Managing change

We all have to deal with change. For most people, there is no great necessity to adapt to many of the changes that confront them, because the changes affect only themselves and they can choose to by-pass the changes that they don’t fancy and stick with the changes that interest them or challenge them. People who want to be leaders enjoy no such luxury. They must grapple with whatever changes their organization faces – failure to do so will cost them their jobs. Often, this process entails reinventing themselves in ways they could never have imagined – and ending up with changes that bear no resemblance to what they envisioned at the outset.

The first task of change management is to identify what changes are emerging in the environment and what adjustments the organization needs to make. This is a lot harder than it sounds, since perceptions of any single change can be so radically different, reflecting each individual’s knowledge-base, experience and character. That’s why it’s so important to bring many perspectives to bear on the introduction of something new. A top-down command to change is doomed to fail, as is a grassroots impetus that has no guiding vision.

At the heart of these perceptions is a very simple choice:

You can focus on preserving as much as possible of the good things your organization has built up, the things that have worked in the past, the things that define the organization’s culture and sense of value.

Or you can chase after change. You can use change as a vehicle for seizing any number of opportunities, a tool to make the institution’s performance and your own life richer and more dynamic. There is no such thing as an institution that functions perfectly, so there are invariably people licking their lips because they can see the opportunity to put into practice some of the things they have been urging for years on what they see as a deaf, uncomprehending leadership. Your job is to help these people, support them and encourage them to innovate on the basis of what they know – provided they can make a good case for their changes.

This is not an either/or choice. Change managers must make full use of both, simultaneously. It’s a question of which issues and changes go into which box and then making sure that the conflict between the two is managed constructively. There is great value in preserving the accumulated wisdom reflected in the way we do things today, but only if it meets specific, emerging needs. We should preserve the wisdom of our predecessors only once we have established that it works well now; what worked in the past has value but we have to revalidate it with ever-increasing frequency. We have to question our most basic assumptions and practices regularly, seriously and honestly. This is a very tall order. We do ourselves a disservice if we trivialize it.

The best way to verify if these past practices are still working is to challenge them through the second process of chasing change. This is the central task of change management and it demands the wisdom of Solomon – to challenge the change makers to confront reality in perfecting their ideas, to challenge the traditionalists to be open to incremental (occasionally radical) changes in the way they think, to engender a sense on both sides that their positions and proposals will be fairly judged, and to get buy-in from both sides on whatever the outcome is.

It’s invariably extremely inconvenient and often painful. Sometimes it just doesn’t pan out and the people have to be changed before the practices can change. Your biggest challenge of all is to find ways to change yourselves so that you will find the process of change both satisfying and exhilarating. Herewith Rumball’s ten gold rules of change management