What Changed?

Change Management is now officially in the same fuzzy logic zone as "Design Thinking", "Digital Transformation", and, well, no need to go further with examples since the point is this: not doing it, even if you don't know how, is not an option, but doing it is no guarantee of getting yourself out of trouble.

We already know that increasingly the effort to manage change is taking a lot of heat from frustrated people who have the responsibility to ask "Did it work?" It's only natural that answering this question before it is even asked has become both a dictate (hello best practices!) and a mini-industry (hello billable "deliverables") -- which together conspire to create engineered change.

Engineered change is recognizable everywhere due to its willingness to predefine a future state as a result of a method of production. But I'll go ahead and climb out on a limb with a hair that I'm going to split, and split it: the actual deliverable of change is a condition called Different, and that means that there are two deliverables of change management -- the recognized difference itself, and the management of the modification as an event.

Here is where most of us automatically think "not just difference, but preferred difference". That's legitimate. After all, we wouldn't ask for change management if we didn't care what difference might occur. And let's face it: change will occur whether we want it to or not.

But staying on point, the issue here is that management always has its own deliverable - namely, competent guidance. This is true even if there is no conclusion! Any number of things in the real world require perpetual management. In this regard, the deliverable of management is a performance level of a competency called managing.

Now it makes sense to talk about what is actually being managed, and the answer is not "a future state". The answer is an event.

Most people know enough about events to accept without debate that intentional events are planned and that complex events are choreographed. Saying those two things says nothing about how easy or difficult -- nor how large or small -- the plan and the choreography will be. Nonetheless, the two things will combine to cause one phenomenon to occur: a transition that creates an opportunity to progress.

This sets up three real-time checkpoints for managers. The issue at hand is to focus on the difference between what makes the transitional event managed instead of unmanaged.

One: (transition) are things happening or being done differently? Why?

• On this point, a manager is working on generating transparency and accountability.

Two: (opportunity) are emerging conditions (effects of what is happening) supporting instead of inhibiting movement along the appropriate direction -- namely, both away from the status quo and towards the desired future state? Why?

• On this point, a manager is working on spreading understanding of what influences are success factors versus risk factors.

Three: (progress) are real-time activities being compared continually to a well-known representation of how the desired future state is designed to function? Why?

• On this point, a manager is working on having actors feel ownership of the effort to reveal whether the proposed ways of working have advantages, and feel benefit in it. The benefit, however, is about having a better way to work, not about other kinds of "results"...

Given those differentiating checkpoints, management brings the ability to determine if, when and why something is not currently as it needs to be. A manager is accountable for triggering action that responds to those determinations.

What becomes more clear is that the management role is not responsible for performing those response actions effectively. In fact, the actors can be effective in influencing the success and risk factors whether intentionally or not. A major difference between coincidental support and managed progress is that people are aware when their actions are supportive, and the available combinations of supportive action are expressly co-operative.

Change Management is often confused with Project Management because the effectiveness of managing is itself conceived of as a result of a plan of management. But change management and project management are not the same thing! Projects produce; Changes re-organize.

More importantly, a plan of management is not, in fact, the same as the plan of change.

A management plan and a change plan can be incompatible with each other. It is therefore necessary to determine if, under the prevailing circumstances, a "sufficient" management plan can be pursued given the necessity of executing a given plan of change. If the current answer is no, it is the responsibility of executives to rectify the situation. hat can of course involve committed provision of time, money, authority, knowledge, systems, and other resources -- including the credibility of walking the talk.

The punchline to those observations is that the overall effort to progressively transition requires understanding why managing in a certain way is more likely to promote good outcomes from a planned arrangement of modifying influences.

Said differently, successful "change management" has the feature of connecting motivation and strategy in sustainable new action.

The basic "deliverable" of change management, then, is a cultivated (not engineered) different way of getting things done. The deliverable is not some other outcome. At the same time it should be obvious that this applies equally to timely recovery, stronger growth, or innovation, even though those three things may have vastly different detailed requirements.

(c) 2019 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research

Archestra is actively exploring strategy development in the alignment of its longstanding mantra - Change How You Change - with the organizational development mantra of Insights Without Borders - Change Or Be Changed. That work will be reflected in future articles from one or both of the partners.