Change Management - Survival of the Most Responsive

Charles Darwin famously said that:

"It isn't the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones who are most responsive to change"

Any organisation whose processes, behaviours and cultures have evolved around a perception and belief in a fixed and static environment, are finding that they have a limited effectiveness in the fluid reality that we are all currently experiencing. Survival depends on continuous change.

For your organisation to survive and prosper in this climate your feedback processes and behaviours need to be aligned to the reality of your external environment - or you die.

But in reality it's even harder than that. It's not just about catching up with what is changing all around you - it's about doing it faster than your competition. So in a very real sense your survival and success in organisational life isn't merely based on your ability to simply change - survival and success is based on your ability to change faster.

In recent interviews John Kotter makes the disturbing point that the marginal rate of change is increasing - and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. In his view, many organisations just can't keep up with the speed of change.

We used to believe that change occurs in cycles and waves that ebb and flow. This may be accurate over long time spans of hundreds of years, but in the present the rate of change is continually increasing, and the blunt reality is that continuous change is hard work and deeply unpopular.

2 key themes emerge:

(1) The failure of BPR and the over emphasis on process at the expense of people

Probably the single biggest reason for the astonishingly high 70% failure rate of ALL business change management initiatives has been the over-emphasis on process rather than people - the failure to take full account of the impact of change on those people who are most impacted by it.

The major lesson of the last recession was that big companies had to learn fast how to think and behave like the small companies they originally were. This led to the emergence and growth of Business Process Re-engineering [BPR] that advocated that organisations get back to the basics and reexamine their roots.

The objective behind this was to attempt to achieve a massive step change in productivity and profitability by transcending organisational boundaries and focusing on processes above tasks, jobs, functions and people.

A primary area of initial focus was establishing customer needs and requirements and defining and implement the feedback processes to ensure that the organisation stayed aligned to changes in market conditions and customer requirements.

Only trouble was that it didn't work. Michael Hammer co-author of "Re-engineering the Corporation"- the arch proponent of the process led approach to change and business improvement - revised his opinion and claimed that 70% of all BPR initiatives failed [Hammer and Champy 1993]:

"I don't regret saying anything; it's more what I left out. In particular, the human side is much harder than the technology side and harder than the process side. It's the overwhelming issue."

Even Hammer now recognises that the people aspects of change are "the overwhelming" issue!

(2) The emerging recognition of the "people factor" and the importance of the emotional dimension

Change is an emotional business. The failure to address the human impacts of change is at the root of most failed change initiatives. It is not enough just to "manage" change; people need to be led through change.

One of the major change leadership priorities is recognising and addressing the inner psychological and emotional adjustments that people move through in response to external organisational change events.

William Bridges was the first thought leader to draw the important distinction between external organisational change and what he defines as the internal "transition" that people need to move through as they make a successful emotional and psychological adjustment to the changed circumstances that they are experiencing as as a result of the organisational change.

In my view, this is an extremely important aspect of change leadership and one that, in my experience, is invariably over-looked.

So often it is just assumed by senior management that people can and will accept an organisational change.

But, the failure to recognise and attempt to address this dimension is a significant cause of organisational change failure. The larger the human impact of the organisational change the greater the need for some form of "transitional support".

Many directors and senior managers have the emotional detachment and objectivity to make clear, sound strategic decisions yet seem to lack the "counter-balancing" self-awareness and emotional intelligence to realise the impact of their decisions.

This omission frequently [and unnecessarily] delays or jeopardises the implementation of their strategic vision and the realisation of the organisational benefits.

Change management is about how you take an organisation from Position A to Position B, in the fulfilment or implementation of a vision and a strategy. The whole art of this is to how to carry your people with you, so that the envisaged benefits of the vision and strategy are actually realised.

The perspective of "change management as survival of the most responsive to changing markets and customer requirements" can be expanded to include the perspective of "change management as the survival of the most responsive to the needs and emotional requirements of the people employed by the organisation - who satisfy those changing customer requirements".