Build a change platform, not a change program
It’s not you, it’s your company. Management Innovation eXchange founders Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini believe that continuous improvement requires the creation of change platforms, rather than change programs ordained and implemented from the top.
Transformational-change
initiatives have
a dismal track record. In 1996, Harvard Business School professor
John Kotter claimed that nearly 70 percent of large-scale change
programs didn’t meet their goals,1 and
virtually every survey since has shown similar results. Why is change
so confounding? We don’t think the issue lies with an understanding
of its building blocks—Kotter’s classic eight-step
change-management model is still a helpful guide. The problem lies in
beliefs about who is responsible for launching change and how change
is implemented.
The
reality is that today’s organizations were simply never designed to
change proactively and deeply—they were built for discipline and
efficiency, enforced through hierarchy and routinization. As a
result, there’s a mismatch between the pace of change in the
external environment and the fastest possible pace of change at most
organizations. If it were otherwise, we wouldn’t see so many
incumbents struggling to intercept the future.
In
most organizations, change is regarded as an episodic interruption of
the status quo, something initiated and managed from the top. The
power to initiate strategic change is concentrated there, and every
change program must be endorsed, scripted, and piloted before launch.
Transformational change,2 when
it does happen, is typically belated and convulsive—and often
commences only after a “regime change.” What’s needed is a
real-time, socially constructed approach to change, so that the
leader’s job isn’t to design a change program but to build
a change platform—one
that allows anyone to initiate change, recruit confederates, suggest
solutions, and launch experiments.
The problem with change management
Three
intertwined assumptions limit the efficacy of the traditional model
of change:
Change
starts at the top.
This
mind-set implies that executives have the sole right to initiate deep
change and are best placed to judge when it is necessary. Truth is,
executives are often the last to know. They are insulated from
reality by layers of managers who are often reluctant to sound an
alarm. By the time an issue is big enough and unavoidable enough to
attract the scarce attention of the CEO, the organization is already
playing defense. That’s why most change programs are, in fact,
catch-up programs. Moreover, risk-averse executives are seldom
willing to launch a company-wide change program that ventures beyond
the safe precincts of best practice.
The
result: change programs that are too little, too late.
Change
is rolled out.
When
change is imposed from above, with both ends and means prescribed,
it’s rarely embraced. Traditional change programs fail to harness
the discretionary creativity and energy of employees and often
generate cynicism and resistance. Senior executives talk about the
need to get buy-in, but genuine buy-in is the product of involvement,
not slick packaging and communication. To be embraced, a change
effort must be socially constructed in a process that gives everyone
the right to set priorities, diagnose barriers, and generate options.
Despite assertions to the contrary, people aren’t against
change—they are against royal edicts. The
alternative: change that’s rolled up, not rolled out.
Change
is engineered.
The
phrase “change management” implies that deep change can be
managed, like a large-scale construction project or an IT overhaul.
But if change is truly transformational—if it breaks new ground—it
can’t be predetermined. Think for a moment about how our lives have
been changed by the social web—Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat,
Twitter, and all the rest. No single individual or entity invented
the social web. It emerged, in all its weird and wonderful variety,
because the Internet is a powerful platform for making connections
and because thousands of entrepreneurs were free to develop new
business models to harness that power. When change programs are
engineered, the solution space is limited by what people at the top
can imagine. A change platform, by contrast, gives everyone the right
to suggest strategic alternatives. The
advantage: options that are diverse, radical, and nuanced.
Reimagining the model for change
Management
literature is rich with case studies of bottom-up, spontaneous change
and of product and business innovation sparked by the efforts of
frontline activists.3 Inspiring
as such stories are, however, few of these efforts effect systemic
change across an entire organization. Internal activism and small
wins don’t easily scale. Neither do they address the core
management systems, processes, and cultural norms that dictate how
large organizations run.
The
challenge is to tackle deep change for tough systemic issues in a way
that avoids the pitfalls of traditional change programs. Put another
way: how do you create platforms for sustained company-wide
conversations that can amplify weak signals and support the complex
problem solving needed to address core management challenges?
We
believe that three shifts in approach are necessary:
From
top-down to activist-out. Transformational
change conventionally starts at the top because companies haven’t
enabled it to start anywhere else. To make deep change proactive and
pervasive, the responsibility for initiating change needs to be
syndicated across the organization. For instance, it was a small
group of trainee clinicians, young leaders, and improvement
facilitators in Britain’s National Health Service who developed and
ran NHS Change Day 2013—the biggest improvement effort in the
history of the NHS.
Internal activists, multiplying their impact
through social media, spawned a grassroots movement of 189,000 people
who pledged to take concrete action to improve healthcare outcomes.
When Change Day was repeated this year, the number of pledges
exceeded 800,000. Change Day has enabled everyone to be a change
leader and improved the care of patients.
From
sold to invited. Transformational
change cannot be sustained without genuine commitment on the part of
those who will be most affected. This commitment is best achieved by
bidding out the change program’s “how” to everyone in the
organization. Consider the approach that fast-growing medical-device
company Nuvasive took to reengineer its supply chain. Instead of
appointing a task force of senior leaders, the CEO invited the entire
company to “hack” the customer-fulfillment process. Associates
from around the organization, supported by a small coordination team
and volunteer coaches, eagerly contributed to a process that
generated a common view of the problem (from the front line up), a
set of shared aspirations for world-class performance, and a
portfolio of new initiatives to achieve it.
From
managed to organic. Psychologist
Kurt Lewin’s seminal “unfreeze-change-freeze” model still
guides how most leaders think about change. But in a world that’s
relentlessly evolving, anything that is frozen soon becomes
irrelevant. What we need instead is constant experimentation—with
new operating models, business models, and management models. Not
freeze and refreeze, but “permanent slush.” This approach means
placing less emphasis on building a powerful project-management
office and more on building self-organizing communities that
identify, experiment, and eventually scale new initiatives. At Cemex,
the global cement and building-materials company with revenue of $15
billion in 2013, self-defined communities generate and implement
thousands of change initiatives each year. For example, the ReadyMix
Network, which brings together specialists from more than 50
counties, was instrumental in developing the company’s first global
brands and related value-added services, which now account for a
third of Cemex’s total revenue. The lesson?
Change comes naturally
when individuals have a platform that allows them to identify shared
interests and to brainstorm solutions.
Change
platforms take advantage of social technologies that make large-scale
collaboration easy and effective. But they are qualitatively
different from the idea wikis and social networks commonly used
today. The difference isn’t primarily about specific features;
rather, it’s in the encouragement individuals are given to use the
platform to drive deep change.
Specifically, effective change
platforms:
- encourage individuals to tackle significant organizational challenges; that is, those that are typically considered beyond an employee’s “pay grade” or sphere of influence
- foster honest and forthright discussion of root causes and, in the process, develop a shared view of the thorniest barriers
- elicit dozens (if not hundreds) of potential solutions rather than seeking to coalesce prematurely around a single approach; the goal is first to diverge, then to converge
- focus on generating a portfolio of experiments that can be conducted locally to help prove or disprove the components of a more general solution, as opposed to developing a single grand design
- encourage individuals to take personal responsibility for initiating the change they want to see and give them the resources and tools necessary to spur their thinking and imaginations
Guiding
a process of socially constructed change is neither quick nor
easy—but it is possible and effective. The biggest obstacles to
creating robust change platforms aren’t technical. The challenge
lies in shifting the role of the executive from change agent in chief
to change enabler in chief. This means devoting leadership attention
to the creation of an environment where deep, proactive change can
happen anywhere—and at any time—and inspiring the entire
organization to swarm the most pressing issues.
Gary
Hamel is
Visiting Professor of Strategic and International Management at the
London Business School. He cofounded the Management Innovation
eXchange (MIX) with Michele
Zanini, who
serves as its managing director.
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