Practical thoughts on Organizational Change Management - Part II

This article is the second part of our series on Organizational Change Management (OCM). You might have already read the first part of this series. If not, I recommend you look at the first steps when initiating a change before continuing here.

In this article, I will give you some theoretical background to the next three parts of the OCM process and will also show you some learnings and recommendations through my real-life examples so that you can apply them to your OCM.

Reflecting and expanding on the first steps

Looking back at the first part, you would have noticed that I emphasize a lot on the “why”. It is the natural first step that simply cannot be skipped. There are two more things to consider about the “why” that I would like to highlight here.

If you look at it in terms of timeline, OCM efforts should always start at the latest, together with the planning phase of the initiative. If you start too late with the OCM part, you jeopardize the overall success of the initiative, because there will be resistance and opposition, and people likely to not adapt to the new ways very well. As such, the effectiveness and efficiency will not be at anticipated levels, reducing the expected Return on Investment (ROI) of your initiative. At its worst, you might even lose some top people during the process. In other words, if you do not care about the people-centric side from the very beginning, you will always be “late since the beginning.”

Figure 1: The technical and people-centric sides of OCM

Example: I was tasked to be the Senior Project Manager of a CRM implementation at an Austrian infrastructure company. This project could be considered a not too dramatic “Change” - nothing particularly spectacular, because it involved mainly one department with a couple of teams. However, the project was already underway for about one and a half years and up to that point, roughly six months before the planned go-live, hardly anything related to OCM had been done. So, besides my role as the Senior PM, OCM became my main focus. Even after our best efforts of trying to “catch up,” the results would never be the same as they could have been, had proper OCM been done from the very beginning.

I made one more important observation: OCM is no silver bullet, no magical “get-out-of-jail-free” card. If your initiative has no proper “why” or is poorly executed at an operational level, then OCM can only do so much. While it certainly has some similarities with marketing, OCM is not meant to (over)sell a faulty product. Be aware that if you try this, the results might hurt any future initiative because you have lost a lot of trust.

Now, let’s move to the next steps.

Step 4: The Vision

(Note: Apart from continuing with the fourth part here, the previous parts are in the introductory article of this series.)

You know why a change is needed, you have a rough idea of the magnitude of the change, and you have also built an initial alliance. Now it’s time to move from the “why?” to the “what?” or “where?” You need to define the new vision that will solve the issues identified. Let us look at the Nagarro OCM Onion that I had introduced in the first part of this series:

Figure 2: Components of the Nagarro OCM onion

Depending on what type of change you are dealing with, the vision needs to be expanded upon to a lesser or larger degree. As a thumb rule, typically, a rather simple “change” does not require a super elaborate vision, going forward five or ten years. On the contrary, a clear and crisp goal should be given so that everyone knows what they can expect.

Moving more towards the outside layers of our Nagarro OCM Onion, the vision might become increasingly blurry, and you need to find the precise path towards this vision as well, because that is what the people concerned by the change will see first. Vision and path towards it are imperative for a transformation type of change that will reshape the culture, processes, methods, products & services, strategy, and structure of the organization. Nevertheless, the following advice is applicable to all types of change:

Each concerned person should be able to individually answer the question “what is in it for me?” and ideally, should desire to move towards this vision upon hearing it. Let us take a look at the typical emotional Change Management curve according to Richard K. Streich (see Streich (2016) page 25):

Figure 3: Personal competence vs. Time

With a well-explained “why?” and a clear vision about the “how?” you will be able to shift the mood of the concerned people very fast out of shock, denial, and depression and towards accepting the new reality. This is one of the absolute core aspects and keys of OCM. If you fail at either the “why?” or a good vision, people might forever stay in denial or in the “valley of tears” with all the negative effects that I had described in my introduction. This can, in fact, end up being worse than not picking this initiative at all.

To achieve this mood shift, the vision must be well coordinated, agreed within your change alliance, and approved by the (top) management. It has to be CLEAR within the context of the initiative.

Figure 4: Towards a CLEAR vision

It should highlight the benefits of “the new way” as opposed to the current status quo. During this step, you can (and should) expand your change alliance further. Ideally, you involve some subject matter experts or concerned people to help you in detailing the vision and the strategies/initiatives leading to it. This kind of involvement typically increases the buy-in of the concerned people so that they can act as positive multipliers for their peers. It will also empower others to help you implement the new vision.

Fun fact: A vision that requires a full set of PPT slides is too detailed and convoluted for any person to understand and feel thrilled about! So, if no one can understand the vision, no one will follow it. Such a convoluted vision will also make forming a broader change alliance extremely difficult. The result is a set of competing and contradictory initiatives, because everybody has a different understanding of the given direction. This renders the whole plan useless or worse, even jeopardizing the organization’s future because many important resources are being wasted this way. Similarly, a vision that is too vague or very ambiguous will have the same effect.

Example: Stay away from very generic approaches like “we want to be the employer of choice” as a key message – first of all, we can safely assume that no one wants to be a bad employer by choice and secondly, who hasn’t heard such claims before? Such claims have lost their originality long ago and are not at all relevant in your context.

Step 5: Change Management Plan

Now that you have worked on a CLEAR vision, it is time to think about how you can realize and communicate this new vision.

A (rough) roadmap / path towards reaching this vision needs to be part of the vision generation and communication as well. The more you are towards the outer layers of our Nagarro OCM Onion, the more important the road to the vision becomes, because this road will naturally be longer and more stressful as it implies a much heavier change for the more concerned people.

Highlight some important milestones along the way that everyone can relate with and feel the (first) impact of the new vision materializing. If the concerned people have the feeling that the vision is too big, too huge, or too ambitious, the fear of failure will eventually take over. So, make sure that the path towards this big, far away vision is as clear and as achievable as possible, to keep the people engaged and willing to participate.

At the same time, you should work on a Change Management Strategy & Plan as well as the communication plan.

You can use the matrix introduced in the first part of this series and take a deeper look at the “protagonists” of the change at hand. For each of them, assess their change readiness and develop individual (as in: per organizational entity or in some cases per individual) change management plans including dedicated communication planning and, if applicable, training planning. You can do this via anonymous surveys, interviews with selected people or with the managers or through some material from past experiences. You will also get an insight on how bad the “silo” mentality is (that I talked about in the first part of this series).

There is a huge benefit if you have some outside perspective here as well. As consultants, people often tell us things they would not necessarily say internally, especially if they fear that this could have negative consequences. However, these things are often crucial information towards the success or failure of the initiative. Our experience also helps us see certain things differently and in a more differentiated way than an internal person.

This newly developed vision should help you know or at least anticipate who is concerned by the change, along with their potential or actual objections, fears, wishes, and desires, and how you can feed into them to move them forward in the emotional change management curve. What you should also consider when setting up the strategy and plan is the history and the habits of the concerned people. Of course, we are forward-looking, but it’s also important and useful to look back as well, to remind ourselves about where we come from so that we do not alienate our people. This can be very critical if there is already a history of failed or poorly managed changes that have piled up and make the concerned people much less enthusiastic or keen about this new initiative.

In the end, each individual should be able to answer the questions:  a) “How do I change?” relatively soon after initially communicating the vision and a bit later in the process, b) “Can I do it?”, once they know they are equipped with everything required to adapt to the new way, be it systems, methods, processes or training/ability.

Conclusion

With these steps, we have completed all the preparatory work for our change, after we did the initial reveal / communication to the corporate public. Now that the rabbit is out of the hat, the initiative can start for real. In our next article, we will cover topics on quick wins / initial success stories, long term goals and actual change execution. Stay tuned!