Leveraging a tool such as The Change Compass is not just about data entry and interpreting data. It is about building organisational capability in managing change. This means that business stakeholders needs to be engaged, coached and supported to be able to leverage change data to make operations decisions. This also means that other stakeholders such as the PMO (project management office) and senior managers are also to use change data for planning purposes.
To find out more about how to structure the approach for leveraging the value from a change tool such as The Change Compass click the following link to download the infographic.
At the time of the article Space X ‘Resilience’ (name of the shuttle) successfully took off into space with 4 astronauts. The astronauts wore super sleek white costumes that were tapered to the body and minimalist in design. They look quite different than the bulky spacesuits that we are all accustomed to in our heads from the 60s. What stood out for me was that this was a diverse team of astronauts. There was 1 female, 1 black, and 1 Asian. This was definitely not the all-white Caucasian males we are used to seeing in the past. It made me ponder about diversity and the change journey that companies are driving.
We all know the drill with most change journeys. It ‘must’ start at the top. It needs to be driven by senior managers. Then the rest of the managers need to support it and convince their people about the change journey. So what is wrong with this? Well, we also know that things often don’t go according to plan. Employees may ‘resist’ the change. They would then be labeled as ‘resistors’. The change manager on the project will then need to devise a plan to deal with these resistors to ensure the change goes smoothly despite them.
Diversity in Change Design
Anticipating Challenges: The crux of this transformative approach lies in its foresight to identify potential challenges before they materialize. Incorporating diversity early in the change design process constructs a dynamic framework that embraces myriad perspectives, experiences, and insights.
Practical Infusion of Diversity: Effectively infusing diversity into change strategies demands a conscious effort across dimensions. Assembling a diverse team of stakeholders from the project’s initiation ensures representation from various facets of the organization.
Shaping Resilience and Innovation: The primary objective is to cultivate resilience and innovation through intentionally incorporating diverse perspectives. Research consistently highlights the adaptability of diverse teams in facing challenges, tapping into a reservoir of creativity born from collaboration among individuals with varied backgrounds.
Beyond Tokenism: Infusing diversity transcends token gestures; it’s about creating an environment where diverse voices are not only heard but also valued and integrated into decision-making processes.
Early Stakeholder Engagement: Adopting an agile mindset, organizations should proactively assemble a diverse stakeholder group at the project’s inception, ensuring early engagement and integrating a broad spectrum of perspectives.
Anticipating Resistance and Brainstorming Solutions: Diversity in stakeholder engagement empowers organizations to interact early, identify potential push-backs, and collaboratively brainstorm solutions. This proactive strategy addresses resistance at its roots, mitigating risks during the implementation phase.
Ideation and Creativity: Inspired by Ideo’s principles, the ideation stage prioritizes quantity over the quality of ideas. Encouraging creativity without premature judgment recognizes that innovation often emerges from seemingly unconventional ideas.
Involvement at Every Level: Moving beyond the traditional top-down approach, organizations should envision change being driven from top-down, bottom-up, middle-out, and across every layer of the organizational hierarchy.
Challenges and Solutions: In the landscape of change, integrating diversity can encounter hurdles. A common challenge surfaces in the form of resistance, where employees perceive diversity initiatives as superficial. To overcome this, fostering open communication is vital. Actively involving employees in the change process not only allows them to voice concerns but also instills a sense of ownership and alignment with the change goals.
Another challenge lies in aligning diverse perspectives cohesively, which may lead to ambiguity or conflicting goals. This calls for robust communication channels and cross-functional collaboration. Encouraging a dialogue that integrates different viewpoints ensures a unified vision that accommodates the richness of diverse perspectives.
Measurable Outcomes: Embracing diversity in change design yields measurable outcomes. Teams reflecting diverse backgrounds consistently showcase heightened innovation and problem-solving capabilities. This innovation often translates into quantifiable improvements in product development, process efficiency, and overall organizational performance.
Measurable outcomes extend to employee engagement and satisfaction. Organizations fostering diversity experience higher levels of employee morale and commitment quantified through employee surveys, retention rates, and increased productivity. These metrics form a compelling narrative for the strategic value of diversity in driving successful change.
As we conclude this exploration into the transformative power of diversity in organizational change, it’s clear that diversity is more than a checkbox—it’s a dynamic force shaping the future of successful change management. The ‘Resilience’ shuttle journey serves as a metaphor for the resilience and innovation that embracing diversity brings to organizational journeys.
In essence, diversity propels change beyond resistance, transforming it into a collaborative, inclusive, and innovative process. The ‘Resilience’ shuttle journey serves as a metaphor for successful organizational change. Embracing diversity in change design is not merely a philosophical stance but a practical imperative. By incorporating diverse perspectives early on, organizations proactively navigate challenges, foster innovation, and drive transformative change from all directions.
As you embark on your change journey, remember that diversity is not just a strategy—it’s the cornerstone of lasting, impactful transformation.
Embark on a Diverse Journey with The Change Compass! Discover how our platform empowers you to embrace diversity in your change initiatives. Book your weekly demo now.
As change practitioners, we often feel that we create success behind the scenes. We design great change experiences, and if all goes well, then people won’t notice it. By this, I mean that if the impacted person has a smooth experience, and there are no negative incidents or frustrations, then he/she won’t notice the change curve that had just occurred. However, there is more to this.
Analyzing the System
Designing and executing good change experiences is not just about how skillful the practitioner is. It’s about understanding the system. An effective change approach involves assessing what the change needs to be and diagnosing key components of the overall system required to transition impacted stakeholders from current to future. What are these?
For example, you are implementing a new system, and you hear that the last system implementation did not go smoothly. You conduct a series of interviews with key stakeholders to understand what happened. What you found was that there was insufficient drivership from leaders. There was adequate communication and training as a part of the rollout. However, the change was not sufficiently reinforced by middle managers, and therefore after the first 2 months where there was good traction, things slowly faded away. Users started to not use the new system.
In your analysis of the overall system, elements included:
The extent of commitment and visible reinforcement from various leaders
The understanding of the why and how this was communicated
How effective learning interventions were
Effectiveness of launch visibility on the behaviors of impacted stakeholders
Influence of manager/leader levels on the behaviors of impacted stakeholders
Preventing Failures Through Problem-Solving
In Dan’s book, some of the key concepts of how one can become an invisible hero by problem-solving before the problem happens include:
Focus on changing the overall system, versus just one problem
Identify what has become normal and zoom in on this as a problem
Systems can be complicated, and therefore when you tweak elements of the system expect the unexpected
Design ongoing feedback to ensure ultimate success
Detect problems before they arise by addressing any early warning signs
Use key points of leverage to exert the greatest impact
By focusing on the overall system, the change practitioner can start to become less reactive and more proactive. A proactive situation is one where you’ve incorporated key risks and challenges and addressed these early on before issues happen. You’ve anticipated stakeholder concerns, potential embedment issues, lack of sponsorship, and ineffective reinforcement of stakeholder behaviors. This is what Dan Heath means by ‘upstream’, that you deal with problems before they occur.
Expanding Perspectives Across the Portfolio
Let’s take this one step further. Organizations are all implementing multiple initiatives. Stakeholders are not rats in the lab that only face one singular project. At any one time, they are usually facing multiple changes. Some large and some small. To truly look at the whole system, we need to consider the system from the impacted person’s perspective.
Some examples of this include:
Key targeted behaviors driven across multiple projects
Overall change capacity is impacted by operational factors such as customer work volumes, seasonal work changes, and of course any Covid implications
The sizes of impacts of various projects, and the priority placed on each of them
The nature of impacts on different stakeholder groups and how impacts on one stakeholder group could, in turn, result in an impact on another group
At The Change Compass, we focus on providing data visualisation to show elements of the system, whether it’s the relative change capacity of stakeholder groups, to what extent change saturation is exceeded, identifying key behavior changes targeted across initiatives, identifying hotspots for potential synergy across initiatives, or assess which initiatives are at most at risk due to level of impact versus stakeholder readiness levels.
Are you ready to be an invisible hero? To what extent are you already incorporating systems analysis and planning as a part of your change approach and implementation? With the right data, stakeholder feedback, and focus, examining the whole system does not need to be complicated, cumbersome, or time-consuming. In the post-Covid agile world where things are constantly in flux, examining the system is even more critical. This is the ultimate test of the change practitioner in being the architect and tinker.
