Applying Change Management to Change Management in The Digital Era

Change management programmes have a bad image. Ever since Kotter pointed out their massive failure rate (70% to 80% depending upon whichever source you consult) and identified his 8 principles for change management, little appears to have changed.

Leaders still don't understand their role in change management; over long top down programmes get foisted on the business; if the programme gets There, There has already changed when it arrives and the world has moved on. In the process organisations often she up to 20% of their talent and the whole enterprise can get distracted from its day job, hitting organisational performance badly. So the only remedy becomes, launching another change programme.

Change is fundamental to Digital Transformations since not only is a business trying to adopt new technologies to support innovation, it also has to change its business model, organisation and skills to do this. So how do businesses cope? A great quote is by George Westerman of MIT's Sloan Business School “When digital transformation is done right, it’s like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, but when done wrong, all you have is a really fast caterpillar.”

So what's new? Gartner reckons that 66% of Success Factors are related to talent. Yet the Scrum Alliances recent survey of global CxOs indicates that HR is one of the least Agile functions in most businesses. So its time for leaders to be leaders and work with both each other and their teams. As there's a fundamental signal coming from so many sources that Culture is the over riding discriminator in success. Getting the balance right between direction setting and team driven empowerment and innovation is fundamental.

Secondly, whilst having a clear vision of what the destination looks like, the trend is to break the journey down and only attempt the first few steps before re-calibrating. As the famous Chinese proverb quoted in Chairman Mao's little red book says, "Even the Journey of a Thousand Miles starts with a few small steps". 

Looking for small wins and business along the path of massive change, allows for experimentation, learning and course correction. So that a business navigates to a desirable destination and does not just follow a mirage.

Finally there is a heavier trend towards Data and Insight. Many innovation efforts rely heavily on data to validate (or otherwise) hypotheses and experiments, as well as to provide new insight. This has to be set against deep industry knowledge and intuition. Change involves both art and science to deliver effectively.

Business Leaders need to understand that Innovation and transformation means doing things which have not been done before (not just the same old things faster and better). So they need to be enquiring about the art of the possible, challenging about what really is the nature of value and how actions align with them, and liberating in the way that they encourage their teams to be part of the solution (rather than the unwilling victims of good intentions).