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 - #3: Change management formulas miss the key variable
When studying change management, the formula is deceptively simple: akin to assembling IKEA furniture, complete with iconographs and pre-packaged tools. The glitches are those pesky pieces that don’t conform to the plan. They’re called people, and they come pre-assembled in the form of your staff.
For some strange reason staff don’t behave like objects. Many employees, particularly beyond the first layer of leadership, don’t buy your burning platform and your compelling case for change. They experience constant “messaging” as propaganda. They hear flavor-of-the-month. They stick with the devil they know; no matter how far you infiltrate their ranks with “champions” at each level.
Conversely, most executives and management already see themselves as “being the change” they desire for the organization. With that view firmly in place, why would they ever look in the mirror to see if that is actually true?
The formula is NOT designed to deal with actual people. It’s designed as an academic, logical exercise in changing THINGS with an offhand nod at the most current and compelling scientific evidence on human behavior. In other words, the only problem with change management is those pesky humans who keep getting in the way!
As Keller and Aiken identified in their landmark McKinsey & Company study involving 1546 business executives: “In the same way that the field of economics has been transformed by an improved understanding of how uniquely human social, cognitive and emotional biases lead to seemingly irrational decisions, so too the practice of change management is in need of a transformation through an improved understanding of the irrational (often unconscious) way in which humans interpret their environment and choose to act.”
Without an equally powerful examination of the human factor, and a robust approach that INCLUDES the human condition, change management is dead in the water. The result of that being ignored is a model of change management that says to employees: “You are something to be processed. You’ll eventually get it if we tell you enough times... you dummy. And if you don’t get it, that’s your fault.”
By Vik Maraj and Kevin Gangel, Co-founders, Unstoppable Conversations
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Check back next time for our #4 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.
