Getting Real About Resistance to Change - And How to Overcome It
“What’s the best way to change decision-making authorities in your organization?
Turns out it’s pretty easy once you commit to changing.”
- L. David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around
A ‘best practice’ approach to change management
Change is crucial to the life of a successful firm. So it’s stunning how low the rates of success are for major corporate change programs, and how the orthodoxy of traditional change management remains widely unchallenged.
Hot on the heels of every failed change program is a team arguing that if only they doubled down on what they attempted last, then next time it could be a success. More communication, more collaboration, more documentation, more people, more resources.
To paraphrase some of the change management orthodoxy, change leaders should:
Communicate a captivating vision of the future so that everyone will be excited and willing to contribute. (Just make sure your vision is appealing and convincing to everyone)
Involve stakeholders at all levels early on, and keep them involved in co-creating the process and the destination (Great, as long as everyone agrees, and everyone sees their proposals adopted)
Mobilise cross-functional teams and coordinate them via a regular series of steering committees, workstream sub-teams, and project manifestos (Fine, as long as people are well below capacity and energised by documentation and recurring meetings).
Change programs seldom fail as the result of one insurmountable challenge. Instead they suffocate slowly, starved of energy and oxygen beneath a heap of reporting requirements, gentle pushback, competing priorities and fragmented attention.
A more entrepreneurial approach
What if there was a more entrepreneurial approach to change management - one that revolved around speed, resourcefulness and adaptation, instead of elaborate plans, detailed specifications and endless coordination theatre?
Just as start ups fail - not when they run out of money - but when the founders run out of energy, so too do corporate change programs fail when the energy available is insufficient for the mass to shift.
So in practical terms, what does that look like?
Save bold vision statements for the smallest possible group of leaders. Communicated widely, they set you up for endless debate at best; disillusioning failure at worst.
Start with the team available, not the end state vision. Once you’ve determined what resources and capacity are actually available within your team, you can start creating real and tangible change goals. If the answer requires magic maths, you’re not yet at the start line. Use open discussion and accountability to force realism early on.
Once these goals are established, set a 1-2 month deadline for the next task and reduce the scope until completion within time and capacity is realistic. Set KPIs for what success looks like within this time frame.
Involve as few people as possible until as late as possible. This will keep key decision makers aligned without distraction from further ideas and influence which may, once again, widen the scope and add load to the project.
Be honest and ruthless about “other” work. Having all team members focused 100% on the change program is normally unrealistic. However, relentlessly pushing back on outside work and driving maximum involvement from the wider team will yield the fastest results for change leaders.
It’s a boldly different approach that draws from lessons of successful entrepreneurs, and sits in stark contrast to traditional change management orthodoxy. But given the success rate of commonly followed orthodoxy, isn’t it worth thinking differently?
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