Your ability to adapt to change has the biggest impact on your success.
Your organisation's ability to adapt to change has the biggest impact on the organisation's success.
Sounds easy, right? The thing is, there is no one way embed and embrace change. Following a change management model provides a guide that then needs to be customised to meet your goals, organisation culture and structure. In this post I will cover my preferred change management models so you can identify which one is best for you.
As you know I am lady who loves a plan - by thinking about implementing change as setting a plan and delivering the plan it helps create structure and focus to achieve the end state. If you are looking at making a change that will last, head over to my post on 5 Foundations of sustainable change.
Let's jump into my top 3 preferred change management models and a short synopsis of why the steps can add value to your change initiative.
Prosci ADKAR model
Developed by Jeff Hiatt the founder of Prosci in 2003, the ADKAR model works well for process change and when there may be a need to lift staff capability. I've used this model when implementing a new suite of processes and documentation across business teams and it worked really well for the K and A components.
Awareness of the need for change - this is how you bring your staff on the journey about why the change has to happen. Flush out all the issues and what they want to see success look like. With the use of well formed calibrated questions to identify how problems arise, even the resistors will acknowledge the need for change.
Desire to participate and support the change - having buy-in from the staff impacted by change will always make your job a lot easier. Here you want to develop the "WIIFM" or What's In It For Me from the staff perspective. Will their job be easier? How will they benefit directly from the change? Find out what motivates them and incorporate it into your key messages.
Knowledge on how to change - learning about how to change will support staff to know what to do and what not to do. How you have communicated this helps clarify expectations and will identify the gaps you need to consider - do the staff have the right information and tools?
Ability to implement required skills and behaviours - once you've built awareness, developed the desire to change and communicated the information required it's now on to making sure everyone has the ability to change. This is where you want to monitor progress and have key indicators tell you if you are track. Consider how you identify if more support is required - look for who is championing the new change and whom is lagging behind? Then provide the necessary resources (training, peer support, tools) to develop the skills and behaviours you need.
Reinforcement to sustain the change - celebrate and reward positive behaviours and monitor how the change is supporting the business. Review the lessons learned and continue to adapt the process as it organisation evolves.
Deming Cycle (PDCA)
The PCDA cycle was created by Dr. Williams Edwards Deming in the 1950s, it's a lesser known change management model and is often referred to continuous improvement. I've included this one for its easy to use 4 steps and it's ideal for when you want to do a pilot or trial of the change to understand risk and issues prior to full roll-out. It can be a little slower then implementing as a big bang approach but the benefits suit big organisations or when failure of the change has high risk ramifications.
Plan - scope out the change (activity, timeline, end state), build the team, identify stakeholders and how impacts will be managed.
Do - design and test on a small scale, then gather data about what worked well and what didn't work well.
Check - review the results of the small scale test, if you achieved what you set out in your Plan step then move on to the next step, if not, go back to planning!
Act - this is when you roll out the change across a much larger scale. In this step you'd want to see consistency and sustainment in how the change is implemented. It should be fully embedded and be the new norm.
Kotter’s 8 step process
In my view, this one gets my gold star. Maybe it's all those years at uni reading about John Kotter that has biased by opinion but I love this process. Kotter's 1995 model focusses heavily on the people side of change. You can have the best idea, best system, best tools, but if the people aren't brought along the journey - then you'll find that just like Peter Drucker says "culture eats strategy for breakfast". Kotter's steps are:
Create a sense of urgency - ensure you have a compelling driver to change which will build momentum. Work hard on understanding they key issues and the problem you want to solve
Build a guiding coalition - as you can't do it all by yourself, the guiding coalition will help build alignment and take ownership. This is often the leadership team with added subject matter experts.
Form a strategic vision and initiatives - the guiding coalition must own and understand the end state and be committed to achieving it.
Enlist a volunteer army - delivering large scale and sustainable change needs an army, look to who can be your change "champions, warriors or ninjas" (or insert your desired change agent buzzword). These are usually people who have influence across the organisation at all levels.
Enable action by removing barriers - this one is super important, if your existing policies or processes impede the change you will find it stalls. For example, staff will be disenfranchised very quickly if you want to achieve a flexible workplace - yet don't provide laptops.
Generate short-term wins - small or big wins go towards reinforcing the sense of urgency and strategic vision. Communicate these wins and acknowledge the staff who contributed to the success.
Sustain acceleration - the adaption towards change is happening which has primed the organisation and staff for continuous improvement. Now is the time to apply the accelerator to deliver ahead of time or add in new ideas. Just be mindful of numerous significant change activities could lead to staff burnout.
Institute change - make the change part of the organisation culture, do lessons learned, continue to evolve as time goes on.
There are many other models available that didn't make my final cut. Scroll down for my list of supplementary resources if you are a change management nerd like me and just want to understand more about the process. You can see even with these 3 models they tend to follow a similar pattern.
In summary, always remember a change management model is merely a guide and it's up to you to select a model that helps you achieve your goals. I've seen change initiatives fail when all the effort goes into planning and then implementation stalls and no reinforcement occurs. On the flip side, moving straight to implementation and not planning often leads to staff not being brought on the journey and causes unnecessary resistance. When the change fails to take root and embed, the leadership group may quickly pivot to a “new strategy.” These too, often fail. Then starts a cycle of high expectation, followed by frustration and scepticism.
Be smart, plan for change, communicate change, implement change, communicate some more, monitor and continually improve, and don't forget to communicate again.
Thanks for reading, if you are interested in more ways to Think Ascend, subscribe to my mailing list to learn more about delivering sustainable change.
Please contact me direct if you would like to share the challenges your are facing to implement change.
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