Change Management - Anchor or propeller?

When I started consulting in 1990, the words, let alone the concept of "Change Management" didn't exist. But it was done, and usually pretty effectively. The project manager, as part of his'her bailiwick, set up communications plans, assessed the impact of change, worked out just how ready the business was for the coming change, and who exactly was who in the zoo, and what did they think about it all?

And how did the project manager find out about all this? Well it was a time consuming but fairly straightforward process of getting out of the project room and going to the areas of the business where the people were and where work was done. It was done by asking questions, by listening, by watching work, by collecting and analysing data, and by validating and cross referencing all of this with project team members and key clients.

Twenty years ago, there were no advertisements for "Change Managers", but project managers somehow did it anyway. Then guess what happened? Change management became productised, as did good old "sleeves up, get stuck in" business improvement. For example, the foundation of all business improvement today is Statistical Quality Management (SQM) as designed and developed by W Edwards Deming in Japan in the 1950's. This morphed over time into the late 1980's/early 1990's concept of Total Quality Management (TQM). Hammer and Champy published "Re-engineering the Corporation" in 1993, and began to ask not how fast or how much better things can be done, but should they be done at all? Blood flowed freely across the worldwide floors of industry.

The work I cut my consulting teeth on in in the 1990's was business improvement/cost reduction projects with major corporations, To understand a client's business processes, we gathered members of staff who did the work, who supervised the work, who were customers of the work, and constructed an "As Is" process on huge sheets of brown paper, sometimes many, many metres in length. When the task was complete, members of staff not involved in the process were walked through the paper, fine tuning it and validating it. It was a simple, yet brilliant process, getting a consistently high result and buy in from the client as they had fundamentally produced the artifact.

What I can say now, having used Prince2, Agile, Lean and Six Sigma methodologies is that none of them in isolation do anything very differently or produce a better outcome, than this "dinosaur" approach we used all those years ago. The main difference is that to do Prince2. Lean, or Six Sigma now one needs to spend a significant amount of time and money becoming qualified so that you can wave your piece of validating paper at a potential employer. Chances are today that you will secure a position over a practitioner who has been delivering value adding work but hasn't felt the need to do a course. The productised methodologies have for the most part cannabalised what happened before, repackaged it and re-branded it, and requiring accreditation from anyone wanting to use it. The principles, though, never change. Work in, process, work out. If you can wrap your head around these and know how to find the evidence, you do not need to spend $2,000 (or more) in obtaining yet another qualification. Business leaders and key decision makers need to look beyond the qualifications of their advisors, and find a way to understand true competence and capability. By the time someone says, "I thought he could do the job, he was well qualified", the damage done might be significant. And by the way, I am not saying any of these productised business improvement approaches aren't any good; in their own way they all have value, but in perfect isolation trusting any of them to take an organisation to the promised land, is fraught with danger.

Change management I feel is in a similar place. The change management agenda has been effectively hijacked by prescribed, corporatised products. Certainly, the rise and rise of the position of "Change Manager", or"Change Analyst" has been dramatic, and experience is telling me and others that I speak to that to seek one of these roles, regardless of proven experience, without a Prosci or APMG qualification, or any of the other qualifications going around, is almost pointless. You might have helped steer a BHP business through the tumult of a restructure, but as you did it without a change management qualification pretty much makes that achievement irrelevant. One of the outcomes of this is that I see "Change Managers" sitting behind their desktops producing reams of documents that mostly never get read by people that matter, and never actually make a significant difference to supporting the project objectives that the organisation desires.

Change management is about people. It is about leadership. It is about getting out on the factory floor, into the toolbox meetings, onto the freezing dock at 3.30am while the ship is being unloaded, It is about understanding what is happening, what people are saying, what their fears are, what their hopes are, and hearing what they are saying. It is done by asking carefully crafted questions, by listening hard, by trying your best to walk in the shoes of those people who may be affected by the coming changes, by developing relationships and trust with staff, and by being the bridge between them and the project. It is done by precisely understanding what the business is trying to achieve, and what it needs from it's staff to get there. It is done by having the knowledge, skill and trust of the client to get it's leaders to actually lead. It is not done by ticking a box, completing a template, and by sitting behind a computer. Too many change managers do this.

Now, before hell and damnation reigns down on me from the heights of the change management corporate world, let me say this. I am a great respecter of process. To have a methodology to follow means that nothing should be left out. A productised checklist accompanied by templates for everything is not the reason change management struggles to deliver; it is the dependence on these things at the expense of getting out and around the people that cause the problem. I have seen many change managers rise to senior positions who produce magnificent stakeholder analysis, change risk strategies, and communication plans who are comfortable relating to senior management but frankly struggle to look the rank and file in the eye. They talk a great document, but will seldom sit down in the brew room with the union rep to find out what her members are really worried about.

Effective change management is the key to successful organisational change; yes of course a sound project plan and project management is necessary, of course executive leadership is required, but without the connection to people that the change manager brings, effective change becomes problematic at best, and the short term benefits produced by the project become unsustainable.

Memo to change managers; get out from behind your computers, mix with the staff, ask questions, listen hard, and seek to understand. If you can do all this, and you still feel the need to fill out reams of pre-loaded templates to complete paperwork that most people won't read, well, fill your boots!