Change saturation is a common term used by change practitioners to describe a picture where there may be too many changes being implemented at the same time. The analogy is that of a cup with limited capacity, where if too much change is poured into a fixed volume, the rest will not stay in the cup or be ‘embedded’ as adopted changes.
At the end of 2020, Pivot Consulting conducted extensive research where they asked a range of different roles in organisations about implementing change. When questioned about key challenges to executing strategy and driving change, change fatigue or employees being overwhelmed by multiple initiatives is identified as one of the top 2 most critical challenges. It can be seen that change saturation is not just a popular discussion topic but a serious focus area that is posing significant challenges to a range of organisations.
Research from Pivot Consulting, 2020
There are many common ways of understanding and approaching change saturation. However, many of these are not always correct with some being quite misleading. In this article, we aim to review the 5 key incorrect assumptions about change saturation that are downright misleading and should be directly challenged. These may be assumptions that are widely held and assumed to be ‘facts’ and are not questioned.
Incorrect assumptions:
In the following, we outline the key assumptions that should be challenged when approaching change saturation.
1. Change is disruption
The first assumption is that change is always ‘disruption’. Change can be dynamic. There is also a range of different types of changes. Therefore, change does not always need to be negative and cause chaos or impede normal ways of working.
Take, for example, agile teams. A part of the work of an agile team is to drive continuous improvement. The team establishes regular routines to try something new, i.e. a change. They then execute it and examine the data to see the effect of the change on business. For these teams, ‘planned’ changes are just part of normal ways of working, and therefore not necessarily viewed as ‘disruptions’ to their work since this is part of their work.
On the other hand, change is also not always ‘negative’. Some changes may be there to make it easier for the employee or the customer. For example, it may be that the organisation is implementing system-driven automation to save employees time in entering manual information. These changes are typically welcomed by the impacted employees and are not perceived as ‘disruptions’ to their work. Instead, they are typically perceived as positive changes.
As a result, change needs to be understood by its specific impact on the various stakeholders, and not by its ‘disruption’. A more useful way to understand the impact of the changes on end stakeholders may be to understand the various activities required for them to undergo the change and shift their behaviours.
For example, it could be that a customer service rep may need to undergo training sessions, team briefing sessions, review documentation, and receive team leader feedback, in the overall change journey. These activities may be ‘on top’ of existing normal business routines, or they may be a part of existing business routines, and therefore not ‘adding’ to the ‘saturation level’.
2. Change capacity is determined by capability
It is a commonly held belief that change capacity is determined by change capability at individual, team and organisational levels. Yes, factors such as change leadership, individual change capability and skills can improve change capacity. However, change capacity is not only determined by capability.
Indeed, there are other factors that determine change capacity.
a. Biological.
Humans are designed to have a limited attention span. When there are too many things happening at the same time, we can only focus on a limited number of things at the same time. There are many studies that show if we keep switching focus between different tasks, we are likely to not have full focus and attention which will leave us to making mistakes.
This also applies to learning. The more we focus on multiple tasks, the more we are not able to tune out and therefore engage in deeper processing and learning.
What about thinking about multiple initiatives? According to University of Oregon researchers, professors Edward Awh and Edward Vogel, the human brain has a built-in limit on the number of discrete thoughts it can entertain at one time. The limit for most individuals is four. It does not matter how much capability development one focuses on, there is a limit to how much capacity can be created. Therefore, there is a cap on to what extent capability may lift change capacity. After all, no matter how skillful someone is, biological tendencies and restrictions remain.
b. Expectation.
The level of expectation of the extent to which one can change can determine the outcome. Studies have shown the individual negativity or positivity can impact the outcome. The more negative an individual of the outcome, the more negative the outcome becomes. However, if the expectations are unrealistically high, they may lead to disappointment.
Think back to the impacts of Covid, and how what would have seemed almost impossible in terms of virtual working has suddenly become a reality overnight. Often what companies had imagined taking 10 years to achieve, is suddenly achieved overnight out of necessity. The expectation that there is no other way and that there is no choice leads to the acceptance of the change scenario.
3. Basing saturation points purely on opinions
As change practitioners, we often aim to be the ‘people’ representative. Many think of themselves as the ‘social worker’ or ‘welfare worker’ who are there to be the voice of employees. Whilst, it is true that we need to be the voice of people, the definition of ‘people’ should not just include employees, but a range of stakeholders including managers.
Especially when the change environment is complex and challenging, there may be a tendency for people to ‘over-inflate’ the reality of the situation. Sometimes it may be easier to call out that there is too much change in the hope that this feedback will result in less change volume, thereby making work ‘easier’.
Change practitioners need to be aware of political biases or tendencies for people to report on feedback that is not substantiated by data. Interviews with stakeholders may need to be supplemented by surveys or focus groups to test the validity of the results. We should not simply assume that anything stakeholders tell us are ‘truths’ per se, especially since there is political motivation in biased reporting.
Example from The Change Compass – Plotting change saturation line against change impact levels
4. Focus on capability vs systems and processes to manage saturation
An overt focus on capability, knowledge and skills, may lead to gaps in the overall ability to manage change saturation. This is because skills and competencies are just one of many elements that supports change execution. Beyond this, effective organisations also need to focus on having the right systems and processes established to support ongoing change execution.
Systems and processes include such as:
Learning operations processes whereby there is a clear set of steps for the business to communicate, undertake, and embed training/learning activities. These include the right channel to organise people capacity to attend sessions, communication channels regarding the nature of scheduled training sessions and monitoring the effectiveness of these sessions
Communication processes include having a range of effective channels that promote dynamic communication between employees and managers, as well as across different business units and teams.
Data and reporting mechanisms to visualise change impacts, measurement on change saturation levels, and report on change delivery tracking and change adoption progress
Governance established to examine change indicators including change saturation, risks identified, and make critical decisions on sequencing, prioritisation, and capacity mitigation
Skills and competencies are one element, but without processes and systems established to execute the change and track/report on change saturation, there will be limited business outcomes achieved.
Outlined in this article are just 5 of the common assumptions about change saturation that are misleading. There are many more other assumptions. The key for change practitioners is not to blindly rely on ‘methodologies’ or concepts, but instead to focus on data and facts to make decisions. Managing change saturation needs to be data-driven. Otherwise, stakeholders may easily dismiss any change saturation claims (as is often the case with senior managers). Armed with the right data and insights, the change practitioner has the power to influence a range of change decisions to achieve an optimal outcome for the organisation.
An important part of measuring meaningful change is to be able to design effective communication effectiveness change management surveys that measure the purpose of the survey it has set out to measure the level of understanding of the change. Designing and rolling out change management surveys is a core part of what a change practitioner’s role is. However, there is often little attention paid to how valid and how well designed the survey is. A survey that is not well-designed can be meaningless, or worse, misleading. Without the right understanding from survey results, a project can easily go down the wrong path. This is how this survey can be a powerful tool to ensure smooth transition for the change initiative.
Why do change management surveys need to be valid?
A survey’s validity is the extent to which it measures what it is supposed to measure. Validity is an assessment of its accuracy. This applies whether we are talking about a change readiness survey, a change adoption survey, employee engagement, employee sentiment pulse survey, or a stakeholder opinion survey.
What are the different ways to ensure that a organizational change management survey can maximise its validity and greater success?
Face validity. The first way in which a survey’s validity can be assessed is its face validity. Having good face validity is that in the view of your targeted respondents the questions measure what they aimed to measure. If your survey is measuring stakeholder readiness, then it’s about these stakeholders agreeing that your survey questions measure what they are intended to measure.
Predictive validity. If you really want to ensure that your survey questions are scientifically proven to have high validity, then you may want to search and leverage survey questionnaires that have gone through statistical validation. Predictive validity means that your survey is correlated with those surveys that have high statistical validity. This may not be the most practical for most change management professionals.
Construct validity. This is about to what extent your change survey measures the underlying attitudes and behaviours it is intended to measure. Again, this may require statistical analysis to ensure there is construct validity.
At the most basic level, it is recommended that face validity is tested prior to finalising the survey design.
How do we do this? A simple way to test the face validity is to run your survey by a select number of ‘friendly’ respondents (potentially your change champions) and ask them to rate this, followed by a meeting to review how they interpreted the meaning of the survey questions.
Alternatively, you can also design a smaller pilot group of respondents before rolling the survey out to a larger group. In any case, the outcome is to test that your survey is coming across with the same intent as to how your respondents interpret them.
Techniques to increase survey validity
1. Clarity of question-wording.
This is the most important part of designing an effective and valid survey. This is a critical part of the change management strategy. The question wording should be that any person in your target audience can read it and interpret the question in exactly the same way.
Use simple words that anyone can understand, and avoid jargon where possible unless the term is commonly used by all of your target respondents
Use short questions where possible to avoid any interpretation complexities, and also to avoid the typical short attention spans of respondents. This is also particularly important if your respondents will be completing the survey on mobile phones
Avoid using double-negatives, such as “If the project sponsor can’t improve how she engages with the team, what should she avoid doing?”
2. Avoiding question biases
A common mistake in writing survey questions is to word them in a way that is biased toward one particular opinion which may lead to biased employee feedback. This assumes that the respondents already have a particular point of view and therefore the question may not allow them to select answers that they would like to select.
Some examples of potentially biased survey questions (if these are not follow-on questions from previous questions):
Is the information you received helping you to communicate effectively to your team members through appropriate communication channels?
How do you adequately support the objectives of the project
From what communication mediums do your employees give you feedback about the project
3. Providing all available answer options
Writing an effective employee survey question means thinking through all the options that the respondent may come up with regarding the upcoming change. After doing this, incorporate these options into the answer design. Avoid answer options that are overly simple and may not meet respondent needs in terms of choice options.
4. Ensure your chosen response options are appropriate for the question.
Choosing appropriate response options may not always be straightforward. There are often several considerations, including:
What is the easiest response format for the respondents?
What is the fastest way for respondents to answer, and therefore increase my response rate?
Does the response format make sense for every question in the survey?
For example, if you choose a Likert scale, choosing the number of points in the Likert scale to use is critical.
If you use a 10-point Likert scale, is this going to make it too complicated for the respondent to interpret between 7 and 8 for example?
If you use a 5-point Likert scale, will respondents likely resort to the middle, i.e. 3 out of 5, out of laziness or not wanting to be too controversial? Is it better to use a 6-point scale and force the user not to sit in the middle of the fence with their responses?
If you are using a 3-point Likert scale, for example, High/Medium/Low, is this going to provide sufficient granularity that is required in case there are too many items where users are rating medium, therefore making it hard for you to extract answer comparisons across items?
5. If in doubt leave it out
There is a tendency to cram as many questions in the survey as possible because change practitioners would like to find out as much as possible from the respondents. However, this typically leads to poor outcomes including poor completion rates. So, when in doubt leave the question out and only focus on those questions that are absolutely critical to measure what you are aiming to measure.
6.Open-ended vs close-ended questions
To increase the response rate of change readiness survey questions, it is common practice to use closed-ended questions where the user selects from a prescribed set of answers. This is particularly the case when you are conducting quick pulse surveys to sense-check the sentiments of key stakeholder groups. Whilst this is great to ensure a quick, and painless survey experience for users, relying purely on closed-ended questions may not always give us what we need.
It is always good practice to have at least one open-ended question to allow the respondent to provide other feedback outside of the answer options that are predetermined. This gives your stakeholders the opportunity to provide qualitative feedback in ways you may not have thought of. This may include items that indicate employee resistance, opinions regarding the work environment, new ways of working, or requiring additional support.
Writing an effective and valid change management survey best practices for a specific change initiative is often glanced over as a critical skill. Being aware of the above 6 points will get you a long way in ensuring that your survey addresses areas of concern in a way that aligns with your change management process and strategy and will measure what it is intended to measure. As a result, the survey results will be more bullet-proof to potential criticisms and ensure the results are valid, providing information that can be trusted by your stakeholders.
Change saturation is one of the popular search items when it comes to measuring change management. How do we effectively measure change saturation without resorting to personal opinions? And how might we formulate effective recommendations that are logical and that stakeholders can action immediately?
Use this recipe to measure change saturation using The Change Compass.
Measuring change has become increasingly popular within the change management discipline. It used to be that change practitioners were more comfortable thinking and proposing that they are all about people, and therefore people factors are not hard and easy to measure. Areas such as change leadership, training, communication, and engagement were often the key tenants of a change professional’s key focus areas.
With increasing digitisation and focus on data and metrics, change management is also not exempt from this trend. Business leaders are now demanding that change management, just like most other business disciplines, demonstrate their value and work outcome through measurable metrics.
Using change management software to measure change
Even before the more recent trend of focusing on various aspects of change, change management software products have emerged. 10 years, when the basic idea for The Change Compass started, there was only 1-2 change management software in the market. Several years after that, there started to be 2-4 product offerings emerging in the marketplace.
Over the years, many of these software products have closed shop, or been sold to other companies. At the time, the need for change management software to measure change was not strong in the marketplace. It was perhaps an immature market where a lot of practitioners saw little need.
Types of change management software
There are many types of change management software. First, let’s spell out that we are not talking about technical change management software such as ITIL or technical change tracking software. The focus of this article is on organisational change management software.
The different types of change management software include:
Change project adoption measurement – Such as ChangeTracking that focuses on measuring the extent to which the project is progressing on track from a stakeholder perception and adoption angle
Change project implementation measurement – Such as Change Automator that provides a platform to automate project change delivery work that change practitioners focus on in capturing change deliverables, and overall change reporting and tracking
Change portfolio measurement – Such as The Change Compass that offers data visualisation for a change portfolio (collection of change projects) to help make portfolio level decisions on prioritisation, sequencing and delivery risks
Other organisational measurement – Such as OrgMapper that provides organisational network analysis maps and networks to understand relationship networks across individuals and groups
Data capture and automation
One of the key value propositions of a digital change management software is to provide some levels of automation in the capture of change management data, so that the data may be easily analysed and visualised. However, in our analysis of available change management software in the market, we found that there is a wide range of various levels of automation. Some have almost zero automation, whilst others have significant levels of automation.
In searching for an effective digital change management tool, ensure that you take into account the following in data capture:
To what extent is the data capture flexible and can be easily tailored
What are the system features to automate data entry?
Is there a range of data analytics from the data entered
Is the tool just a data depository without insight generation and data analysis features
Is the data capture too categorical? E.g. Agile vs Waterfall? And how useful are the data fields in terms of making decisions or generating insights?
Here is an example of automation from Change Automator where stakeholder data can be pulled from the company’s Microsoft Azure system to reduce the significant time required to input stakeholder details.
Change Automator example of using automation to save time
Data analysis & reporting
The power of digital software is that it can easily calculate, track, and visually show the metrics that we are focused on. Looking at raw data is meaningless if it cannot be turned into highly engaging and meaningful charts that generate an understanding of some kind of insight into the organisational situation with regard to initiatives.
Some change management software reports simple figures that may provide limited usefulness. For example, the number of impacts affecting each stakeholder group may be interesting but there is not much we can do with the data. This is because the number of impacts doesn’t indicate the overall severity or volume of the impacts.
Data visualisation should also support ‘drill-through’, where the user is able to click on the chart and drill into more details about that particular part of the data to better understand what contributes to it. This is a critical part of data analysis and understanding the story that the data is telling us.
Effective data visualization
Data visualisation formats are also critical. With the wrong data visualisation design, it becomes very difficult for people to understand and interpret the data. Ideally, the user should see very clearly what the data is showing them visually. For example, pie charts have become very popular in reporting. However, pie charts are only useful to contrast a few different data points. When there are too many data points and the data is too similar, the human eye finds it difficult to compare and contrast any differences.
Effective data visualisation should also allow the user to highlight a part of the data to create a visual emphasise to support a particular point. Making the visuals simple for the user is ultimately the most important part of chart design. The more complex it is, the harder it is for you to get your point across to your stakeholders.
To learn more about designing the right data visualisation to create optimal impact check out our infographic.
Insight generation & decision making
Ultimately, the change management software should be designed to provide insight into what is going to happen to the impacted people (whether it be employees, customers, or partners). The data should help you zoom into where is the source of the problem or the risk area, what the risk is, and potentially how to make a recommendation to resolve it. The drill-through capability is critical to support the insight generation.
The data visualisation should also directly support you or your business stakeholders to make business decisions on change. If the data was just ‘interesting’ it will not have much impact and after a while business stakeholders will lose their interest in the data. Instead, data and reporting should form a core part of regular business decision-making. Decision making using change data can be:
Within a project in making roll out and implementation decisions
Within a portfolio in making prioritisation and sequencing decisions
Within a business unit in making capacity prioritisation, business readiness and operational planning decisions
Across the enterprise in PMO and change governance settings on prioritisation, sequencing, benefit realisation and enterprise planning
Tailoring of data visualization
For those users who are more advanced with change analytics, there may be stakeholder requests to tailor charts in different formats. It could also be that for a specific organisational scenario, the user would like to create a tailored chart to show the specific problem that is not represented in existing off-the-shelf report designs.
In this case, the software should have the flexibility to allow these users to select their desired data fields and even types of charts that they want to work with to design the tailored chart without too much effort, and ideally not from scratch.
Here is an example from Change Automator where the user is able to easily tailor a chart by selecting the data fields, experiment with different charting, to come up with the ideal chart to influence stakeholders.
Example from Change Automator on easily tailoring charts
Trend analysis and predictive analysis through machine learning
Reading and interpreting individual charts can yield significant insights. However, the real power of analytics is to look at historical trends and even predict future trends based on data. Therefore, having the right data, over time, can create significant value. This is why investing in data is so critical, and why not just technology companies, but most industries are focused on digitising and leveraging the power of data.
The same thing applies to change analytics and change data. Invest in change data and the benefits can be enormous. By better understanding data trends with the assistance of machine learning, the system can highlight and draw your attention to critical observations and findings that you may have skipped.
With sufficient data, you’re also able to utilise machine learning to generate predictive data trends. Some examples of situations in which this can provide significant value include:
Typical times in which the business unit or team are busy with changes or operational challenges
Typically how initiatives of different complexities take to adopt and embed within the business
Typical delays in forecasted versus actual change implementation timeline
Stakeholder groups that tend to show the highest resistance or lowest engagement to initiatives
Predicted time it takes to realise targeted benefits
Investing in a change management software can create significant value for your organisation by measuring change and making it visual and easier to understand. Selecting the right tool is critical since there is a variety of options on the market. Examine closely the functionalities and how they enable you to make business decisions since not all charts may be useful. With the right software support, you will be able to not only tell a compelling, data-backed story of what is going to happen to the business, but also the logical recommendations that stakeholders find hard to dispute.
Change Automator example of leveraging machine learning in change analytics
Being more strategic in managing change is about being more focused on those aspects of driving change that will create the most value for the organisation. This is directly comparable to what strategy is about. Strategy is about choosing a particular path to achieve a particular set of goals, versus other paths. There are many paths and many ways to manage change and different paths may yield different results.
What are the advantages of being more strategic? Being more strategic means you are clearer in terms of the specific approach you are taking in leading change and how that translates to a particular set of results. It is not just about following a particular methodology blindly or whatever approach is ‘in vogue’.
Strategic change practitioners create greater value for the organisation. They are more able to connect with senior managers in terms of driving organisational impact and results versus being focused just on individual implementation tactics. They are also able to easily articulate why change activities are carried out and how they contribute to the overall outcomes. Moreover, they’re able to position the value of the change in the overall strategy of the organisation and why the change is important. In approaching the implementation they zoom in on the parts of the change that makes the most difference.
How does a change practitioner be more strategic?
Start with understanding and linking the initiative to the strategy
Every initiative exists to support a particular strategy that the company has created. Change practitioners need to have a good understanding of the organisational strategies, why they were created, and what they aimed to achieve. At a basic level, it should be clearly understood by all stakeholders why the initiative was created and the strategy it aims to support.
A clear grasp of how the initiative supports an organisational strategy helps the change practitioner position the size of the value delivered by the initiative. As a result, it helps with determining the focus and effort that should be devoted to and how to realise the objectives of this initiative.
Organisational strategy can also be understood using the 3 horizons model. Strategies and initiatives can fall within each of the 3 horizons.
Horizon 1 ideas provide continuous innovation to a company’s existing business model and core capabilities in the short-term.
Horizon 2 ideas extend a company’s existing business model and core capabilities to new customers, markets, or targets.
Horizon 3 is the creation of new capabilities and new business to take advantage of or respond to disruptive opportunities or to counter disruption.
3 horizons model (from Stratechi)
Most change practitioners would be involved in horizon 1 initiatives where there are immediate changes required to the business in the shorter term. However, there are also initiatives about transformation in horizon 2 concerned with building core capabilities. Horizon 3 is about building and launching new products or launching into new markets outside of the existing business. There may also be initiatives within this horizon. Understanding which horizon the initiative falls under helps with its positioning.
Improving business acumen:
Having good business acumen is critical to being a strategic change practitioner. If you do not understand how the business works then it is hard to be strategic. This is because without understanding key drivers of how the business works, it is hard to formulate the right positioning to support the change initiative in a way that supports the realisation of the strategy.
Don’t fret. There are a few focus areas that can point you in the right direction.
1. How the company makes money.
At a basic level, understand how the company is structured and how it makes money. Lay out all the various departments of the organisation. Focus on key operations of the business. This can be labelled as a value chain, or how services and products get produced and delivered to the customer. What are the key investments of the organisation? In a financial services setting the focus is on people, financial investment, and technology. In manufacturing, it could be on equipment and supply chain.
Focus on the key drivers for the company. Is the company focused on maximizing profit? Or is the focus on increasing revenue? Is there a focus on decreasing costs to increase revenue? What are the ‘big buckets’ in which cost savings can be achieved? And therefore how is your initiative supporting any of these drivers?
The critical part is to understand ‘why’ the company is focused on particular activities. There are the business-as-usual parts of the organisation focused on maintenance of the business (’keeping the lights on’), and then there are core drivers that can make or break the business and its financials. Seek to understand why particular strategies were chosen and what objectives they will help the company to achieve.
2.Competition and the market landscape.
After understanding how a company operates, the next step is to understand the landscape that it operates. A good model to be familiar with in analysing the competitive landscape of the industry is Porter’s 5 forces model. Seek to understand the interplay between the 5 forces. How do these shape the industry? As a result, how is the company positioned in the market? To be successful which forces is the company focused on managing?
Is your initiative involved in providing a better experience for customers because the landscape has been changing and customers are more demanding and have more choices than before? Is the initiative focused on launching a digital solution so that the company is not overtaken by rivals who offer better options to customers? Is the company’s profit suffering due to increased material/finance costs and therefore the initiatives are focused on containing cost? Is the program focused on improving efficiency through launching a systems solution and therefore improving customer delivery time or saving headcount?
5 forces model (from Visual Paradigm)
Focus on providing value to the organisation
We know that it is not always easy to prove the value of change management. People benefits are not always tangible and easily measured. However, this does not mean that it is less important or that measurement is not valuable. In the past, there have been efforts to try and measure change management in terms of return on investment (ROI). However, this may not be the most strategic way of demonstrating the value of change management.
Where possible, always focus on creating value for the organisation, as opposed to focusing on saving costs. The ultimate superpower of change management is about creating the right organisational environment so as to fully realize the benefits targeted by initiatives. Initiative benefits may not always be in financial dollar terms but are often in the hundreds of thousands to millions in benefits.
On the other hand, a focus on cost will always be compared against other costs. You can try and argue that the cost for change management is not large, but then there are always ways to reduce the cost. Going down the path of focusing on cost can only get you so far. This is for the same reason that a company that only focuses on reducing cost will not grow. Alternatively, focus on increasing value for the organisation means targeting a much bigger piece of the pie. Here is an example of why focusing on value often means creating a lot more impact than focusing on cost.
To adopt a rigorous logic-based approach in determining your change approach, use the MECE framework. MECE stands for mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. The framework is commonly used by strategy consultants when they analyse the organisation and determine what strategies to formulate.
MECE framework (from Case interview)
There are 2 aspects to using this model. The model is based on a scientific hypothesis approach to problem-solving. This means that you must always begin with a hypothesis, followed by branches that test the hypothesis. To goal is to prove or disprove the hypothesis. For example, “by open-sourcing change tactics, we will achieve a better change outcome”. Then you can draw a tree diagram that branches out the various factors that can either support or disprove this. For example, these could be the potential branches:
The culture of the company is hierarchical and employees are not always forthcoming in openly sharing their ideas and expect to be lead
The project has a particularly tight timeline and there may not be sufficient time to properly engage the community for various ideas
Program sponsor and key stakeholders already have a fixed idea of how they want to implement the change, and therefore may not be open to other ideas
The organisation does not have a history of undergoing significant change and therefore employees may not understand the effort required to drive and sustain the change
Tree diagram (from Case interview)
From each branch, there can be subbranches that call out the evidence or reasoning for each branch. In this case, there seems to be strong logic that this hypothesis is false. Therefore, this is not a good strategy to use for this initiative.
Use the MECE approach to strategize your change approach. A lot of practitioners tend to prefer to follow standard change management models and methodologies. This may be OK as a reference, or a reminder. However, an effective change approach that is strategically focused on what the organisation needs must be developed using a logic-based approach. One that is tailored and designed specifically for the unique situation that the company is in currently.
Your change strategy or approach should always be unique to the requirements of the organisation. It should never be a ‘copy’ of another initiative because no two initiatives are ever completely the same. There will be tactics that are similar across initiatives, such as engagement approaches utilised or impact assessment design. However, the change strategy needs to call out what is unique about this initiative and how the change strategy is specifically designed for this situation.
Build change measurement and tracking
Business strategy can only be successful if it can be measured. Without measurement, there is no way of knowing if the objectives are achieved or when to abandon the strategy and adapt/tweak as required. The same applies to change strategy and execution. The change strategy must come with a set of metrics in order to gauge to what extent the strategy is successful or not.
Be aware of not creating too many metrics that will lead to significant effort required to capture and report the metrics. Balance effort and outcome in the tracking and reporting of change management metrics. Having anywhere from 3-5 metrics is a good number to target. When you start to have more metrics, the effort required may be too overwhelming.
Application of strategic approaches throughout the project lifecycle
Let’s go through an example of how strategic change approaches can be applied throughout the project life cycle.
Scoping – Strategic approach to look widely at the effort involved
Typically during this phase of the project, change practitioners may tend to focus only on the operational aspect of scoping out the resources required to support the project and the level of impact on the organisation. However, it is also important to be clear about the strategic importance and positioning of this initiative.
In scoping out the change management effort required to support an initiative we need to understand the strategic importance of the initiative and where it stands compared to other initiative and organisational focus areas. Key questions to consider include:
What is the priority level of the initiative
What strategy is it supporting? What’s the level of strategic importance?
What’s the right level of focus to support this initiative, balanced against other organisational priorities? For example, what else would impacted stakeholders be focused on during the impact period, and therefore how do we support having the right priorities? (i.e. the right level of ambidexterity)
Are there opportunities to integrate the roll out of this initiative with other initiatives to simplify focus, organisational effort and aid change adoption (e.g. this could be done at a communications or learning roll-out levels)
Impact assessment – Utilise strategic analysis to understand business impact
In analysing the change impact of the initiative, a strategic approach means a depth of understanding of how the business is impacted by the initiative and what benefits will mean to the business. Each part of the business by definition has different focus areas, and the business impact will be different as a result. To conduct a strategic analysis of the impact of change undergoes the following:
What is the business environment including partners, customers and suppliers? How will the change influence the dynamics of this environment?
How will the work and value of the business unit be altered as a result of the change? Conduct this analysis at multiple layers of the business unit to tease out the implications?
Will there be financial, resourcing, time, cost or effort impacts on the business unit or stakeholder group?
Will the business unit’s own focus areas or strategies be altered as a result of the change? Will its metrics, tracking and reporting be altered as well?
Change strategy formulation
In formulating the change strategy for the initiative adopt the MECE approach as described previously. You may need to formulate different hypotheses and test them before arriving at the one that is the most applicable to the organisation. Feel free to share your tree branch with your stakeholders to take them through how the change strategy is formulated. Involve them to ‘test’ the assumptions as required in the formulation.
Systems and portfolio views of the organisation
A key part of strategic change management is approaching change from a holistic and ‘systems-based’ perspective. A change project should not be viewed in its isolation but as a piece of the overall system. This means you need to understand the potential relations of this initiative with other initiatives in supporting the same strategy, and what other initiatives are focused on by the impacted business units. Having a portfolio-level visibility of the various initiatives and their relative impacts on the organisation is a key capability to support planning and decision making. This also helps you to better position or clarify your initiative compared to other focus areas.
Examples of portfolio level views of change from The Change Compass
Strategic capabilities
Different organisations and business units will have different levels of capabilities in leading, executing, and embedding change. Within the timeline and resource challenges of one initiative, it is not always possible to address all the various aspects of capability gaps. In fact, you may even face multiple capability gaps that may potentially derail the project.
Conduct a strategic capability analysis to assess which capabilities are core and critical to the success of the project. Assign weighting to each capability in terms of importance and any existing gaps. Use this analysis to formulate the top one or two capabilities you may want to focus on supporting the business to ensure the rollout is successful. Strategy is about focus and making bets. By spreading your efforts too thin you might not be able to close any of the capability gaps.
