How a solid change foundation gets your project through the 3 states of change successfully.

Last week I got certified as a ProSci Certified Change Management Practitioner. For me this was logical step since I have been helping people get through change for the last 10 years being involved in implementation, business process improvement and knowledge sharing projects. During the ProSci course we talked a lot about all kinds of aspects of change management. One of the things that has always interested me is creating a solid foundation for change, as I also mention in my articles about HR and knowledge management. For me having a foundation for (a) change is logical, since you need to know where you are before you can see and understand where you will be going.

ProSci touches this subject by stating that there are three states of change, being the “Current state’, ’Transition state’ and ‘Future state.’ In the Current state the change manager, organisation and people prepare for the change that is to come. Preparing for the change means defining a change management strategy, preparing a change management team (if applicable) and thinking about project sponsorship. This makes all perfect sense, but there is no specific attention for building a solid foundation for the change that is about to start other than assessing if the organisation is ready for the change and what the impact on the organisation will be like. These are useful assessments, but in this article I want to highlight that from my perspective I believe that a solid foundation needs to be in place as well in order to help your managers and employees get through the change successfully.

A solid foundation on which to build your change project is often very useful because people like to truly see and understand what the change will mean for them personally. In order to do that it helps a great deal if you can actually show that to them in such a way that they recognise their own reality first, and that a change manager can then subsequently show them how that reality (Current state) will be influenced by the change that will be implemented, and how the Future state will eventually look like. A good foundation does not only display this at a high level, but also focuses on the details of people’s work as well, since that is often influenced by the change and that is the world that people experience on a daily basis. Combining high level and detailed insights of the Current, Transition and Future state helps employees and managers to become aware of:

1. How their work(processes) will be affected by the change (high level and in detail)

2. How their relations with other employees and external parties will be affected (will my role still interact with others in the same way?)

3. How their communications with colleagues and external parties will be affected (who will now ask me to do something, and who do I report to?)

4. How the way they use their current software support systems will be affected (will I still use the same software or new software, do I still use software the same way?)

A solid foundation that truly helps employees and managers can best be co-created with the employees themselves, using their words and displaying their job reality. This will help them own the foundation and therefore own the start of the change to come. It should also be truly visual, and non complex to ensure everyone will be able to understand and use it. Essentially what you do with your foundation is combining business process management (BPM) (high level) and internal knowledge management (KM) (detailed level) to provide awareness and insights about the change by visualising the Current state.

You can also use the foundation that you are using to visualise the Future state. The change manager (and the project manager if applicable) knows what he or she wants the final result of the change to be. If you add that to your foundation you then have your Current state and Future state captured within your visualisation, helping people to understand what the change will actually mean to them while doing their job. You can show this again on a high level and detailed level to help employees and managers fully understand the impact of the change and to help them prepare for the change that is coming. 

In my next article I will focus on the Transition state in detail, explaining what a solid visual change foundation means for ADKAR (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement). 

Bram Eekhout is the CEO and founder of Bizpearl, a consulting firm specialised in knowledge management, business process improvement and change management. He is passionate about sharing knowledge within organisations effectively, working better together and providing a foundation for implementing change successfully.