![]()
1
FOUNDATIONS OF CHANGE
Change is easy to propose, hard to implement, and especially hard to sustain.
Andy Hargreaves, Professor of Change, Engagement and Innovation
âPlans are nothing; planning is everything,â is Dwight D. Eisenhowerâs famous admonition (Dwight D. Eisenhower Quotes, n.d.). This couldnât be more true than when it is time to execute an organizational change. Most people need a framework to refer to when working on the most intractable and murky aspects of the change process: the human aspects. This book focuses on various facets of working through the change process while validating, affirming and meeting the needs of the people with whom you are working. This book provides a framework for the new practitioner to engage the multi-dimensional aspects of human beings during a change process.
The reality, however, in organization change is that nothing ever goes as planned. And thatâs why the ideas framed in this area are so important. There are principles that underlie successful approaches to change. Thatâs the goal of this book: to help you, a person starting out in change, to create a good plan to successfully implement change in your organization, but to also help you deal with the things that canât be planned for â the unpredictable decision-making process of human beings.
To be clear, there are lengthy books (see Holman, Devane, & Cady, 2007) dedicated to various change management approaches. This book is not one of them. This text will help the change agent see change in a holistic and implementable way, regardless of what method is chosen for a project. This book may even help you select a method based on the nature of your project, the relationships between the people involved or it may help you to adapt several different approaches to meet your needs. Most importantly, this book will provide guiding principles to use as a way to make good decisions and maintain the trust and integrity already in your organization.
In change management and organization development, there are two basic types of practitioners: an internal and an external. An internal practitioner is an employee of the company that is undergoing change. This person may be an expert in organization change and do that work as their primary role within the organization. Or an internal may be a person who the organization sees as a successful implementer of processes or a good manager of people. Internals have an advantage, because they know the systems of the organization, they understand the culture, know where to go to address a problem and who to see to get things done. Internals are at a disadvantage, because they see the organization through the lens of their own experiences. They come with pre-existing ideas about people and processes, and other people in the organization may view the internal with their own pre-existing ideas about them, as well. An internal will be able to call people by name, he/she may have pre-established and powerful relationships in the organization which will help him/her accomplish aspects of the plan and will understand the process for how decisions are made in the organization.
An external is the employee of a consulting firm â whether a sole-proprietorship consulting firm or a large firm that employs hundreds of change management consultants. Externals have an advantage because theyâve seen a wide variety of problems and have a lot of resources to draw upon. They can easily discuss problems or situations with other consultants and get workable advice quickly. An external has the benefit of seeing the organization with new eyes, comparing the organization to other organizations like it and will have a wide variety of tools, techniques, assessments, software and colleagues to consult with as things are happening during the change process. Externals are at a disadvantage because they donât know the players, the culture, the history or how to get things done in the organization. They have to rely on internal partners for direction about how to do anything from using the copy machine to managing the air conditioning in the conference room or finding the bathroom.
There are benefits and drawbacks to either way of engaging change â whether with an internal or an external. For the ease of communication, internals and externals will both be referred to as change agents within this text.
Ultimately, this book is a practical guide to creating change in organizations that keeps human well-being front and center during the process.
COMPLEX OR MERELY COMPLICATED?
Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge.
Winston Churchill, Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Famously, Harvard Universityâs Norhia and Beer (2000) debated economic versus organizational approaches to change; they also pessimistically warn us that roughly 70% of change efforts fail. There are mechanisms to calculate the risk of change and its likelihood of success, such as the Duration, Integrity, Commitment and Effort Framework, known as the DICE model for short, which through risk analysis of duration, integrity, commitment and efforts categorizes change initiatives into Win, Worry or Woe (Sirkin, Keenan & Jackson, 2005). However, as noted by Henri Atlan, no matter the depth to which we plumb the characteristics of a project and potential changes, there is always an element of risk (Atlan, 1979).
Henri Atlan, the French philosopher and biophysicist, offers some relevant insight on the notion of why organization change is so difficult. Atlan explains that complex systems differ from complicated systems because complex systems are ones in which all the information about the different variables, or even the variables themselves, are not known. Conversely, complicated systems are ones in which the diversity of the variables and their dimensions are known.
Complexity is thus a measure of lack of information and thus renders it more difficult for us to form pertinent ideas of the organizational realities we enact and which can impinge upon us.
Atlanâs ideas, that we donât know all that we need to in order to implement change properly and successfully, are very much true. His ideas are also the reason why this book is necessary and helpful.
To reduce issues from complex ones to simply complicated ones can be assisted by discussing the underlying principles that support change practices from the human perspective and providing enough information so that the change agent can take on a ânon-conformingâ or atypical situation and still make a good decision. While this may only increase our adaptation and responsiveness on the part of change managers and participants, this can be enough to make the difference.
It seems that a better route is to look at each aspect of the situation under consideration and to review the various issues and the merits or potential pitfalls and strengths in it. In this book, distinct and diverse aspects of change are discussed and given some grounding in research. These concepts are then illustrated in terms of application, templates for action, checklists and decision-processes are provided in the hopes of reducing what is a complex issue, to simply a complicated one.
Regardless of what method of change is used, the animating force of organizational work is human beings, and human beings can develop synergistic outcomes when they work in effective teams. So employing teams in your change efforts makes excellent sense. Effective teams leverage involvement, participation, reduce resistance, drive engagement and use vision as a motivating force. These are all aspects of change that are covered in this work.
HISTORY OF CHANGE AND HOW CHANGE IS CHANGING
Every new beginning comes from some other beginningâs end.
Seneca, the Younger, Roman Philosopher and Statesman (and Semisonic, the Band)
Change itself is as old as humanity and began with ancient philosophers the likes of Aristotle, and Lao Tzu. Early ideas around change were furthered with the study of human beings in the field of anthropology by observing and noting how humans formed groups and worked toward common goals. But the formal academic study of change didnât begin until World War II when the US government was trying change domestic consumer behavior to use different products in order to better support the war effort in Europe. The reality of this problem was to determine how to convince households to eat organ meat in lieu of traditional cuts of meat, so that those traditional cuts could be sent to support the troops. Kurt Lewin began this research at University of Iowa and directly involved homemakers in the research by sharing recipes and cooking together. It is through this process of involvement that we can see the seedling of Lewinâs larger approach and current approaches today. Lewinâs three-step model is now foundational to most other approaches to change, but change keeps changing. Connecting a few of the major approaches to change with Lewinâs three-step model can help visualize that evolution.
Unfreezing, Moving, Re-Freezing
The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.
Albert Einstein, Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist
What Lewin found was that in order to create change, there needed to be a disruption in the status quo. In the World War II situation mentioned above, a proper, relevant reason had to be provided in order to convince people, in this case homemakers, that they needed to do something differently.
Lewinâs approach to change developed from his experiences with the homemakers in Iowa and grew into a three-step process for change: Unfreezing, Moving/Changing and Re-Freezing. In the Unfreezing step, the change agent provides reasons for why change must occur. These reasons are called disconfirming data. It is disconfirming because the change agent is trying provide information that proves that the current approach is no longer working and that the organization or individual needs to âunfreezeâ their behavior. In Lewinâs work that process would be explaining to the homemakers how they can contribute to the war effort in their own kitchens and allow the war effort to better feed the troops. In the Moving/Changing phase of change, the shifts in behavior actually occur. Old behaviors are left behind, and new behaviors are established. This is where Lewin brought the homemakers into kitchens to work together to test recipes and share tips about the ways to feed their families and still help the US government provision the front lines. And finally in the Re-Freezing phase of change, these new behaviors are firmly established and codified as the way to approac...
