2011 November | Horizontal Change Management

McKinsey, Changing in the Right Place and Missing Leaders

A recent McKinsey article, “Finding the Right Place to Change” illustrates a well thought out approach to directing efforts to the place in the organization that will adapt for the end state (of course not the way the authors worded it). What is interesting is that the approach focuses on finding the spot (people) where change will be the greatest and directing extra efforts there. That gets points on its own.

In the particular case they mentioned they switched from “communication” and “road shows” (in quotes because both look good on paper but tend to come across as sales pitches)

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The Change Management Arena

A staged, prescriptive event will be much the same the next time. Without the ability to be flexible the show is boring, the best gladiators will likely be eliminated and the ringmasters will have won with the crowd, obviously,losing.

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How can you possibly have 400 of anything? 400 Change Management Topics

My 400th Blog Post.

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A Magic List of Project Prerequisites

What this magic list is about is respect for a seasoned, reasoned external perspective. What this magic list is about are leaders who take responsibility for their roles as both visionaries and guides for change journeys. What this list is about is people doing work that connects to something important. It is a list about something important being the lever for shared work.

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Tips for Change in Virtual Environments

Most initiatives now are global. Many initiatives, and organizations, have some form of work at home option. At the initiative level extra pieces are now added (I have been on initiatives that had space moves, software upgrades, business process design and organizational redesign all at once) which increase the spread- increased spread equals some sort of virtual connection. To be all in one place, meeting together and talking face to face is not only rare now it is almost impossible.

How has this helped?

Work at home makes it much easier for stakeholders and team members to manage work and

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The Number One Stakeholder Complaint

The number one stakeholder complaint is absence of executive ownership and project connection to strategy (OK maybe that is two but they go together).

Some random thoughts on this:

Executives often think sending out communications shows their connection (not if the connection does not already exist).

Ownership is almost always passed one level down (Directors are leaders, but not owners of change).

Executives rarely have a list of tasks they are responsible for (managing other peoples tasks does not count as ownership).

Brown bag sessions (a great way to connect and show ownership) often do not go as well as

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Change- Let’s look at this a different way

Theoretically you could start doing without imaging. It turns out that is not the same as starting and then creating a plan. Believe me I see this all the time. Start doing without imagining and you will never get to the imagining. Without the imagining there will be no end state. And really doing is the easy part…

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Interesting patterns- reverting to status quo

Here is a pattern I am seeing repeated on engagements: reverting back,after having boldly tried something new, to a previous comfort level.

The most common is the project manager who after having heard the reason for a certain kind of engagement with stakeholders (maybe a frequency of communications, or a template that represents something or the addition of sessions to make better connection) goes back to a version they used in the past. Maybe they have their own macro enabled spreadsheet they are enamored with. Maybe they think communications ARE change management and so balk at the time and effort

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Being the End State

An interesting exchange cropped up recently in a LinkedIn forum- here for the full content.

Impressive peer of mine Bill Braun in illustrating an end state focus used an analogy of a 240 pound man who had decided he was 160 pounds.

“The 160 pound man in the 240 pound body, chose, in one moment, his future state.

In that same moment it was pretty clear that he did not actually weight 160 pounds. But he began being 160 pounds on the way to becoming 160 pounds.

For the sake of this conversation assume the ingredients he would

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Internal Change Management Consultants- todays oxymoron

I should have said practitioners. It is hard to be a consultant within. The consultative level tends to be about how to be the best at status quo. Our oxymoron: If change is the opposite of status quo and internals are measured on status quo then how can there be internal change management consultants? Oxymoron.

Of course there can be. What they practice though is Tactical Change Management.

Tactical change management fills in the blanks. This is usually because they work side by side with the project managers. In fact large organizations if they have a “change process” usually layer

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