The balancing act of leading change
Leading change in an organisation can often feel like an elastic band. You push hard to stretch it and when you stop pushing it goes back to it's original state.
Why is that?
People form habits - new employees quickly identify what are the social norms in a company and adopt those habits. Organisations have collective memories.
If you want to fundamentally change the behaviour of an organisation you either need to start small or shock the organisation - bankruptcy, mass redundancies are the obvious shocks to a business that can trigger alternative behaviours.
So let's look at the ying and the yang of change. Change creates consequences - some intended - some unintended.
Objectives, Goals, Targets and Measurement
So you want to create some change. Well a classic management technique to drive change is put it in people's objectives.
Well formed objectives follow the SMART acronym. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound.
So objectives have a Measurable component - however one thing I have learnt over the years is that Measurement drives Behaviour. Get the measurement wrong and you will get the wrong behaviour. So if your objective is to double revenues - but there is no balancing constraint then doubling revenues may well be at the expense of something else. In the UK, the Payment Protection Insurance scandal was caused by setting objectives to sell more PPI insurance but it was done at the expense of ethical behaviour. The end cost to the banks has been orders of magnitude greater than the revenue.
Measurable objectives need constraints.
Management Control
Management often likes to control things. In tightly regulated companies eg banks, the process is there to control. There is little freedom to do things which means there is little scope for change.
The diagram above illustrates the concept. A tightly controlled process has little freedom. It therefore has little risk and there should be little need for monitoring and oversight - the process is the control.
At the other extreme if there is little control there is perceived to be higher risk. People have personal freedomes to do as they please. Obviously in something like a bank you wouldnt want chaos - you place trust in your bank to look after your money - if they didnt have controls to stop employees stealing your money, there wouldnt be trust in the bank.
However the big problem here is that inflexible controls means that if there are defects in the process then actually the risk level can be much higher. People will find work arounds to the process which means the effeciveness of the control is reduced.
The inability to change the process can be a huge compietitive threat in a rapidly changing market. The challenge is therefore to know what parts of the control really do need to be controlled.
Ineffective Change
So coming back to driving change. A change which reverts back to old behaviours when the pressure is released is not really effective change. The challenge is that often large scale change is too big a problem to solve.
How do you eat an elephant? One piece at a time.
Agile project concepts are a great way to deliver small incremental changes however the objective system is usually geared around annual or maybe quarterly objectives. The "reflection" part of objectives is usually the stressful performance review where the achievement of the objectives (or lack of them) comes to light. Reflection allows learning and the objective setting process doesnt necessarily achieve change or learning.
By having broad strategic objectives, which are realised through small agile sprints, will lead to more effective change. Each sprint can deliver small chunks of change. Small changes are small risk. Big changes to monolithic processes are high risk and likely to fail. Small evolutionary steps are much better. The in built period of reflection allows learning and fail fast.
With large monolithic change, stakeholders may sabotage your efforts as they fear the risk your change will create or consequences of your change such as loss of control/power. This can create a political environment and re-enforce your failure to drive change. Left unchallenged this can lead organisations to adopt the pathological culture in Westrum's organisational typology.
Why is that?
People form habits - new employees quickly identify what are the social norms in a company and adopt those habits. Organisations have collective memories.
If you want to fundamentally change the behaviour of an organisation you either need to start small or shock the organisation - bankruptcy, mass redundancies are the obvious shocks to a business that can trigger alternative behaviours.
So let's look at the ying and the yang of change. Change creates consequences - some intended - some unintended.
Objectives, Goals, Targets and Measurement
So you want to create some change. Well a classic management technique to drive change is put it in people's objectives.
Well formed objectives follow the SMART acronym. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound.
So objectives have a Measurable component - however one thing I have learnt over the years is that Measurement drives Behaviour. Get the measurement wrong and you will get the wrong behaviour. So if your objective is to double revenues - but there is no balancing constraint then doubling revenues may well be at the expense of something else. In the UK, the Payment Protection Insurance scandal was caused by setting objectives to sell more PPI insurance but it was done at the expense of ethical behaviour. The end cost to the banks has been orders of magnitude greater than the revenue.
Measurable objectives need constraints.
Management Control
Management often likes to control things. In tightly regulated companies eg banks, the process is there to control. There is little freedom to do things which means there is little scope for change.
The diagram above illustrates the concept. A tightly controlled process has little freedom. It therefore has little risk and there should be little need for monitoring and oversight - the process is the control.
At the other extreme if there is little control there is perceived to be higher risk. People have personal freedomes to do as they please. Obviously in something like a bank you wouldnt want chaos - you place trust in your bank to look after your money - if they didnt have controls to stop employees stealing your money, there wouldnt be trust in the bank.
However the big problem here is that inflexible controls means that if there are defects in the process then actually the risk level can be much higher. People will find work arounds to the process which means the effeciveness of the control is reduced.
The inability to change the process can be a huge compietitive threat in a rapidly changing market. The challenge is therefore to know what parts of the control really do need to be controlled.
Ineffective Change
So coming back to driving change. A change which reverts back to old behaviours when the pressure is released is not really effective change. The challenge is that often large scale change is too big a problem to solve.
How do you eat an elephant? One piece at a time.
Agile project concepts are a great way to deliver small incremental changes however the objective system is usually geared around annual or maybe quarterly objectives. The "reflection" part of objectives is usually the stressful performance review where the achievement of the objectives (or lack of them) comes to light. Reflection allows learning and the objective setting process doesnt necessarily achieve change or learning.
By having broad strategic objectives, which are realised through small agile sprints, will lead to more effective change. Each sprint can deliver small chunks of change. Small changes are small risk. Big changes to monolithic processes are high risk and likely to fail. Small evolutionary steps are much better. The in built period of reflection allows learning and fail fast.
With large monolithic change, stakeholders may sabotage your efforts as they fear the risk your change will create or consequences of your change such as loss of control/power. This can create a political environment and re-enforce your failure to drive change. Left unchallenged this can lead organisations to adopt the pathological culture in Westrum's organisational typology.
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