This post is part of a 10-Week Series sharing the powerful reasons to Let Go of Change Management. If you missed the first post - go there first. We welcome your comments, discussions and insights as we explore the topic of transforming culture and business.
Why Let Go of Change Management - Top - 10 #2: 70% of change initiatives fail. Seven. Zero. Who sticks with a 70% fail rate?!?
“If you sit in on a poker game and don’t see a sucker, get up. You’re the sucker.”
Change management is designed to deal with the symptoms of culture, not the culture itself. And your culture is the one behind the wheel of your shiny new change management strategy: the processes, the structures, the communication, the actions, and the results. Your culture is doing all the talking. It’s doing all the listening. It’s sitting in every chair in your pristine new org chart.
A new org chart with new titles doesn’t produce new thinking. It usually produces a temporary disruption to business as usual, some confusion, and something that will one day be considered “a flavor of the month”. Whether I now sit to the left of you or the right of you has, on its own, rarely made any significant impact on the paradigm that got our organization in this pickle in the first place.
If people want to affect dramatic change to the morale or culture of their company, something entirely different is needed. And that thing is a transformative process that is designed to address the culture of a company.
And what else is the culture of a company but the way common and accepted way that a particular group of people think, speak, listen and act. In other words a culture is “how we do things around here”.
Which is why your change management outcomes are going to look an awful lot like the outcomes you had before you even started.
Which equals a failure to deliver the future you so desire.
It's time for a new, transparent conversation, not a 70% failure stat.
By Vik Maraj and Kevin Gangel - Co-founders of Unstoppable Conversations
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Check back next time for our #3 Reason to Let GO of Change Management. Join Unstoppable Conversations and get notice of these and other paradigm-shifting insights on LinkedIn (group), Facebook or Twitter. Keep in-the-know for your organization, team and culture transformation.
Unstoppable Conversations, founded by the team of Vik Maraj and Kevin Gangel, are a unique consulting firm which produces radical shifts in the capacity of an organization’s leaders to realize extra-ordinary results within a surprisingly short time. Their work demystifies the world of change and simplifies everything to ONE key driver. Leaders discover that their organization’s culture shapes and limits all of their well laid plans and they discover how to practically address their culture with real-time actions that produce immediately obvious benefits.
