Identifychangepitfalls

The large scale of business transformation is difficult, you have to remove roadblocks, avoid change pitfalls.

Change is inevitable, the "VUCA" new normal forces digital leaders to be cautious of barriers and pitfalls on the way. To navigate through the large-scale digital transformation, it’s important for companies to craft their own version of the digital playbook to focus on doing more with innovation and manage radical changes in a structural way.

 In fact, change is both art and science; there is art embedded in scientific design, construction and optimization. It’s important to avoid various change pitfalls:


Information becomes one of the most invaluable business assets, but it could also turn out to be one of the biggest pitfalls for change management if it is not handled properly or interpreted accurately: The quality information not only helps to make effective decisions for driving changes timely, but also brings invaluable feedback for making continuous improvement. Information precision directly impacts decision effectiveness and change management success rate. The optimal prediction system based on quality information should have the best results in different areas according to the specific or customized quality criteria.

Information compromise will perhaps mislead the management to make ineffective decisions or solve wrong problems. When you intend to understand, interpret and judge something, you need to collect relevant information, form a critical opinion of it based on facts, discerned data, common understanding, and clarified notions. This is particularly critical for top business leaders and management. As effective Information Management can capture the real-time business insight for fixing root causes of problems, discovering the new areas which contribute to the business growth, or spot the opportunities to increase revenues. Therefore, information management effectiveness directly impacts the maturity level of the entire business

Change fatigue is another potential pitfall if there are too many change efforts going on, but lack of vision, purpose, and passion: Become better at what you do, or become able to do something different. Becoming better means removing obstacles. If change is overwhelming, lack of focus, out of control, it’s the time to slow down, clarify vision and purpose of change, set up the right priority, and define the reachable goals with tangible results. One of the pitfalls of Change Management is that the managers underestimate the resources necessary to successfully complete change initiatives. A way to break that pattern is to develop a tangible, neutral description of success for the organization and how each role contributes to making the seamless change, leverage resources scientifically and drive change systematically.

Many change efforts need creative people, who can think outside the box, solve problems alternatively. There is understandably tension sometimes between the creative and the administrative. It’s critical to strike the right balance of creativity and process, standardization and personalization, justify a solid business case, subjected to reality-based cost-benefit analysis, align people, process and technology seamlessly, “look, listen, question, understand, plan, test and collaboration, “to make change happening not only on the structural surface, but really ensure the culture is harmonized to accelerate performance.

Lack of change review, reflection, and recognition is one of the biggest pitfalls in moving forward: Closer to reality is that change is continuously happening in the environment of a company. The desires of stakeholders, customers, and employees are evolving naturally. The challenges, competitions, and complexities may be on the increase, but along with it, there comes the increase in opportunity and in the form of demand. To improve change management effectiveness, the change leaders should review, reflect, have a solid grasp on what has been tried before and analyze why those initiatives didn’t succeed. Historical lessons are important; if we no longer refer to the past, then we are likely to repeat the mistakes of the past.

The lack of breathing space between change initiatives is an issue, just like you keep spinning without going anywhere. Plowing on to the next big thing before completely embedding the change into business as usual or running multiple simultaneous changes can leave a workforce reeling and exhausted. Taking the time to communicate the expected outcome with consideration of the "right" way allows the team to have room to make change progressive, learn from the previous effort, without being afraid to make fine adjustments as implementation is underway.

The effective Change Management approach is logical, proactive, iterative, and gets really creative on how to apply multidimensional disciplines to manage a system paradigm shift that change is called for, decide what to change, how to change, and become part of change. The large scale of business transformation is difficult, you have to remove roadblocks, avoid change pitfalls, get out of the “comfort zones,” ride above the change curves, with the goals to build a high-responsive, high-intelligent, and high mature digital organization.

Posted in: Digital Pitfalls,Information/Data Management