Initiatesequenceconsequencecycleofchange

Organizations need to take systematic steps in evolutionary Change Management. It means to make a radical shift from a silo and linear classic management style to holistic and nonlinear management discipline.

We are living in a complex world where disruptions and conflicts are continuously happening in the environment of a company, which makes it impossible to have complete knowledge and understanding of many issues facing the business today. Change could happen anytime, anywhere, too often change managers don’t have the big picture business oversight.

 Change management statistically has a low success rate. How to broaden the vision of change, clear stages of change scenario, clarify sequence-consequence cycle of change continuum, and do the comprehensive change impact analysis?

Clarify sequential stages in change management: Change is usually complex; there are incremental change and transformative change; there are reactive change and proactive change; there is long-term mythology for big changes and short term mythology behind change. Pre-contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance, etc, are all crucial stages in change management. The change goals and objectives must be well defined, understood, and accepted through planning, and change scenarios need to be contemplated, the psychology behind change needs to be taken care of by walking people through the process of resistance is key. Change Management often needs to go hand-in-hand with strategy management or talent management. Planning is a good way to achieve change if the planning effort is integrated with normal management processes

In order to frame change management and take competent change management initiatives by following sequential steps:
-understand the audience requirements/impacts before any change is relayed/discussed considering the organizational strategic goals
-identify change agents or champions for propagating the change initiative in advance for getting senior executives’ sponsorship.
-gather feedback through various tools and mechanism
-update stakeholders on non-implement-able ideas, suggestions with appropriate rationale
-transparent all activities relating to change initiative, take advantage of the latest technology tools for communication, the practice of change
-find out the reason for the members who are not in favor of the change and understand how much of this group's voice goes with the other members of the organization.
-keep track of change outcome, make appropriate adjustments on the way.

Accelerate a dynamic sequence-consequence cycle: Due to increasing pace of changes, in reality, change management is rarely a linear process. Change dynamism consists in being able to break away from being static, and becoming proactive. The dynamic planning-implementation, sequence-consequence cycle involves the continual attention to current changes in the organization and its external environment, and how this affects the future of the organization, as well as how to enhance an iterative change continuum and accelerate a dynamic sequence-consequence change management cycle.

During the journey of change, there are many accumulated steps and perhaps a few leapfrogs. Acceleration means to speed up the organizational vehicle to build the business competency for long-term growth. There are both hard elements and soft factors that decide change success. It is important that business management has objectivity and humility to realize that their hard processes/systems are outdated or soft elements such as culture are ineffective, they need to keep modernizing, integrating, innovating, and optimizing. It takes a lot of effort and resources to make change happen, and it takes even more management effort and disciplines to sustain changes.

Change impact analysis and measurement: You can only manage what you measure. Change measurement is difficult because the things you try to measure keep changing. The dynamics of change overlap can also make change measurement extremely difficult. To make change sustain, it is important to manage end-to-end performance. Measuring change involves first accurately identifying where you are now. Then, clearly identify where you want to be once the change is complete. Change impact analysis and business readiness are key processes that need to be conducted to give a person a glimpse of what to measure. Change impact measurement is multifaceted because the associated change benefits can be achieved via financial, market share, productivity, culture improvement, speed or innovation. 

Organizational change is a complex human process, the management science and organizational development often have failed to measure the change process, and the main source of that is the lack of multidimensional assessment instruments. Generally speaking, to make a considerable fair assessment and keep measurement relevant, Change Managers should assess: How do you design metrics to measure what changes and how these changes are measured? What are the relevant metrics and how can they be quantified and validated? If change management measures something that is not congruent with the final outcome, then dysfunctional behavior arises, potentially diminishing the end-to-end change performance.

Change Management turns out to be strategically important in today’s organization, it is no longer just a one-time project, but an ongoing business competency. Organizations need to take systematic steps in evolutionary Change Management. It means to make a radical shift from a silo and linear classic management style to holistic and nonlinear management discipline.

Posted in: Change Management