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January 15, 2007

Critical Mass on the Critical Path

In his comments on the Archestra article "Why Change Is So Hard", Sid Kemp of QTI, Inc. picks up the beat on how to campaign a change. His description highlights the idea of transitioning between different stable states: the periods before the change and after it. A seven-element program that Sid outlines is a case methodology for "covering the bases" that the Archestra matrix on individual attitudes presented in the original article.

Where it comes to covering these bases, Sid's comment calls out something of more pointed interest to think about -- i.e., that an individual exerts influence on other individuals in a way that leverages the current state of things into a sufficient level of steadiness for a change to be either "accomplished" or "prevented". In other words, the individual can disproportionately contribute to a critical degree of momentum or inertia.

Good call. Furthermore, that has very obvious implications for the idea of "leadership"... It's a given that a group involved in a change will typically feature, within the group, different functional roles in the composition of the "to be" steady state. Not everyone will have the same kind of influence, and the new equilibrium will not ask them to -- neither in the composition activity nor in the final composition structure. In effect, amongst the group of individuals involved, would-be leaders may need to adopt the change differently from would-be followers, and so forth. Along with that, some individuals may experience a change in role due to the move from before to after the adoption campaign. Following suit, have we as change managers identified the leaders and followers on the "momentum" side, separately from the leaders and followers on the "inertia" side? (By the way: we'll note here, for future consideration, that change leaders and change agents are not the same role, even though they may both be played by the same individual. But how about when the agent is not a leader?)

This lets us revisit a "truth" that we've both observed and experienced, which is that in some occasions, "success" is not pretty. It goes without saying that becoming different is not necessarily becoming better, so a proposed change has to carry with it a presumptive confidence that its objective is an outcome that has more value than does the status quo. This is exactly why one of the quadrants in the Archestra matrix is "appreciation" -- it includes the same sense that we convey when we say, as an objective measurement, that anything else has "appreciated". The change proposal argues that the value will be there; the question is, will the individual say "I'll buy that..."??

When the proposed change is an executive goal, those individuals that don't buy that may in a different sense "buy it" : they may become either targeted damage or collateral damage, clearing the way for transition.

But if these individuals are still deemed important as resources to the future state, then managing these resources is a risk management activity within the campaign for change. At minimum, the individual's role must be proposed.

Attention to this issue had been developed methodologically during 2000-2002 by the consulting group Fulcrum Management, whose principals Howard G. Hastings, David A. Messineo, and yours truly M. Ryder offered Change Assessments using the analytic cycle Requirements-Risks-Resources-Approvals to reality check the top-down alignment of objectives and commitments in change.

It is on this point of "alignment" that Sid Kemp's comments on populations being "systems" carry weight. Additional specific light on this alignment problem is cast quite strongly since 2004 by Jonathan Becher in his work with Pilot Software, Inc. in Operational Performance Management. Kemp likewise offers work on the "leverage points" of alignment through his current offerings, under other labels, at QTI, Inc. Neil Russell-Jones puts out "The Managing Change Pocketbook" at www.pocketbook.co.uk, containing a fairly classical approach that we can see mapping to this issue. And (if you are still reading this!), similar efforts in your own sphere of activity are likely familiar to you under various other programs and entities you can name.

So what?

In further articles at Archestra, we'll maintain an opportunity to show how these different offerings reiterate the attitudes matrix from "Why Change Is So Hard", and how they help to explain the criticality of the individual's adoption to the design for change. Naturally, if we find that the matrix is broken, we'll change it...

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at January 15, 2007 7:34 AM

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