Tag Archives: Change Management

Does Your IT Shop Embody a “We Can Do That!” or a “We Can’t Do That!” Culture?


I was reminiscing with a consulting colleague recently about the two kinds of IT shops we’d worked with.  (Reminds me of an old joke that I first heard from Professor John Henderson at Boston University – “There are two kinds of people in this world – those who believe there’s two kinds of people and those who don’t!”)

The “Can Do’s”

Some IT shops fall clearly into this camp.  Suggest something innovative or new to them, and they are quick to explore the idea, see if it makes sense, and then figure out how they’d make it happen.  These clients are a delight to work with – energizing, engaging, sometimes challenging, but in a positive, constructive way.

The “Can’t Do’s”

Other IT shops fall into this unfortunate camp.  Suggest anything – innovative or not – and the immediate reaction is some variation on, “We can’t do that!” or, “That won’t work here!” or, a common variation, “That’s just not the way things work around here!”

Ask someone in a “Can’t Do” shop to help with something, and they will spend 30 minutes or more telling you why they don’t have the time to help – even if the help you are asking for would take only 15 minutes!  In other words, they will spend more time telling you why they can’t help than the time it would have taken to help.  It’s a knee jerk reaction.  The thought bubble I see in my head, floating above these naysayers is, “If I sign up for this, I might have to do something that would change the status quo.  That might be dangerous.  That might lead me to the unknown.  It’s safer to say, ‘no.’”

Prevent “Bad Change”

The “can’t do” environments spend all their energy trying to prevent change that might be harmful or counter to the established order.  Of course, there’s typically no way of knowing if it’s going to be a “bad change” or a “good change”, so by definition, any change is to be resisted at all costs!

Create “Good Change”

These are the innovators – the change agents.   Always looking to challenge the status quo and explore new possibilities.  I imagine that companies like Woolworths and Circuit City had a critical mass of “change resistors” (or at least, had enough of them in positions of power to preserve the status quo), while companies like Best Buy and Target had a critical mass of “change agents”.

I can understand why IT shops tend towards the “prevent bad change” camp.  IT operations depend upon stability and predictability, so you don’t want to mess with that.  But, unfortunately, the operational needs and culture tends to permeate everything the IT shop does!  Just when the business needs their IT specialists to be bringing them new ideas and new ways to compete, the IT specialists are beating down anything new.

From “Can’t Do” to “Disengaged”

Unfortunately, it’s an easy slide from “can’t do” to “disengaged”.  People in the organization get so beaten down whenever they try to introduce something new, that they give up.  It becomes such a painful endeavor, banging your head against a wall, that you stop trying.  It’s easier to slip into the background and go with the flow.  I have to admit that even as a consultant, there have been times where it was too painful trying to change things, and I’ve “gone native”.  Just make sure the deliverables per the Statement of Work are produced, get paid, and get out!  After a while, the extra energy it takes to break through the culture is spent.  At times like that, I empathize with the client’s employees – beaten down, disengaged, and at peace with simply going with the flow.  All that potential creative energy left at home, rather than being brought to the office as a source of new ideas.

So, What To Do About It?

I’m sorry, there’s no magic formula I’m aware of.  The first step, like the substance abuser, is to admit to the shortcoming.  Recognize that “can’t do” has permeated everything – way beyond those operational process where preventing bad change makes sense.  Then follow the familiar but tricky steps of organizational change management – establish the cost of the status quo, create a vision of the new, brighter future, build a guiding coalition, create early wins, etc.   Sometimes, it pays to stick you neck out – ask forgiveness, not permission!  If you get shot for doing so, that’s OK – you probably didn’t want to work there anyway!

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The “Six Month Rule” of Organizational Change – It’s All Personal!


New Priorities AheadIt is said, “All politics is local.”  Picking up on that aphorism, I think it is equally true that all change is personal.

So Much Known – So Little Followed!

There is a substantial body of research and theory about organizational change management (OCM) dating back to the mid-50′s or even earlier.  Most OCM findings seem to resonate with people who are facing, or who have faced organizational change.  And yet, nearly all of the findings and recommendations from the body of OCM knowledge seem to be woefully lacking when it comes to increasing the success of change management initiatives.  If this were not the case, why do so many change initiatives fail to meet their objectives?

For IT professionals, even the terminology can be confusing!  I had a long, and I thought, enlightening conversation with a CIO some years back about the challenges and importance of managing change.  About an hour into the conversation, it became apparent that he was talking about technical change management – configuration management, release control, testing, and all that good stuff, while I was talking about the so-called ‘soft’ stuff (which is so hard!) of organizational change management!

How Have You Dealt With Change?

Ultimately, to effect change such as that involved in the introduction of a new work process or new tool, or increasing collaboration across silos, or improving team effectiveness, individuals must leave behind habits and behaviors ingrained over many years and adopt new ones.  Think about changes you have tried to make in your personal life – how many have truly succeeded?  Be it weight loss, increased exercise, learning a new skill, or any other change, chances are you’ve had way more more failures than successes.

A couple of years ago, after 60 years of reasonably successful brushing of my teeth (I still have most of them!), my dental hygienist suggested a slight change to my brushing regimen.  This did not require new skills, or new equipment, or any difficult physical movement.  It just required changing a habit of literally, a lifetime.  How long would it take to institutionalize this change – to make the new way of brushing my new habit?

For me, it took concentrated effort for about 6 months for the new brushing regimen to become habit – leading to my “Six Month Rule” for behavior change.  And during that period, I slipped a few times.  I did not suddenly decide to go back to my lifetime’s brushing habit, or decide to give up on the new approach suggested by the dental hygienist – no, I just lost focus in the early am when I got up, or the late pm when I went to bed, and – voila – I was back in the old routine!  It took conscious effort, as well as all sorts of reminders to help me stick with the change long enough for it to become institutionalized!  (For those facing a tooth brushing change, try a piece of string or rubber band around the handle of your toothbrush as a gentle reminder!)

The Six Month Rule – And Why Changes Fail

With business attention spans getting ever shorter, how can an organizational change that will take at least six months to shift behaviors be expected to stick?  No wonder the “this too shall pass’ response to dictated change is so common – by the time the changes may be starting to take hold, top management has moved on to the next big challenge or opportunity!

And my “Six Month Rule” applies to changed behavior demanded of someone who believes in that change.  Supposing for a moment, that my teeth brushing routine change was not something I believed in?  Or that it required I learn a new skill?  Or, as with an adjustment to a golf swing, it actually degraded my golfing abilities while I adjust to the new swing?  (Visions of me walking around with gobs of food all over my teeth, apologizing and explaining, “Sorry about the filthy teeth.  I’m learning a new way to brush – it should all be cleared up by Christmas!”)  It’s no wonder that the response to so many corporate change programs is, “This too shall pass!”

Most of what we do during a day’s work is based on deeply ingrained habit.  It’s not necessarily the ‘best’ way, or even the ‘right’ way – but it’s the way that is familiar too us and, most importantly, predictable.  And it is these deeply ingrained behaviors that are so hard to change and that often derail organizational change initiatives.

Lessons Learned, Questions to Ponder

We can all learn lessons about organizational change management – whether we are leading them or simply participating – by looking into ourselves and identifying what we need to be doing differently, and how are we going to accomplish that.  Achieving change at the personal level is crucial for most corporate change programs.  While it is easy to depersonalize change at work as “something that’s going on around me”, the reality is that if we don’t change ourselves at some deep, personal level, the desired change will not take hold.

So, first ask yourself, “Do I want this change to succeed?  What might be in it for me?  What if it fails – how might I be impacted?  Then, assuming you decide the change is positive, ask yourself, “What do I need to be doing differently?  What will that look like and feel like?  How will I go about making the personal changes happen?  How will I recognize success or failure, and what consequences will I hold over myself?”

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Crowdsourcing Organizational Change: A Collaborative Approach to Leading Change


In the first post in this series, I provided some brief context for ‘change leadership’ (a term I find more apt than ‘change management.’)  I also introduced a caveat about linear, sequential, ‘programmatic’ change methodologies and briefly discussed the emergence over the last 15 years or so, of a more organic and emergent view of organizational change.

I observed that these emergent models are less alternatives to the more mechanistic models than they are refinements that help us interpret and apply them – i.e, organizational change can be planned and led, but the plans must be continuously revised in the light of emergent behaviors. And sometimes the emergent behaviors actually precede the recognition of the need for organizational change – i.e., you are not starting from scratch – you often recognize a good change that is happening (perhaps in one part of a company) and want to accelerate and broaden that change.

From “Push” Change Leadership…

Traditional organizational change methods are generally based on a ‘push’ model of change – we (company leadership) want you (employees) to work differently (e.g., reengineered processes, new incentive/reward systems, new tools/technologies, new organization structures, mergers/de-mergers, and so on).  For example, John Kotter’s 8-Step Change Process suggests we should:

  1. Establish a sense of urgency
  2. Create a guiding coalition
  3. Develop a vision and strategy
  4. Communicate the change vision
  5. Empower broad based action
  6. Generate short term wins
  7. Consolidate gains and produce more change
  8. Anchor change in the new culture

There is something both ‘Taylorist’ (the leaders are smart and know what to do, the workers are dumb and must be told what to do) and inherently manipulative about this approach.  I believe that the types of changes many companies are attempting to engage in today require that both ‘hearts and minds’ must be engaged in the change.  It’s not enough for them to simply to follow a new process – they must truly understand and wholeheartedly embrace the values and ideals behind the process.  They must want to follow the new process (or whatever the change being implemented is), not do so just because they’ve been told to.  Ensuring an exceptional customer experience, for example, does not simply happen because your customer-facing employees follow new procedures.

As such, change that requires “hearts and minds”, while it might be accomplished through a ‘push’ model of change leadership, is far more likely to take hold with more of a ‘pull’ approach.  In fact, I’d argue that most of the changes around Enterprise 2.0 (corporate and organizational adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, social networking, and so on) very much lend themselves to a ‘pull’ approach, or at least to more of a balance between ‘push’ and ‘pull’ change models.

… to “Pull” Change Leadership

So, adopting Enterprise 2.0 really requires more of a ‘pull’ approach to organizational change management.  And the good (great!) news is that Web 2.0 lends itself to enabling this kind of change.  Of course, there’s a ‘catch 22′ here – if people aren’t using Web 2.0 (or even worse in some companies – are not allowed to use these tools!), then how can they be used to facilitate change?

We will dig deeper into this in a subsequent post, where I will take a fictitious (but realistic) change situation and see how Web 2.0 ‘pull’ can be leveraged as a great counterbalance to traditional ‘push’ methods of change.

Image courtesy of Transforming Visions

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Influcencing Change In Your IT Operating Model


My last post, “Business-IT alignment – The Relationship Dimension” drew some interesting and even passionate commentary.  In particular, one frustrated commenter (someone in a Relationship Management role) pleaded, “What should I do? How can I influence to bring the necessary changes?”

I’ve posted numerous times on aspects of Organizational Change Management (see link for examples) but perhaps it’s time to revisit this perennial puzzle.

Change Management – The Quintessential Misnomer!

Actually, I think that the term “Organizational Change Management” is a terrible misnomer – change can’t be “managed” in the ways that people and projects can.  It can be “inspired”, “led”, “facilitated”, or it can “subverted” and “rejected,” but it can’t be managed.  Also, for IT folk, the term is too close to “change management” – that technical stuff associated with ensuring that changes to a system are implemented in a controlled manner.

I prefer the term “Change Leadership” – with the important caveat that we are all leaders when it comes to changes we’d like to see.  If it’s a change we don’t know is needed, or we would like to see it not happen, then it is down to others to “lead us into the light” and get us on board with the change.  Either way, it’s a leadership issue.  That’s why I loved my most recent commenter’s plea – “What should I do? How can I influence to bring the necessary changes?”  This is one relationship manager who recognizes his role in leading change!  (And who is not afraid to ask for help in filling that role!)

So Much Known, So Little Applied!

The big irony for me is that so much is known about and written about Organizational Change, and that we all have many years of first-hand experience trying to change our own behaviors or those of friends or family members, and yet most organizations are so completely inept at it!  There are books on change dating back to the early 1940′s (see, for example Kurt Lewin’s work), and a current search on Amazon.com yields 11,860 titles!  And, according to Google, there are currently 191,000 Blogs on the topic!  Clearly, the domain is fraught with subtleties and complexities.

Why Are IT Professionals So Inept at Organizational Change?

OK, so that’s a deliberately inflammatory question and a massively sweeping generalization – but from my personal experience in a 40-year IT career, it’s generally true.  I think it has to do with the characteristics of the IT profession that draw people to it – tangible, finite, project oriented.  IT professionals take highly ambiguous situations and ultimately reduce them to zeros and ones!  I’m not sure which is ‘chicken’ and which is ‘egg’ (i.e., do people good at driving out ambiguity gravitate to IT, or is it a learned behavior by IT professionals?) but I find that IT folk don’t like ambiguity.  And yet leading change means living with ambiguity.  IT professionals like plans, with beginnings, middles and ends – with defined deliverables and clear milestones.  Organizational change has none of these characteristics.  It is about people, not systems or bits and bytes.  It is about politics and influence, not routines and processes.

So, with such a plethora of research and written wisdom, what can I hope add to this body of work?  My goal (in a short series of posts) is to highlight the most useful Organization Change Leadership Model I have come across, and try to simplify and illustrate it with real examples from the world of IT management.  I’ll also point you to the excellent Change Management Blog.

Kotter’s Change Model – And It’s Potential Flaws

Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter has researched and written extensively on organizational change and has articulated an 8-Step Change Model.   (See his excellent HBR article “Why Transformation Efforts Fail.”  Also, the invaluable MindTools web site has this excellent summary of the Kotter Change Model.)

First, an important caveat.  To my point about the misnomer of “Change Management”, the Kotter model  implies linearity and assumes predictability and manageability of the change processes.  I don’t believe it should be interpreted or used this way.  In the immortal wisdom of Jerry Weinberg, “The project actually started long before it was officially declared ‘a project’.”  So has the organizational change typically ‘started’ before anyone gets too involved in planning how to drive it or, at least, to steer it!

In the last 15 years or so, a more organic and emergent view of organizational change has surfaced, leveraging chaos and complexity theory.  See, for example, Wanda J. Orlikowski and J. Debra Hofman’s “An Improvisational Model of Change Management: The Case of Groupware Technologies.”

I don’t see these emergent models as alternatives to the more mechanistic models, but as refinements that help to interpret and apply them – i.e, organizational change should be planned, but the plans continuously revised in the light of emergent behaviors.  And sometimes the emergent behaviors actually precede the recognition of the need for organizational change.  For example, many IT organizations today are trying (and failing!) to leverage social networking (typically around Microsoft‘s SharePoint).  At the same time, many members of the IT organization are participating in a number of social networks – both within their company and with external communities (e.g., FaceBook, LinkedIn, Plaxo).  So, while IT leaders are trying to “manage” a social network initiative (i.e., planned, formally managed), the reality is that social networking is already happening, but in an unplanned and emergent way.  If the planned efforts could understand and leverage the emergent activities, there is a better chance that social networking could be “steered” towards improved outcomes for the IT community and for the company.

My next post will pick up on the Kotter Change Model and begin to illustrate it with real world war stories and examples.

Image Courtesy of Management Excellence

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A Tale of Firefox, Resistance to Change and Personal Value Systems


It’s a familiar adage that if you are trying to persuade people to embrace or engage in some kind of change, you need to get to the heart of the “WIFM factors” – What’s in it for me? I’ve been helping clients understand, embrace and lead change initiatives for about 30 years.  This shows up in several ways:

  • Often the nature of my consulting work involves working with clients to create a business-IT strategy that must be sold to the organization.  Of course, collaborative approaches afforded by the Web 2.0 universe facilitate much more use of collaborative, appreciative inquiry, Future Search and similar whole systems approaches to change – pull versus push approaches, if you will.
  • Sometimes my work is about designing and helping clients to implement a new IT or shared service Operating Model.
  • Occasionally, I am teaching those in the role of “change sponsors” or “change agents” how to be more effective at leading or guiding organizational change.
  • And sometimes I’m asked to shed light on something gone awry, and usually to help get it back on track.

More and more frequently, I am personally on the receiving end of a change.  I learned many years ago that being trained and certified in a change management methodology does not immunize you from the stresses of change.  (About 15 years ago I went through many weeks of organizational change training when I was a partner at Ernst & Young and received the highest certification in their OCM methodology – a feat that involved rappelling down a sheer mountain in Jackson Hole, Wyoming – an activity that still has me occasionally waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat!)

My most recent personal change experience is trivial, but, I believe, quite telling.  I found myself in a discussion recently with several colleagues about web browsers in general, and Mozilla Firefox in particular.  I consider myself no laggard when it comes to technology adoption, but I’m no early adopter either.  I won’t lightly embark on a change unless I can:

  1. See a very compelling benefit to the change (in this case from MS Internet Explorer to Firefox)
  2. Understand and be comfortable with the risks of change (compared with the risks of not changing)
  3. Understand the path I’m going to take from current to changed state (in this case, learning a new browser, moving all my favorite links, etc.)

I’m pretty conservative with my work technologies.  Internet Explorer (IE) effectively came with my work laptop computer and seemed to work fine.  I particularly liked some of the new features such as tabbed browsing.  So, I asked my colleagues, who were all very enthusiastic about Firefox, why I should change to Firefox.  I heard a lot of “noise” – they were telling me about features that I either did not understand, could not visualize, or that simply did not turn me on.  I was sent a couple of links to evaluation sites.  I spent a few minutes on those, but again, could not see anything compelling that would lead me to undertake the risks of change.  After a few such conversations, I dropped the idea of switching, and continued with my good old IE.

A few days ago, I came across a comment about Firefox’s speed advantage over IE – now I was really interested!  In my personal value system as it relates to personal computing, I’m a speed freak!  I can’t explain why, but I crave fast response times.   I was one of the first to get AT&T’s U-verse broadband, and I’ve experimented with tricks such as Google Web Accelerator (which I’ve uninstalled due to too many conflicts with web sites such as delicious and YouTube).

So, when I learned that Firefox might be faster than IE, I took the plunge and installed Firefox.  This blog is typically not about software evaluation, so I won’t go there except to say that I’m absolutely delighted with Firefox and it is, indeed, noticeably faster than IE on my computer.  But the real point is a lesson in change management.  If my colleagues had known, or had flushed out my personal value system, and related the change in browser to my “need for speed” I would have jumped at the change – no hesitation.  Instead, they threw features at me, or benefits that I just did not relate to or was not interested in.

So, if you are trying to persuade people to change, one of the keys is the WIFM – and to help them understand what is in it for them, you need to understand their personal value systems – what are they looking for – what turns them on – then figure out how your proposed change gets to their value system.  It is said, “All politics is local.”  The analogy is that, “All change is personal!”