We have finally reached the point where many advisors (who presumably are experts, e.g. in banking and economics) are saying that they are guessing as it relates to what the future has in store for their clients and investors. We, on the other hand, in the Change Management world, can confidently say that more change is coming – that’s the easy part. The difficult part is saying which ones will be the game changers, and in what way they affect us. What we have learnt in the last 20 years is that the macro changes affect different organisations differently, so we as change management practitioners, must continue doing what we do; collect change information, analyse it, and create the strategies and plans to help our organisations manage a change more effectively and efficiently and above all, reach the desired objectives.

I recently read the thought leadership article by Tim Creasey called Pushing Boundaries and Revisiting Foundations. It’s a stimulating read. What I am about to say was influenced by this, but also by other conversations and observations I have made in the past year, as we at and Change continue to work with originations in 18 industries, across 23 countries.

The Fundamentals are changing

While there are dozens of models around that try to explain how organisational change happens, most are falling short of reflecting the dynamic and simultaneous nature of how change happens in organisations (or should happen). I think that the true leaders in change management will bring out more useful models for practitioners to use and plan their work. Will these be logical extensions of the current? Yes, to some extent, but there may also be some radical new input. For example, one the most frequent comments I get is that the reinforcement of change (both in mind and behaviour) is a process that starts from the beginning of the change and persists, or should, throughout the change. The actions are quite different through the life-cycle of the change but it should always be there.

I think the more radical input will come from the effect of the new era of digitisation. Digitisation has been around for many decades, but we are finally starting to get to the point where machines will affect change that was not informed or controlled by management/leaders, and that will change the way leaders lead and followers react to change. Our models, processes and tools need to come of age here. So, what’s the effect of this?

Human change sponsorship will continue to be a challenge – exactly as Tim reflected. It will however also acquire more challenges as it deals with ‘induced’ change from more intelligent technology. I have had feedback from leaders and practitioners about how sponsorship is devolving to lower levels in the organisation and is also changing form.

The traditional concept of project management is also likely to undergo change. Agile is not a game changer, is what I am hearing. Yes – it’s a great technique and responds in some way to the high velocity of change, the devolution of sponsorship, but it’s a bigger change than originally thought and in many organisations, that are already saturated with change, the prospect of another big one is being resisted. This was one of the feedback we received when we ran a seminar on the topic of Change Management in an Agile world in November last year.

Will the fundamental of ADKAR change? I don’t think so. I think what will change is the way we leverage the model. I am seeing more change in the way leaders leverage its concepts. We need to measure it quicker and better and relate it to the actions and events around the affected person – work for our data scientists.

Frontiers in change management

I think the work Prosci has done in understanding what it calls “change enabling systems” is laudable. It quickly brought an understanding of the importance of aligning change capability with the strategy of the organisation. This was something I spoke about 5 years ago and the most common response I got was “we have bigger fish to fry” Now, it’s what I spend 80% of my time discussing with the C-suite. They see now that without an integrated and aligned approach to building change capability they risk sacrificing their careers and even their businesses, partly because they just cannot afford to continue with 50% of their changes failing to make their objectives first time[1] and partly because advisors are increasingly hiding behind the caveats that accompany predictions of the future (what I said right at the beginning of this article). However, this is bringing and even bigger change – saving Change Management from the unrealistic perception that it will solve all change related problems. Change Management will not go away, but it will be accompanied by a growth in Change Capability – a structured approach to building the capability to deal any change for the purpose of aligning its outcome to the strategic results of the organisation. Traditionally, we decided to make a change and then we called change managers in and asked them – how do we manage this? Increasingly we will invert the question to; given our current capability to change, what changes should we make? Unless we do this, we risk becoming victims of the game changers instead of leading change, thereby becoming the game changers.

Many happy changes in 2019

[1] 2018 Best Practices in Change Management- Prosci Inc.

read and Change

The Outlook for Change Management in 2019

Frontiers in change management