. With a background in clinical neurology and change management, you can’t go past it. John’s writing is detailed, technical and still accessible.

Do check out Sue Langley’s work at Emotional Intelligence Worldwide - again, Sue’s academic background really shines through and adds considerable credibility to an area that is fraught with consultants jumping on a band wagon. She is also an excellent facilitator.

David Rock’s 2008 article - SCARF: a brain-based model or collaborating with and influencing others, in the NeuroLeadership Journal

A great primer on communication theories: A First Look at Communication Theories  by E.M .Griffin. I think I got this in first year of my organisational communication degree and have re-read it every year since.

But what of you? What are you thinking about the intersection of change management and neuroscience? Resources you would recommend? Something you are actively integrating in your practice? Or same old, same old? Would love to hear!

In the last post I shared some of the work I have been doing with the community management team behind the Organisational Change Practitioners group on Linkedin. One of the strategic principles is “We are in service to the profession”. One of the tactical ways we have been doing that is sharing dedicated blog posts on change management via the @ocpractitioner twitter account.

The content strategy on this is kind of simple. Most of the business world is unclear on what exactly change management is. There are many domains that overlap – communication, leadership, innovation for example.  So to that end we are sharing posts that are central to the practice of Organisational Change Management (OCM) to assist in providing clarity.

And I’ve got to say there’s not a great number of dedicated change management bloggers! So without further ado – here’s a list I have bookmarked at the moment who are my go to sources. I welcome more — if you know of some-one who is regularly blogging on OCM I would love to know and happy to update.

1) Beth Banks Cohn http://adrachangearchitects.com/

2) Bill Braun, Future Possibilities http://futurepossibilities.wordpress.com/

3) Darryl Conner http://www.connerpartners.com/daryl-conner/blog

4) Emily Carr http://practicalchangemanagement.blogspot.com.au/

5) Faith Fuqua Purvis, Ponderings and Insights  http://synergetic-solutions.com/ponderings-insights/

6) Gail Severini, The Change Whisperer http://gailseverini.com/

7) Garrett Gitchell, End State Change Management http://horizontalchange.com/

Heather Stagle http://www.enclaria.com/resources/blog/

9) John Barbuto Limbic Zen http://limbiczen.wordpress.com/blog-page/

10) Jude Burger, Dancing on Hot Coals http://dancingonhotcoals.wordpress.com/

11) Luc Galoppin Reply-MC http://www.reply-mc.com/

12) Martin Fenwick http://www.thechangefactor.com/our-blog/

13) Sher Kyweriga http://www.people-change-management.com/moxie-the-blog/

14) Steve Chihos http://thebigrocks.com/

15) Torben Rick http://www.torbenrick.eu/blog/

PS: and if any one can tell me why the #8 turns into a smiley face I would be very welcome!!

PPS: if you occasionally blog on change management and want the post shared via twitter, hashtag it #ocpractitioner!

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How effective are you as a leader during change?

Even if you don’t hold a positional power, how good are you at motivating and managing yourself and those around you to higher performance, positive outcomes and greater purpose?

Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is our ability to effectively manage our own and others’ emotions and it has been found to significantly contribute to personal excellence and all forms of leadership both in personal and professional settings. As people who work in change we often seek to influence – EQ is core competency of those who are effective influencers, and helps us not to burn out in change.

The Change Management Professionals group would like to invite you to our first 2013 session:

“Working as an EQ Coach”.

The session will introduce the EQ competency model taking you through the stages of Self Awareness, Self Management and Personal Leadership.

We will then workshop the model in the context of an EQ Coach working as a member of a team to identify the challenges of managing your own emotions as well as helping others’ to manage theirs during a period of workplace change.

Please note: NEW VENUE – a big thanks to the good folks at Terra Firma for provision of venue, nibbles and beverages.

All industry stakeholders welcome – if you work in businesses or communities going through change, either in projects or embedded in business or community initiatives. Recruiters, contracting agencies, and vendors also welcome.

This is a ‘tout’ free zone  – We are commited to improving the practice of change management through the sharing of stories and experience.

A big thank you to Anthony Stevenson and Kate McAree for facilitating and organising.

Want to know more? For background on group please see here

It’s somewhat unusual for a linkedin group in that it is fully moderated. The four of us review every submission for applicability to the group rules and delete inappropriate posts. We also reach out to a number of the people submitting posts with suggestions on how to improve the discussion topic so that it will be published. In many cases all it takes is a little tailoring to the central focus of the group: change management.

We have been working some pretty long hours in the last three months in developing a set of guidelines, curators notes, and a strategy for the group. There have been many many discussions on all things community, interpretation, dialogue and of course the profession. This has culminated in the launch of a Strategy Declaration video.

There are three core strategy declarations:

1. We are community

2. We are in service to our profession

3. We connect locally

There will be more changes (improvements) / evolutions coming down the pipeline and we are keen to see  further engagement.

Tell me, what do these declarations mean to you? I would really like to know. If you are an online community manager – how do you drive engagement?

A reader writes:

I work in a culture where people think that change is temporary and will stop at some point in the future. This leads to high levels of apathy, lack of interest in anything innovative and complete shock when something major does happen. Head in the sand syndrome! How do we move forward with employees like these?

Short answer: With great difficulty!

Long answer:

This one is tough, because as you have identified in your first sentence – this is cultural, and it appears to be a deeply sedimented culture.

Most experienced culture change leaders tell you four years is optimistic for changing a culture radically. It takes a full blown ‘assault’ and comprehensive change strategy and plan.

For a start – Identify the stakeholders and their positions. Apathy can be a symptom of the following

• Lack of respect for the leadership team (we don’t care what they want)
• Ineffective consequence management (it doesn’t matter what we do)
• A disconnect between rewards, resourcing and the desired future state
• The future state is too far removed from their professional identity – that’s not what I started this career to do.

Apathy may actually be avoidance

What you are telling me is really frightening – I won’t be able to be successful in the new world.  I don’t have the skills and I’m too old, too set in my ways to learn, I’m going to fail.

What you are telling me is stupid – we don’t need it. I haven’t heard a compelling reason for this new behaviour / process / values.

Understanding the root cause of the change response you are seeing allows you to design an effective intervention – for example:

• Build leadership team credibility and trust
• Review the rewards and consequences systems
• Make it easier for them to do their jobs
• Address individual career transitions
• Training and development
• Focus on the change communication

Sometimes the way forward is not to try and change the existing culture to a radically new one, but rather establish a “bridging culture”. What aspects of the current culture can be retained to meet the newer desired values?  For instance – there is a great big chasm between a bureaucratic culture and an innovative one. What if you were to bridge that gap with a customer responsive culture – could those attached to the bureaucracy identify with the need to focus on customer / constituent? And step them a little closer to innovation in the process?

At the end of the day, I am reminded of the old adage in change “ If you can’t change the person, change the person” . It’s harsh, but possible necessary. A quicker culture change may be achieved by attrition, layoffs and careful recruitment and selection. You need to balance the community response to severe actions with the benefits to be achieved… culture change aint for the faint hearted!

Other readers – what say you?

IABC Victoria presents…

Thought leaders Dionne Lew and Trevor Young will take a provocative look at the impact of social technologies on business and the role corporate affairs and marketing executives have in leading this change.

With Boston Consulting Group predicting that by 2016, online sales will contribute $4.2 trillion to the GDP of G20 nations, the need for corporates to have a strategic social agenda is critical.

CEO of the Social Executive, Dionne Lew, discusses the business imperative for social and why social literacy is a must-have future skill.

At the heart of the socialisation of business is the creation of a connected brand.

Trevor Young – the PR Warrior –  talks about his philosophy of The Connected Brand, a smarter way to market business in a hyper-connected world through content creation and building communities that are empathetic and inclusive.

Date: February 21

Time: 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Seats are limited so book early to avoid disappointment.

In the last post on change readiness (Ready or Not), I flagged that I don’t tend to put much stock in focussing on change resistance. This post, I’ll tell you why.

Historically (and frustratingly a lot of the time today), change resistance was / is seen as this immovable force needing to be overcome in order to achieve change success.

In 1979, Kotter and Schlesinger published “Choosing Strategies for Change” in the Harvard Business Review. In it they proposed six strategies to manage resistance in order of difficulty.

1)   Education and Communication

2)   Participation and Involvement

3)   Facilitation and Support

4)   Negotiation and Agreement

5)   Manipulation and Co-option

6)   Implicit and Explicit coercion.

As the change resistance force grows, you move down the list. In the article, they list the pros and cons of each approach and when it is best to use them. It’s all pretty sensible stuff, but once the topic moves out of the text it all gets a little simplistic.

The minute managers hear objections to the change they want to implement there is much hand-wringing about employees who are resistant to change. The call goes out to consultants who can assist with reducing or overcoming resistance to change.

And I really, really think this is a very short-sighted view. More recently, change researchers (Piderit, 2000, Waddell and Sohal, 1998, Bovey and Hede, 2001)  have recognised that change resistance is actually a far more nuanced and dynamic personal experience of change. What is seen as “resistance” is multi-dimensional and often as not a positive and constructive aspect of the change process. I’m with them.

Here’s why I get frustrated with a focus on change resistance as a negative thing and something to be “overcome”

1)   Change resistance is multidimensional and there are so many emotions associated with a “resistant view” it would take a team of organisational psychologists working full time to assist in working through it. I don’t know about you, but I have rarely seen that resourcing

2)   The reactions associated with change resistance change from day-to-day and hour-to-hour. It is too dynamic to “overcome”.

3)   When people express resistance to change they are actually engaging in the change. They are invested enough to consider it and respond. This is a good thing.

4)   Resistance to me is feedback – as change agents you get the opportunity to respond to that feedback

5)   Often resistance is used as an excuse for poorly communicated or designed change.  It is easier to blame the employees than reflect on design of the change process.

6)   Sometimes change resistance is an indicator of change fatigue. To “overcome” change resistance in an environment of continuous change is fraught with danger. Consider those resistant the canaries in the mineshaft.

There’s also some interesting neuroscience behind not focusing on change resistance. One of the core aspects of motivation and goal achievement  and brain function involves the “Reticular Activating System” or RAS. The RAS is responsible for sifting through the millions of messages you get each day and making sense of them all. It’s very efficient. Crudely put, when you focus on change resistance, your RAS seeks out examples of resistance and ignores the rest. That’s just a little bit too risky for me.

For me, “change resistance” is really normal – we coach our managers to understand that it is normal to experience a performance dip after implementation of the change, it is also normal to hear expressions of resistance.

Often, what we are hearing is:

• I don’t know I have the skills for this
• I don’t think you have explained why very clearly
• I really want this to happen but I don’t want it to stuff up
• Show me proof this is going to work
• Have you considered how we have failed at this before?

So in the last post, I talked of the value in considering change readiness. For me this represents a more valuable aspect of change management. I recognise expressions of resistance as engaged stakeholders and work with them accordingly, and I accept that will be a continuous part of how employees make sense of change. But I put my focus on change readiness. This gives much more targeted activity to do to move the business forward in their change goals. I tell my RAS to focus on change readiness and this draws out much more information and evidence that can be worked on in a positive and productive sense.

What do you think? How have you dealt with change resistance in your efforts? Would love to hear…

PS Just after hitting publish I find this gem of a post on the topic from Bill Braun (Hearing Doubt Rather Than Seeing Resistance). Bill is far more eloquent than me, but basically…”what he said”!

Welcome to 2013.  I put a shout out a week ago or so to find out what topics regular readers wanted in this year’s blog posts. The first one offered up was change readiness – specifically how you measure it and what do you do about it.  I thought it was a great topic to start the year. Here’s my thoughts on it.

Change readiness was initially defined as ‘the cognitive precursor to the behaviours of either resistance to, or support for a change effort’ (Armenakis, Harris and Mossholder, 1993, p.681). Today the construct at least at a practical level has come to include considerations of organisational support as well, so not just “will they”, but also “can they” (eg do they have the skills, knowledge, resources, training, infrastructure, assets). You can have all the will in the world and be emotionally and intellectually supportive of change, but without the resources and capability you are simply not change ready

Twenty years since Aremenakis et al  seminal paper “Creating Organisational Readiness for Change”  in Human Relations, Rafferty, Jimmieson and Armenakis, (2013) have published “Change Readiness: A Multi-level Review” . For those wanting to dive deep I would highly recommend getting into this. The review primarily focuses on the cognitive (thinking) and affective (feeling) responses to change (so the “will they”) and not so much on the factors that result in the “can they” . For this Weiner’s (2009)  “A Theory of Organisational Change Readiness” paper is useful.   – What they both point to is a lack of multi-level attention to change readiness. Change readiness occurs at an organisational level, a group level and an individual level and also in practice while the organisational and group level is often addressed, we see individual readiness to change neglected.

I prefer to focus on change readiness rather than resistance. In some ways it presents as way to do the Lewinian force field analysis  eg are the forces for change greater than the forces against change? I think when you focus on change resistance that’s all you will see. And for a whole host of reasons which I will explain in a later post, I think change resistance has limited use to change practitioners.  However, by focussing on change readiness and you shift the energy a little bit.

In practice – it’s measured in a number of ways – full blown quantitative surveys, pulse polls (short series of question to take the pulse of the change), pulse checks – (checking in with change networks as representative of the audience), focus groups, and manager assessments. Done well, this data provides you information on how, where and when to intervene to improve the likelihood of success when the change goes live.

In about half of my change engagements the change readiness assessment is aborted. The reasons being:

• The organisation has survey fatigue
• There is no time or resources to do anything about the results
• Leadership is uncomfortable with hearing if the audience is not ready

This is a real shame. Because one of the hidden benefits of a change readiness assessment is it is a form of engagement and opportunity to reinforce the key messages of the change.

In a recent project where there was resourcing, time, and political understanding of the importance of the activity we developed an audit tool to assess the business unit before go-live.  The tool listed a series of practices which were known to either hinder or help the change once implemented with a 5 point scale.  It provided a scoring scale eg what your score means, and a contact point to return the audit. The business unit leaders were asked to rate their business unit on these practices.

To be honest, I expected the business unit leaders to inflate the responses – I didn’t mind that. Even if they were scoring themselves a 5 (when the real practice was lower) by thinking about the question they were being reminded of the key practices that needed to occur and saying to themself (Oh boy, we are going to need to change this!) But the answers came in quite honest and realistic. This enabled us to consolidate the results by business unit and provide the change leaders with a focus on where to intervene with coaching / workshops / discussions on the changes to occur.

In other projects I have been able to include a communication audit with the activity and provide critical information on understanding of the key messages and what has missed the mark, so it really is not an activity to be done in isolation.  In crafting the change readiness activity make sure you review what you want to do with other key stakeholders. You may be able to get more bang for your buck!

But over to you – what experience have you had with change readiness? Would be most keen to hear.