The waters cold

One of the critical elements for getting to implementation success at speed is knowing what the environment is like for the change you are introducing. Your change isn’t introduced into a vacuum—your success is impacted by the past history of implementations, and the lessons the organization has learned about what is important, and what’s not. Awareness of how your change Targets view past implementations can help you to see where there are opportunities for acceleration and how to predict speed bumps for your change. 

6 Reasons for testing the water: There are 6 reasons why you would want to conduct an assessment.

• To estimate the degree of difficulty you will face in implementing the change, whether it is a transformational change or more limited in scope and complexity
• To identify prospectively the likely barriers so you can put mitigation strategies and tactics in place
• To determine the amount of effort and investment that will be needed.  What is the resource load that will be required to overcome your systemic weaknesses?
• To predict the points of resistance
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• To enable you to form strategies to manage the resistance.
• To develop awareness of your climate in your Sponsors and Change Agents-- much like a thermometer

 No change occurs in isolation. Instead, it occurs in a context of all those priorities competing for resources and all the lessons previously learned about implementation history. That’s why knowing your climate is so critically important!

 Organisational stress

When you are so focused on your own change project, you can overlook the fact your Targets and Sponsors have many other changes that they are dealing with simultaneously. Your Targets and Sponsors have limited time and change bandwidth. What’s more, your senior leaders may fail to appreciate that the impact of a change on them can be very different from the impacts that are being felt further down the organization.

To illustrate this point, think of your senior executive Sponsors as the "big wheel" at the top. Each time the senior leaders launch a new strategy from on high, their own change wheel may move just a notch. But the "little wheels" of the organization start churning as the disruption and impacts of the change are felt, much like little hamsters madly turning the wheel. Meanwhile, the senior leaders have moved on to the next change, without appreciating that the past changes are still being absorbed lower down the organizational food chain. The cumulative effect can have a major impact on the change climate.

So when organizations commit to large-scale, complex changes like business transformation, leaders need to have their eyes open to what the levels of disruption will be not just for them, but for everyone else who is impacted. It’s not just a question of leadership sensitivity; when there is too much going on, with too few resources available, trust in leadership erodes.  Trust is not a warm and fuzzy issue; low trust organizations can’t implement at speed, ultimately impacting competitive advantage and business results.

TIP: Do an organizational change stress test which provides a context for understanding the current levels of organizational stress, and the climate in which changes will occur.

Your organizational history is more than a past relic

Albert Einstein once said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” One of the biggest change management gaps we see is when an organization does not take the perceptions of its past implementation history into account when planning for the future.

There is great value in looking at past history as part of your change management methodology. Transparency around past failures is critical to building credibility for the future. Remember, no project is implemented in isolation. If you have had an unsuccessful past history, and you have high stress, you can predict that you will need extra resources and time to create readiness for this one.

Owning your past history can help build confidence for the present. Failed implementations that still live on can often be a source of resistance for the current change. Employees learn lessons from the past. What makes them think things will be different this time? Words alone aren’t enough!

TIP: An Implementation History Assessment measures perceptions of past patterns of implementation results, since these same patterns are likely to be repeated. Managers typically will use the same strategies in the future that they have used in the past, unless a conscious effort is made to understand the patterns and impacts of past implementation practices. The data output is used to determine new strategies for overcoming identified barriers to implementation.

Tips on how to test the water for your change:

• Understand historical barriers to implementation and develop specific strategies to manage or eliminate them.
• Set three to five clear-cut priorities
• Sequence all other priorities over time (what comes next)
• Create feedback loops and measurement systems where Sponsors, Agents and Targets are dealing simultaneously with the real information on the progress of each implementation
• Integrate concurrent key initiatives. Manage the complete portfolio of implementations in the organization
• Eliminate projects that are not mission critical to minimize resource differences

If you have greater awareness and understanding of perceptions of your past history, and you have a picture of all the competing priorities, you will be much better positioned to identify the right tactics and strategies to overcome barriers to change and achieve value realization.

 Now go and swim.