One
of the privileges of consulting is that you talk with many talented
leaders, each engaging with different opportunities and challenges. So when common themes emerge you sense
that something’s happening to which you need
to respond. This year I’ve heard many more
leaders talking about the need for change to
be BAU, arguing that a sustained ability to effect change has to be a core organisational
competence.
Why’s
this coming to the fore now? I think a
number of factors are at play:
o Operational leaders and groups are having to work with
and absorb change initiative after change initiative – and they and their
people are tired of being ‘done to’
o Partly as a symptom, Programme
& Project organisations are faced with an unsustainable volume of requests from Operations
for project managers to help effect change
o Portfolio approaches, while helping, are not yet
delivering enough to address the above factors (but that’s for another blog)
Beyond
this, perspectives are far from uniform.
Some emphasise BAU change capability because without it benefit
realisation leaks away. For others, it’s
more about continuous improvement or reducing the number of expensive corporate
programmes.
The obvious response is to equip operational functions with change
capability. But what does that actually
mean? Does it mean methods and tools;
ways of engaging their people more effectively; leaders growing in how they sponsor change; or even changing culture? And since it’s the case that it could be one
or more of these (and others) that's required, how do we know what to
major on? There’s little point, after
all, in only providing a method and toolkit if the organisation has an
intensely change-resistant culture.
For
Afiniti, where I work, this takes us to something we’ve had in our toolkit
for quite some time: a Change Readiness Assessment that we’ve typically used in
relation to specific change initiatives.
This, by exploring six ‘levers’ that need to be well developed for an
organisation to be change ready, highlights exactly how and where action
needs to be taken if change capability is to become a BAU core capability. Crucially, the tool we use does more than just point out (say) the need for development of capability or culture per se. A rich exploration of each lever, and subsequent careful analysis of answer
distribution, outliers, and underlying factors get to the heart of the matter.You can try a cut down version here – it's not the only solution, but we think it works well. What do you use?
