Designing a New Code for Change – Part 1

Why use only one club from the golf bag? – the reason we are still getting poor results from Change Management

I am a pretty average golfer. My excuse is that I don’t play enough. My family may not agree. However, I do know that you cannot achieve a good score by playing with only a putter. As a minimum, you need a driver, wedge and putter to achieve a good round, and then you selectively use more specialist weapons as required. It never ceases to amaze me, Generic Cialis Online then, that so many businesses believe they can achieve good results while using only “one club from the bag”. This is especially the case in change management: many organisations expect to handle this dynamic process by relying on just one technique – administration – even though nearly every thesis on the subject identifies a number of complex issues to address.

For business today, there is no place to hide. The pressure to adapt will not diminish. In the next decade, as we emerge from recession, growth will be achieved by those who best calculate and manage the risk–reward frontier. Held et al. (1997) have stated that “Globalisation is developing in an emergent non-linear way involving overlapping political, economic and technological development”. In other words the pressure upon businesses to achieve a reasonable return on capital will increase. For this reason it is paramount that strategy management and execution is a dynamic rather than an annual process. Strategy, a well-worn term, is in this context is the way in which a business organises itself to navigate external uncertainty and best utilises its resources in the pursuit of targets. Realising strategy, in this sense, is what we call change management (see figure 1).

Haldane's 4C Change Model

Context Management

Part of the difficulty faced by some organisations in realising strategy is managing the context in which the business operates. Often their inability to create planning processes that reconcile fiscal cycles with long-term projects is a key symptom. Corporate structures rarely manage capital allocation in a way that gives the divisions within them the required autonomy to adapt and grow over a sufficient period. Short term cost management imperatives then typically undermine change strategy. Then there are the organisations’ reporting processes and the belief that these are synonymous with the ability to deliver. Anyone who has worked in a project management environment knows that passive RAG (Red, Amber or Green) ratings rarely report actual status. Furthermore, in a culture in which raising negative issues is discouraged, reporting is not linked to successful delivery, and there is very little incentive to reveal the true status of projects. Transparency, an essential requirement for effective change management, is then elusive.

Essential to realising strategy is better management of the non-linear change process identified by Held et al. We must move away from the reliance on linear, often sequential, event-based management that is so evident in modern organisations, because it cannot address the complexity of change management requirements in today’s global economies. A more flexible framework is urgently required.