Upon the increasing pace of changes, the reality is that there are a lot of things that can go wrong and it is not always easy to identify what is important.
Top management needs to lead proactively and become really creative on how they architect and implement changes via following the right logic and methodology, to ensure their organization is strategically positioned to be ahead of change curves and achieve high-performance business results.
An objective way to observe and assess circumstances: Nowadays, there are so many things going on in the business, and there are all sorts of changes going on - positive changes, negative changes, incremental changes, transformative change; reactive changes, proactive changes; technical changes, structural change, or people change, etc. To make change management effective, the first step is to observe, what exactly went wrong, who got affected, who could drive changes? Which mindset, rules, processes, methodology, or technology are outdated, and where are silos or frictions happenings? Etc. For change to be embraced by stakeholders, they ultimately need to understand why it is an improvement, and what it will improve for them.
Upon the increasing pace of changes, the reality is that there are a lot of things that can go wrong and it is not always easy to identify what is important. Making an objective change assessment is not easy, because everyone perhaps has some bias or blind spots blocking the way. sound judgment is a hardcore leadership competency and a crucial step to drive effective changes. Besides “what, who, where, etc,” you need to ask enough “WHY”s to get to the root and uncover the negative factors that create a divide between the vision of the desired future and the current reality. The large scale digital transformation comes with the foresight to envision the need that others perhaps overlook or ignore. Change impact evaluation is multifaceted because the associated change benefits can be achieved via financial, market share, productivity, speed, or innovation perspective.
The descriptive way to list and articulate key success factors: There are both visible and invisible success factors for changes. One of the reasons change often fails because so many change managers only focus on tangible, but they lack an in-depth understanding of invisible or intangible things, just getting them to consider the list of intangibles would be a breakthrough. Keep in mind, there are numerous points-of-view and reference points of varying stakeholders such as senior executives, board members, middle managers, professional staff, etc, they all have a different view on "change." The variety of ideas, opinions, and viewpoints directly contributes to the business value in terms of productivity and profitability. Thus, collecting multifaceted change perspectives, identify key factors, and articulating change management logic and methodology are all important steps in leading change efforts. To succeed, top management needs a unified “one sight” focus, strikes a dynamic balance between the inner and outer success factors of change management in order to achieve expected results.
High-effective change leaders need to be cautiously optimistic and deal with egotism or over-optimism properly by asking: Did I overlook? What perspective am I taking that might blind me to other things I could have distinguished otherwise? What is the best scenario to change? Etc. Change impact analysis and business readiness are two key processes that need to be conducted to give the change management a glimpse of descriptive (nomenclatures of artifacts, relationships, etc.) of Change Management. The result-driven companies often need a set of deliverables so that they can justify the investment of Change Management. Deliverables are of themselves reasonably easy to describe generically but will vary dramatically in applicability, importance, and workload to complete.
The prescriptive way to set rules and form a systematic scenario: The digital organization is hyper-connected and interdependent, the linear system perception needs to be replaced by complex adaptive systems, Change Management often takes nonlinear thinking and iterative steps nowadays. Although there is no magic change formula, change prescriptive (rules on how to evolve system dynamics, some kind of philosophy) may be implicit or explicit or somewhere in between. The right level of change guideline is not about putting restrictions on what people should do; Instead, they are the philosophy behind the change methodologies, and they are the mindsets behind behavior change. “Planned Change Management" shouldn’t be too rigid or overly prescribed, otherwise, it could create a bottleneck for streamlining change scenarios.
Change is not always inside-out, the outside-in approach to change is about focusing on customer perceptions and experiences, with the goal to transform the company's culture and be dedicated to creating value for their customers. Radical change often needs to restructure the root of the company such as values, beliefs, and objectives. To debunk change management maturity, it's critical to account for cross-cutting concerns, putting a puzzle together requires trying different pieces, being flexible and willing to put a piece aside to find another more appropriate piece, enabling people across the organization to share knowledge and co-develop solutions. The changes delivered could be incremental through training, transitional through improving processes, or transformational if it is fundamentally shifting the entire business model of an organization.
It is nevertheless true that change itself has become unpredictable and evolutionary, business leaders today can’t predict every turn or curve on the journey. By taking a logical approach with the right methodology, organizations become highly conscious about what’s happening in their environment, enable dynamic resource allocation, adapt to change promptly, grasp opportunities timely, and prevent risks effectively.
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