How to diagnose your organisation’s readiness for change…..

Initiating and leading change is one of the greatest leadership challenges. Many change programmes fail long before they’re ever started. I’ve seen many change programmes fail simply because the organisation and it’s people were not ready for the change being thrust upon them. The typical scenario is that the leader is introducing a change the organisation cannot assimilate, because it’s not ready or the leader is too far ahead. Before acting to introduce change a leader needs to carefully assess the organisation’s readiness.

Michael Watkins in his book “The First 90 Days” provides a great tool that can be used to assess an organisation’s readiness to accept change. In the book he distinguishes between two approaches for initiating change, the plan-then-implement approach and the collective learning approach. Understanding when it’s appropriate to use each approach can mean the difference between success or failure.

“The straighforward plan-then-implement approach to change works well when you are sure that you have the following key supporting planks in place:

1. Awareness: A critical mass of people are aware of the need for change.
2. Diagnosis: You know what needs to be changed and why.
3. Vision: You have a compelling vision and solid strategy.
4. Plan: You have the expertise to put together a detailed plan.
5. Support: You have a sufficiently powerful coalition to support the implementing.

 

…If any of these five conditions are not met, however, the pure plan-then-implement approach to change can get you into trouble. ”

This diagnostic is a very useful way of assessing an organisation’s readiness for a traditional “plan-then-implement” approach or alternatively, if additional ground work is required before embarking on a large scale change programme.

Leaders will often find themselves in a situation where a plan-then-implement is not appropriate, in these situations an alternative approach is need. In these situations Michael recommends that a collective learning approach is adopted, whereby you “focus on setting up a collective learning process….. Rather than mount a frontal assault on the organisation’s defenses, you should engage in something akin to guerrilla warfare, slowly chipping at their resistance and raising their awareness of the need for change.”

“The key, then is to figure out which parts of the change process can be best addressed through planning and which are best dealt with through collective learning.”

Collective learning is best initiated as conversation or dialogue with the intention of exploring and understanding how things are working in a non-threatening environment. The next time you’re thinking about embarking on a large scale change programme, stop and ask your self?

1. Is the organisation ready for this change, i.e. do they understand the need for the change?
2. Is there sufficient appetite for the change? Remember that people have limits as to how much change they can absorb at once. Chunk your change programme into digestible pieces.
3. What collective learning conversations needs to be initiated now to prepare for changes that need to be made in 6-2 month time?

Technorati Tags: Change, Transition, Project, Plan, Vision, Strategy, Business, Leadership, Management, Conversation, Learning, Book

Related posts:

1. The Three Journeys of Strategic Change
2. The structures and tensions required to create change
3. How leaders change and in turn, change the world…
4. Change Management Lessons
5. Change fails when employees don’t grasp the rationale for the change

Tagged as: Change, Framework, Transition