Making It Meaningful

I heard a quote that went something like 'Only a wet baby likes change', a very true statement even though we are all involved in 'change' everyday.

An important aspect of change is to make it meaningful to the people involved - the old 'WIIFM' test (What's In It For Me?) - meaning that people immediately consider what the impact of the change will be on them personally - will it increase their wealth, decrease their stress, improve their working environment, stop them from doing things they like etc etc.

Any change that is imposed will generally fail to address these issues for individuals and result in CPF (Change Programme Failure) as individuals and small groups undertake guerilla activities to undermine the change and return it to the status quo. Even given this figure, something like 50% of change programmes will be substantially driven by managers, or worse, external consultants, forcing people to make changes they may not agree with and which have not past the WIIFM test.

To make change meaningful to people, they need boundaries to operate within, the skills and vision to enable them to create a mental picture of an improved process, guidance when they get stuck and the freedom to make mistakes on their journey.

Whilst this goes against many of the philosophies of change which focus a lot on ram-raids and detailed analysis by externals, it leads to change that people believe in - something they find meaningful.

Are you really ready? Are you?

My own research undertaken several years ago demonstrated that 87% of change programmes failed to achieve sustainable results. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to have these results confirmed by Henley Management College at a recent seminar which stated that 'over 75% of change programmes fail to achieve results that are sustainable meaning that of the $60 Billion invested by the UK annually in change, over $45 Billion is wasted.'

In analysing why such a large percentage of programmes fail to achieve the desired results, my research again was confirmed by Henley, with the environment created by Leaders stifling change, internal cultural misalignment to the aims of the business not being addressed and the misapplication of tools being some of the common areas our work agreed on.

To quote a well know saying, "Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance", and this is as applicable to general change programmes as it is to the planning of military operations. Some of the key aspects are obviously understanding why the change needs to happen and where the organisation needs to improve most, but other issues such as identifying how leadership style might affect success or failure and how the organisational environment needs to be adjusted to support the change process, are often ignored.

As such, we regularly undertake a 'Strategic Change Readiness Review' with clients which looks at the drivers and barriers to successful change with the aim of minimising the risk of failure and also maximising the returns on investment covering 10 'success factors' from organisational culture to performance measures and from the tools of change to 'Change Planning'.

With so much at stake, it has to be asked: Are you ready for change?