Change Management or change management?

Is “change management” a noun, proper noun or abstract noun? Who the hell cares ... they’re two words anyway?  I hear you exclaim. Bear with me; sometimes the history of words and how they are used can be instructive.

The other day someone, who had checked out my LinkedIn profile asked me, “what is change management?” I gave them my standard answer; their eyes glazed over and the conversation moved on.

But it got me to thinking and eventually led me to the question posed above: is “change management” a catchall name assigned to anything generally associated with change; something particular, like a process, model or framework; or something abstract like an idea, approach or school of thought?

I’ve been fortunate to have some really interesting roles in my 30+ year career, working with some truly exceptional organisations and people. More often than not, these “roles” have not had nicely written position descriptions which clearly explain the objectives, responsibilities, outcomes, capabilities, behaviours, knowledge and experience required.

So it was, when I first started working in “change management”. At the time, the late 90’s, change and management were two separate words: nouns. They had not yet been put together, let alone evolved into a noun, used to describe a profession or discipline, requiring certification and the application of prescribed models or approaches. So my role was called Operations Business Support Analyst. 

There was a lot of thinking and discussion on the subject of change and how to deal with it, but this thinking had not yet been codified, trademarked and “monetized”.

All I knew about it at the time was that in my role, I was operating in a strange and nebulous space; somewhere between “the project” and “the people”. My role was to do things to help manage and embed the change: prepare, equip and support people to successfully adopt and embrace change and so achieve the organisation’s desired outcome.

Over time “change management” has evolved into a profession and there are now lots of competing processes, models and frameworks. Likewise there is a large body of knowledge and thinking on the subject. They all have their merits and I have used many different approaches in my career. I would say that I am model agnostic: I haven’t settled on any one approach. If required to choose one, I’d say that I like Agile. Its fun, active, human and most people can start using Agile techniques after about one minute of explanation.

This leads me to the answer to the question I posed:  Is “change management” a noun, proper noun or abstract noun?

Remember how I described my change management role as doing “things to help manage and embed the change: prepare, equip and support people to successfully adopt and embrace change and so achieve the organisation’s desired outcome”. 

Well, the key words here are all verbs:  doing words:  change management is fundamentally about people and describes things we do to help people change. So I think change management,  although usually used as a noun, actually is or should be a verb, preferably an active verb.

Of course, that first reaction to this important question, presaged at the beginning; “who the hell cares?” is probably the most instructive: I wouldn’t spend too much time talking about change management outside the project organisation at all; who wants to feel that they about to be subjected to Change Management?  Much better to just do it.

With thanks and apologies to Aristotle, Jung, Lewin, Ross, Agile, Becker &Harris, Prosci, LaMarsh Global, GE, Boston Consulting Group, Accenture, PWC, EY, Nike, The Macquarie Dictionary and a whole bunch of other people and organisations who have no doubt influenced my thinking on this subject.