Our Blog: "The LAST Word on Change"

Change Leadership Role Equals "Kill Complexity & Win!"

Tweet

 

The war is on.  Article after article in sources like the Harvard Business Review now reinforce what thought leading practitioners in the field of organizational change have been saying for years—our attraction to guidance that infuses the already-complex exercise of change with even more complexity is distractive and costly.  Whether it’s in the area of communications, accountability, or measurement, no one is better positioned than a Change Leader to drive complexity from the process of change.

It’s time for all Change Leaders to put their foot down and promote a logic shaped by intuition—NOT change as calculus…To drive focus on a visual map defined by milestones and acting/deciding in a manner consistent with agreed-upon values—NOT savoring “sophistication” in their models like some Rube Goldberg Machine.

Think of your change initiative like a game plan for an NFL team when a spot in the playoffs is at stake.  If you step back from the game plan (or model, communications plan, change infrastructure, etc.) and get nervous when you see that “so many things have to go right for us to pull this off,” then too much complexity has crept in.

So how easy is it to allow complexity to creep in?  Here’s a SELF-CHECK on just a short-list of things that can get hard-wired into change efforts—even unintentionally:

__Can stakeholders easily outline, in their own words, the roles and responsibilities you’ve built into the change process?

__Does proximity to consultants and key decision-making create in- and out-groups?

__Do you have many “plans” (master change plan, project plan(s), communications plan, stakeholder plan, measurement plan, contingency plan, Plan A?, Plan B? Escape plans?)?

__Do you spend time trying to teach the company a new language for change, processes, or  performance?

__Are reporting and formal meetings the key process for establishing accountability?

__Do the infrastructure, strategy, and operating principles you’ve built into your charter and change process compete with or conflict with those that already exist for team members and stakeholders?

__Is there ANY demonstrated disagreement about where to place loyalty (e.g., project v. daily work, change schedule v. customer demands) when they encounter difficulty?

__Do stakeholders use the same language you do to describe the role and authority of consultants and project staff?

__Do the roles and structure put in place to plan or execute change create “matrixed” or dual-reporting roles for project team members, trainers, or end-users?

__Have we rationalized progress in ANY way—is this logic clearly understood and similarly articulated by our stakeholders?

All efforts at transformation and change can be improved, but if you responded “YES” to more than 1-2 of these audit prompts, it is likely that you’ve allowed more complexity than you may have intended to creep into your initiative.  The good news is that there are established practices for identifying and eliminating this complexity.  This blog forum is just a start.  We invite your own ideas and encourage you to look at the preview of our new book for ways to introduce a discipline of simplicity into your change leadership.

http://www.lastwordonchange.com/our-new-book-on-change-management