One way or another?

Five takeaways for your business change

There are a lot of change models out there to help you start to eat the elephant. Snazzy acronyms, defrosting and refreezing; but where do you start?

Here we share five factors that will make or break your change programme, based on our real-world successful delivery of public and private sector change campaigns. Whether you face the complex challenges of delivering social housing services, clinical governance, built environment, leadership cohesion or converting your data into decisions, this is for you.

#1 Visibility – From ambitions and objectives to outputs and wins, your change programme must be visible enterprise-wide. A study by the Katzenbach Centre reported that there is confusion about the objectives of change in up to 44% of colleagues below c-suite level. To ensure engagement and a sense of shared pride in your campaign, there must be a clear line of sight from your front-line teams to your Board, with everyone on the bus.

#2 Durability – Making change stick is hard. You need the right people in the room with the right capabilities and diversity to build what Kotter terms a ‘guided coalition’. Achieving the right balance of carrot and stick from leadership stems from role-modelling these behaviours. The emotional case for change is key here and must channel everyone’s commitment and experience to galvanise action. This improves cohesion and avoids the familiar frustrations and stalemate that come from myopic and disparate change initiatives.

#3 Literacy – Even where one element of your organisation is change ready, limited capability across different teams and at different levels in areas like data, leadership, change governance, technology, or communications, translates to limited capability everywhere. Literacy in these core competencies must be pervasive, defining your objectives and the corresponding activity required to get to your destination. Feeling proud and owning change, being allowed to fail and to be rewarded are key to this language and common narrative.

#4 Scalability –Effectively demonstrating the benefits or proving the concept for each quick or strategic win is central to configuring your change programme and growing it with each successive step. A global 2013 Katzenbach Centre strategy study revealed that 65% of employees were overwhelmed by the number of changes undertaken at one time within their respective teams. Focus here is needed to harness the sense of urgency whilst overcoming the urge to do it all at once. Sequencing is key.

#5 Dependency – Lastly, recognize that these elements from the tactical tweak to the strategic change are greater than the sum of their parts. For example, you can have the best technology money can buy, but without the right people in the room and robust data, solutions and outputs will always be suboptimal. Make your interdependent plan battle-ready.

As the new different throws up ever more challenges, change remains a permanent feature and the ability to adapt an imperative of modern service delivery.

Implementing these constituent parts together will allow you to anticipate customer demand and need, building a palpable change mindset across your business.

Think different. Contact Data Clan.