Blog

Too often change is led by inadvertent change managers – all the supervisors, middle managers, and executives who face the need of some change in order to meet their organisation goals. These are the numerous, small changes that are initiated every day at all levels in the organisation. It is only when these forces for change are suppressed that the need for large disruptive change builds or when strategies are used past their effective life and organisation survival becomes a concern. For the most part, these changes are initiated and managed by the manager most impacted by the problem without the benefit of knowledgeable organizational change experts. In other cases, the change may be an off-the-shelf technology-solution that comes with no change methodology or one that is difficult to adapt to organisation needs.

Lacking access to organisational change specialists these managers fall back on their academic studies (probably a handful of lectures or maybe one change management or organization development course). However, most of their default change methodology is what they learned by observing others, probably with more on what not to do than what works best for leading change. This also raises the question of what is ‘normal management’ and what is change management since change is often a response to routine management and operational issues. To clarify this situation, we may want to say that management moves to “change management” when faced with a situation where normal management practices fail. However, those involved still lack new change competencies and fall-back on what they have seen others do in similar situations when something needs to change.

If the actions they take are based on what others have done, those actions are likely to be insufficient to address the problem symptoms, let along the underlying core issues. This pain may eventually grow to the point where the manager is forced to evaluate their change expertise, turning to consultants, books, or short courses. There, they will be introduced to a traditional change framework that is often more a list of “Change Success Drivers” than a clear change methodology. For example, Kotter (1996) opens with eight “errors” made in organisational change that are then elevated to eight “stages” for improved change practice. To the change novice, this implies a change methodology while really serving as a change framework listing the things you have to do right in order to lead successful change. As such, these frameworks make a poor methodology because all the routine, necessary but not sufficient, steps are left out and assumed. This is fine for experienced change practitioners but sorely lacking for change novices – the inadvertent change manager who is facing change in order to meet their goals. These leaders often fall back to an observational learning methodology since they lack formal org-change training or use a list of “success drivers” with gaps.  

The Traditional Change Methodology below captures the essence of a change methodology with Kotter’s 8-Stage Change Process inserted to illustrate how “success drivers” only address some, but not all the steps we go through in leading change. This gap between the change frameworks built on success drivers and the need for a usable change methodology for change novices leads the inadvertent change manager to work with a hybrid of success drivers and their default change methodology from observational learning.

The missing piece is an approach to organisational change that easily lends itself to routine activity without a high learning curve and supported with simple rules and practices that are easily integrated with daily problem-solving and decision-making.