A BETTER YESTERDAY VERSUS AN ENTIRELY NEW FUTURE
Change Management is 100% Effective…at Making a Better Yesterday
It sounds strange but, there are very few corporate change efforts that have ever failed.
That is because change accomplishes exactly what it is designed for – making a better yesterday. 99% of all change management efforts produce a modified version of what already exists in the organization. And organizations hope that these incremental performance gains will carry the day against the unprecedented pace at which local and global environments are shifting.
The deck chairs are shuffled, strategic plans are drawn up, GAP and SWOT analyses are done, yellow stickies litter the walls, “expert” opinions are sought, reports are written, and new visions are word-smithed until everyone’s head hurts; all this in hopes of some marginal increase in profitability or service.
And if we tell the truth about it – not many results or KPI’s will really change in the coming year. And this continues to happen in board rooms and retreats around the world in spite of its proven ineffectiveness.
So Why Do We Keep Doing It?
One answer is that few leaders have any way of effectively addressing the real source of what limits their performance –culture. Your culture shapes your approach to every challenge and every opportunity. It is a lens that constrains the range of possible solutions. At the same time your culture will blind you to alternatives.
As Peter Drucker eloquently put it, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” You could also say that culture also creates these same strategies that it will later eat for breakfast.
Change Management is incapable of effectively addressing culture – at best change management deals with the products of the culture: process, roles, physical space, and behaviour. Or, change management will attempt to shape the kind of communication (and often propaganda) that employees receive. Depending on your change management process of choice, this might also include “shepparding” disgruntled employees from a resistant state towards the promised land or a conducting a series of town halls or engagements with many senior leaders speaking “on-script’, even when they are trying to be off-script. Or, fantastical employee get-togethers where the new “vision” is unveiled for employees to talk about and somehow, by osmosis, “own” and act on. God forbid, yet another survey will be conducted that will tell us what we already know. None of these efforts confront the fundamental DNA of the organization – it’s just more of the same, hence:
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Alphonse Karr
So How do you Beat this Old and Tired Game?
The answer is – stop playing it. Stop using change management to address fundamental and entrenched ways of thinking and acting. Change management is good at dealing with the downstream products of your culture, of your collective thinking; org charts, policies, practices, strategies are all the result of the groups collective thinking, of its culture. None of these downstream elements at at the source of the problem. Transformation is a match for substantially and rapidly altering an organizations future. The trouble is that transformation is poorly understood and is a word that is used as a synonym for change. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
So then, what’s the difference between Transformation and Change Management? Transformation is not “better” change management. Transformation produces a “wake up” an “aha”. Transformation reveals what you have not been able to see that has limited your view of success and of life itself. The result of transformation is an altered state. Everyone has experienced transformation but few organizations know how to harness its power and direct it at themselves. Transformation offers a unique pathway for accessing breakthrough thinking in which:
new possibilities emerge
new actions become obvious
new conversations start
new behaviours become natural, and
a whole new future becomes real
So Now What?
That depends. You have to have the courage and willingness to deal with yourself, as a leader, and your culture and STOP dealing with everything and everyone else as the primary focus of your attention. You have to stop saying “they are the problem”, if only “they….x” or “they…y”. By the way, you are “a they” for them! If you can have the courage to get past this ordinary explanation then you are probably ready to engage a company that has mastered the practice of cultural and individual transformation. We are one of those companies. If you engage us your organization will have new problems – problems worthy of your attention and your existence. You will stop surviving and get to work on making a real impact that will fulfill you and your entire organization. Most people will end up forgetting that there was a time they used their snooze button.
