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Hi, I am Rich Staats welcome to the second lesson in our change management course.
In this one we’re going to talk about the purpose of change management. We are going to look at the purpose of change management and a little bit about what the scope of change management is.
The first point is that if there is no reason a change then there is no reason for change management.
Why would organizations want to change? The main reason is that our world is not a static place. It is complex. There is a formal definition of complexity, and we could go into the mathematically pure definition, but in this lesson complexity means that there are many interdependent entities that affect one another, and they are capable of independent action. In this environment, this volatile, uncertain, chaotic, and ambiguous environment it is hard to prosper if you remain static. You can survive but it is hard to prosper.
So why would you change? Because you want your organization to be more survivable more resilient.
Change management then is a process that facilitates identifying, designing and implementing appropriate change. All three of those things are important.
You want to pick specific things that need to be changed and those things that can be change.
You want to have a clear vision of your desired endstate, and you need a feasible, acceptable, suitable way of getting from the status quo to the desired endstate.
This requires a lot of soft skills as well as the scientific and engineering aspects.
The purpose of change management is to ensure that organizations achieve their change management objectives effectively and efficiently. Efficiently means that you do it with though the right amount of resources, not too many, in particular, you want to do it with them the minimum required resources.
If you spend too few though oftentimes it can result in an ineffective change, and by effectiveness it means are you accomplishing your objectives.
To be effective, change management has to be a wholistic process. You start by identifying what's the appropriate change. Just because you "can" change doesn't you "should" change.
Look at the whole process start to finish. The best change management is data driven; so, part of that, the first part of that, is identifying what the appropriate metrics are. We use our the PAIR2: persistence, agility, information, reach, and range. You need to measure overall process effectiveness, but you will also want to measure process measures related to the change management. This will include things like the number of people participating in the process, the resources put up against it, development of goals and objectives, etc. We will talk in detail about measures in a later class.
Dave Garvin, a guru when it comes to change management, says that change management is a product of three factors, a product meaning a multiplication, and each of these factors goes from zero to one. Zero being the least effective and one the most. The three factors are desire to change, having a clear vision, and having a process to get from your current state to the desired state. If any of your factors is zero then your probability of success is zero.
The biggest issue in practice is that organizations do not develop and effective vision. That is step zero. Another challenge is that a lot organizations simply feel no real push to change. There is the social and organizational inertia.
Our next class is going to be understanding your audience. We will have a little bit of fun as we discuss the four archetypes of senior managers.
See you then, and thank you some much for watching the video.
Have a great day!