Wednesday, April 18, 2018

The Two Sides of “Change” Coin

Running the business is an ongoing and iterative change continuum.

A changeable organization is to creating organizations where change is the norm and happens the whole time thereby delivering faster and increasing market share. Digital ecosystem has become more complex and dynamic, Change Management also turns out to be more complex, and there is no magic formula to follow. For a company to move from one level to another change maturity requires understanding the two sides of the change coin and having step-function changes in tools, culture, leadership, and process.

Strike a dynamic balance between the inner and outer elements in leading changes: To succeed, businesses need a unified “one sight” focus for driving change, but understand both inner and outer elements in leading changes. The change and (existential) creativity is deprogramming old mindsets, letting go of "the voices from the past," reprogramming the collective minds with new perspectives, norms, and attitudes. Therefore, it’s important to understand the relation and dynamic between consciousness (thinking,) energy (emotions) and information deeply. It is like to recode the DNA of the business, challenging, but establishing a new blueprint for how top management wants to create the digital future reality. No change can be forced, let it unfold. Thus, it’s important to strike a dynamic balance between the inner and outer elements in leading changes. Having learning curve awareness means that you have to engage the sixth sense, if needed, to decipher when to make the change, and to discern what to throw out and what to keep. Shall you shake the old bottle with the same content or shall you have to change the entire bottle with different content? Change reaches the inflection point when the disruption allows for "new" energy to flow and bring with it something that would not be born without it.

Listen to both the “Naysayers” and “Yay sayers” when it comes to deep and far-reaching change: Communicate carefully the reasons for the change and be honest about the impact - positive & negative - on them as individuals. Like many things in this world, there are always two sides to the story. You need to listen to both for gaining true understanding. How you create an authentic context that allows for agreement and disagreement to work equally towards the desired result is the question. Change agents need to inspire and share their success stories. Naysayers or skeptics have a valuable point of view about the change that needs to be listened to and considered. This feedback can be very important in shaping the change effort to increase its success. It is important to try to find ways to make people feel involved in the design and implementation of the change. The more transparent about a change effort, the less uncertainty, and consequently less fear, the change management will be more effective. When people are empowered, intrinsically motivated, creative to take initiative and self-confident, they can become the real change agents and problem-solvers



Change is the 'Now.' Transformation is a journey and requires larger strategic investment: Organizations large or small spend significant time and resource to deal with the Big Changes such as digitalization or small changes as the daily improvement. The top of the pile is strategy-driven transformation. Change is fragile and often temporary - it usually occurs at the behavior level without a shift in the underlying belief system. Transformation is the change, but on a grand level, at the level of the system, differentiate in terms of the end result on a systemic level. One could also look at change (things happening now) as the consequence of a transformation journey. The most significant difference between the two main categories of change is that the tools and capabilities that work reasonably well for improvement have little success in transformational efforts, and, in fact, can be a waste of valuable resources and a source of frustration. The other significant difference is that transformation can require multiple times dedicated resource as a similarly sized improvement initiative. It needs to focus on coordination and facilitation, follow the right set of principles and take the best practices.

Running the business is an iterative change continuum. As change agents, Change Management has a very wide scope and is a relatively new area of expertise, you need to understand both sides of the coin smoothly. It is about how to ride the learning curve to get into action in creative, positive, and productive ways that educate, support and celebrate every critical step of the change curve to accelerate the business transformation journey and sustain change effect for the long-term business success.

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