Change Insight

“The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction, and malperformance. ” — Peter Drucker

Change is inevitable, you can’t step into the same river twice, meaning that everything is always in a state of flow. But too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crisis, and demands. This is the bureaucratic way of meeting the challenges. Change is never for its own sake. The true reason behind the change is either due to the ineffectiveness of teams/organizations or the inefficiency of processes/practices.

There are many books written about changes, but very few dig into the mindset level. Change Management starts with a thought, with a flash of insight, insight is the act or result of understanding the inner nature of changes or of seeing things intuitively. It leads to a vision; then leads to a culture shift, strategic changes, or leadership transformation. It’s important to understand the big WHY about changes, no change is for its own sake, the first step is to define the value proposition and determine demand and estimated pipeline. Insight is thinking into the box after thinking out of the box. Thus, insight takes creativity and reasoning, intuition and logic, the power of acute observation and deduction, questioning, connection, penetration, and discernment. Change Insight is the understanding of a specific cause and effect in a specific change context. Change Insight is being able to identify the root cause of a problem or the core issues of a situation, which leads to understanding and resolution of changes. Change has different scopes and effects, from small changes such as software updating, business process tuning; to radical changes such as culture innovation, or big-bang changes such as radical digital transformation. Often change is an “un” nature activity, you need to focus, also, make an effort to sustain it. So the newly established behaviors or the new way to work will be in harmony with the well-defined value propositions so that change can maintain its momentum. Too often, people take the easy path, think and work at a superficial level rather than spending the time to understand what’s going on underneath. Insight is the understanding of cause and effect, based on the identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario in Change Management.

Change Management is always challenging with a high percentage of failure rate. Indeed, change is difficult. Some say change is not a problem, the primary reason for change failure is resistance to change while the second reason is the inability of leaders to deal with resistance. The purpose of the book “Change Insight” is to:

• Dig deeper to analyze the psychology behind changes and handle problems and changes at the level of the mindset.
• Explore people-centric change management philosophy and practices.
• Differentiate change leadership and change management, orchestrate change at all level of the organization.
• Set Change Management principles to inform and support the way of managing change effectively.
• Build change as an ongoing capability, not just a one-time business initiative.
• Analyze the potential change pitfalls and roadblocks on the change journey.
• Make objective change assessment and measurement from the multidimensional lens.
• And ultimately build high-mature organizations with changeability to fuel the digital transformation.

Many organizations focus so heavily on the "doing" (the "how"), they lose sight of the "purpose," the "WHY" part of changes. It is the key to present the WHY first. Primarily, it provides a way to inject enthusiasm, which is infectious and spurs the concept forward. Once people agree with the “WHY” part of the reasoning, they can develop their own level or means of participating, maybe even offering what you didn't think to ask for, expanding the efficiency of the concept itself, thereby re-injecting further excitement in their being part of it. Because change cannot be completely manipulated from top-down, it starts from the mindset. The successful businesses are the ones that have learned WHY should change, WHEN change is called for and how to decide WHAT to change by WHOM." Let's not have all these problems inherent in any change initiative, to get in the way of accepting the business facts that change is inevitable and needed in every business. The successful businesses are the ones that have learned how to implement change time after the time and build it as a solid ongoing business capability.

Chapter 1 The Psychology Behind the Change It would do good for Change practitioners to have a reasonably good understanding of neuroscience; since it does help understand people's responses to change. People respond in different ways to different situations, and some people perceive less risk when compared with others. The fear of consequences; the perception/response to consequences vary from person to person, and that's what makes change interesting and challenging. Hence, change practitioners need to have good critical thinking skills, high level of adaptability, communication and engagement skills.

Chapter 2 People-Centric Change Management: Digital is the age of people. The human element of change entails a people-centric approach to management style; thus, empowering the workforce to embrace change is a most effective, efficient and result-oriented management in organizations. People are the center of any Change Management, and people are also the weakest link in any change effort as well, do not expect everyone supporting your change initiatives to the same degree, it’s even no surprise that only small percentage of people are changing agents.

Chapter 3 Change Leadership: Fundamentally leadership is about change and influencing people to change. Leadership is the capacity to influence others through inspiration, motivated by a passion, generated by a vision, birthed by a conviction of a sense of purpose of why you were created. Leadership is moving you and others, and it is about change and evolving to what is needed next. Three things that are inexorably linked together are change, growth, and learning. It may be human nature to resist change but not for great leaders. Effective leaders have a very high comfort level with change and understand standing still is not an option in today's world. Doing things differently is just part of everyday life for a leader who is always in the midst of change--envisioning it, planning it, or leading it.

Chapter 4 Change Principles: Change is not for its own sake, it is an ongoing business capability to execute the strategy and compete for the future. Change Management principles are general rules and guidelines, intended to be enduring, that inform and support the way in which an organization sets about managing change effectively. The style of the principle should be short and recognizable. Its definition describes "what" the principle means in the language understood by stakeholders. The motivation describes "why" the principle is important to achieving the change strategy and goals. The implications describe "how" the principle changes behavior.

Chapter 5 Change as an Ongoing Capability: Change is a volatile subject, just like change itself. Everything changes continuously by following the laws of evolution, and the rate of change is accelerated. Corporate change can be a simple modification of strategy, a business process improvement, a technology update, or a more radical digital transformation. Either at the individual or an organizational level, change is a one-time project at the static industrial age; but change has to become an ongoing capability in the digital era.

Chapter 6 The Pitfalls of Change Management: Change is inevitable, and the speed of change is increasing. How capable the business is handling change would directly impact on the business competency. Organizations today are more dynamic than ever, there are Big ’C’ changes such as digital transformation, merging organizations with overlapping or duplicate functions, and little ‘c’ changes such as implementing a new software tool, reorganizing a department, improving a new process to do things more efficiently. However, there is a high failure rate of Change Management statistically, and more than two-thirds of business Change Management effort fails to achieve the expectation. So what are the big barriers and potential pitfalls on the way, how to improve change success rate, and craft change as an ongoing digital capability?

Chapter 7 Change Assessment and Measurement: Change is inevitable, and the speed of change is accelerating! For digital organizations today, Change Management is an ongoing capability, not just a one-time initiative. Measuring is a good starting point to change. A change manager needs to assess business “changeability” and evaluate every specific scenario to create the change program success. Ultimately the success of the change program is measured by results that are important values to the organization. And the cultural adoption of these goals is part of that measure. If these values have not been clearly identified at the outset - you cannot get the true alignment of your organization and all working toward the same goals and outcomes, you lack clarity and purpose of direction for changes.

Chapter 8 Building High-Mature Organizations with Changeability: Digital makes a profound impact from a specific function to the business as a whole, the purpose of such radical digitalization is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of customer delight and achieve the high-performing business result, to ultimately build a high mature digital organization. In reality, an organization or company may be in business for many years but has not matured its management practices or lack of well-defined sets of business principles to manage the business with a systematic approach. Most of the organizations stick to the lower level of maturity mode (reactive, inside-out, and operational driven), how can they move up the maturity level to become truly proactive and outside-in, culture intelligent and people-centric?

Digital means change with increasing velocity and speed. "Change management" is the overarching umbrella, that encompasses extensive planning, outreach, communications, discovery of concerns, objections, and potential points of failure, addressing fears and resistance, developing a shared vision, communicating valid and compelling reasons for cooperation, recognizing sacrifice and incremental success, measuring outcomes in a shared and mutually understood and agreed upon fashion, being able to declare an end-point and successful conclusion.

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“Change Insight” Book Slideshare Presentation
“Change Insight” Book Introduction
“Change Insight” Book Introduction Chapter 1 The Psychology behind Changes

“Change Insight” Book Introduction Chapter 2 The People-Centric Change Management
Change Insight” Book Introduction Chapter 3 Change Leadership
“Change Insight” Book Introduction Chapter 4 Change Principles
“Change Insight” Book Introduction Chapter 5 Change Capability
“Change Insight” Book Introduction Chapter 6 Change Pitfalls
“Change Insight” Book Introduction Chapter 7 Change Assessment and Measurement
“Change Insight” Book Introduction Chapter 8 Building High-Mature Organization with Changeability
“Change Insight” Book Conclusion
“Change Insight” Quote Collection
“Change Insight” Quote Collection II