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December 18, 2006

The 3-D's of Change

Despite the obvious allure of innovation and efficiency, the two best reasons to change are not to "be different" nor to "escape dead ends."

But they are close. The two best reasons are to "be better" and to "create new options." In other words, what's the point of getting different without knowing how it would be better, and to figure along with that, what's the point of having more options without knowing how they lead to the difference?

Yet change does not guarantee those outcomes. To the extent that change is "driven" by reasons, change is about developing the new means for opportunity; it is not the end in itself.

Thoroughly thinking through the positioning and requirements for change might take some research, which might take some time; because time is often scarce and precious, gravitate towards the "fast tracks" of lessons learned and "best practices" about changes undertaken elsewhere or before.

Emulating such models of change management makes plenty of sense, and yet it remains empirically evident that two organizations trying to change in the same fashion may get two very different results. No real surprise: effective change is an environmental shift, and why should two different environments respond alike to a given model of change?

It's not that they couldn't.

Differences will occur because activities and environments have to form together into functional relationships, and this coherence will feature the detail level of chemistry rather than of carpentry. (Take note, ersatz change agents.) The specifics of cultivating two different environments may call for more risk, tenacity or tolerance in one environment versus another, not to mention time.

But the real key to a successful change lies in getting a grip on its entire lifecycle, which has three major phases that are about how the organization agrees to transform:
- adapt...
- adopt...
- approve.

As a true cycle, it has the property of re-iterating by having the approval phase directly influence the adapt phase.
But the individual phases themselves can be hard to progress.

Without tackling "risk" and "resources", the adapt phase won't have an output. Here, the "support" scenario must be described.

Next, the adopt phase can't mature without good marketing of how the stakeholders' own performance in the new scheme will be evaluated. "Roles" have to be declared and accepted. They will rely on support.

And the approval phase relies on confidence and clarity in how people will know that the intended effects are being realized. "Transparency" and feedback needs to be universally established, according to the roles.

Although driving a successful change has this cyclical buildup of viability, real change in action always shows all three phases occurring simultaneously. This makes them each able to affect each other at all times, more like "dimensions" of change maturity, not just phases of the change implementation.

So, as you might imagine improving on each dimension, the probability of sustainable success with the change gets higher. On the other hand, you can see that failing changes probably stem from weakness in one or more dimensions, which causes imbalances and discontinuities. The many sources of rigidity, resistance and disagreement are where the gremlins reside, undermining (respectively) adaptation, adoption and approval. But they are the flip side of a coin on which support, roles and visibility are the critical redeemables.

Map out your change effort, dimensionalize it, and see whether your efforts to manage the change are as rationally aligned as you think.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at December 18, 2006 7:01 AM

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