Doing "Different", Differently

Paul Gibbons, writing recently (“After Kotter”) on LinkedIn Pulse, advises that important principles should inform the task of “updating change models” for 21st century business and the digital era.

A terrific bonus in his piece is a handy chart that he has compiled of the history of change models. Comparing the different models, we see in it the kind of coincidences and competition that often characterize an activist evolution of earlier forms into later forms.

But in asking how “the model of change” should continue to evolve, it is important to first understand that the models he has cited have fundamental differences in objective, and the history of them is not simply one of earlier models being inferior to later ones.

As Gibbons suggests, the issue at hand is how a model fits its contemporary business - and I’ll further specify that this needs to mean both business objective(s) and the business model that is cultivated to meet the objective.

What Gibbons’ chart (below) does not point out is that each of its “change” models addressed a certain need, acknowledged in the challenge of making change efforts both viable and valuable to the business.

(Image above COPYRIGHT PAUL GIBBONS)

What we actually see cited in Paul Gibbons’ chart is the following set of issues about change being addressed:

1.      Lewin's Risk management model

2.      Conner's Adoption management model

3.      Design Thinking's Relevance management model

4.      Kotter's Performance management model

5.      Prosci's Engagement management model

Now, it’s not clear that there is any intuitively logical linearity to that sequence of concerns.

I’ll go ahead and just say it: the sequence is non-linear. Instead, we can take it at face value that at any chosen time, a given model for conducting change became most broadly desired because it reflected a most pressing business goal of its time, which was sensitively constrained to a highly undesirable degree.

The general business goal of any change is therefore, each time, for the business to do something differently or to do something different.

The purpose of any model in its time was therefore to address the way the current business organization was structured to function, because that current structure was too constraining for the current business goal.

But we also know that, historically, measurements of “success” in change typically hover around the 1 out of 3 rate, or worse! That is, at least two thirds of the time, there is some reason why the change effort is deemed unsuccessful. Typically, change “models” exist to attack (successfully or not) those reasons.

In effect, if we are decided that business now, in 2019, has recently new and different goals, and that again current organization structures are inadequate, then the “updating” to be done is of the organization structure itself.

The model for appropriately changing it could be generated with a general indifference to the prior models because the new model is not really responding to the old models. Rather, it is responding to a new environment.

The primary challenge of the “next normal” for business is to sustain status as a provider of preferred business value. The new normal requires the business function to be highly adaptable to environmental volatility – for function to emerge rapidly from configurations of production that, in the best case scenario, may not be available until “just-in-time” but still are usually both possible and feasible with acceptable net gain.

Businesses therefore have the impetus to develop a base set of capabilities like the following, which together cover the managed identification, embracing, and disengagement of a change:

• Anticipate need for a new configuration - This requires research to be able to articulate and prioritize the meaning of events within a value system
• Develop and retain methodological expertise in re-configuration - This requires applied engineering of the means of business production, including design and implementation
• Resource the practical discovery or invention of new-to-the-business configurations - This requires commitment and governance to define and defend creativity
• Manage demand for new configurations and manage the scope of new configurations - This requires promoting emphasis on opportunities that have explicitly aligned requirements for range and reach of change.

Those capabilities should be mutually supportive. To put it more specifically and pointedly, they should be coordinated and integrated.

In other words, structural readiness in the business for this suite of capabilities is basically architectural.

The “best” model for being able to change is to be built for changeability in the first place.

But change will still be necessary in organizations that are not yet ready for change.

Readiness for change is essentially strategic, meaning that it is proactive. In turn, it means that models for conducting successful change must identify how to be proactive in the respective business circumstances and imperatives of recovery, of growth, and of innovation.

It further means that the requirements differentiating the three main modes of change -- translation, transition, and transformation – must exhibit a correspondence of the mode to the imperative.

In the real world of organizations, those associations are produced by people. And in those associations, the requirements will need to point out what people need.

Furthermore, the interactions of people across those needs will both create and leverage a psychological environment of decision-making, events and actions – one that is dynamic, not static.

This makes it clear that the situation being addressed by a “management model” is not a process but a system, while the necessary “model of the management itself” is not a procedure, nor a project, but a method.

Finally, if “success” does not mean the achievement of development, support, and impact, then it is difficult to understand why anyone would care about management, and the need for management is a mystery.

(c) 2019 malcolm ryder / archestra