Changing Change Management

The dizzying array of articles about change management (including this one!) reflects the importance that the effort has — and, the range of participants who acquire an explicit stake in it or responsibility for it.

The collective information and examples should have yielded very high quality practical knowledge by now. Yet we keep on turning it over again.

One reason why the topic seems so resistant to being “settled” is because (as is repeatedly claimed) no amount of discussion has resulted in the perceived “failure” rate dropping below 65% of the reported efforts.

Another reason is the pace of change. Circumstances expected to most need managed change are themselves constantly evolving and the evolutions are accelerating, both socially and technologically.

A third related reason — and a big one — — is the cumulative inconsistency of the discussion literature, which features brands, sub-brands, sub-sub-brands, and fetishes of change. Too often they don’t provide a perspective that puts their specific assertions in a context reflecting your type of needed change.

The complication fueling inconsistency is that change models and management models are two different things. Unfortunately, the distinction is often ignored or confused, under the influence of novelty, authority or sheer inexperience.

Management models include ways to account for many factors such as risk, conservation, prioritization, compliance, transparency, and numerous other things that may not occur without management. Management models would typically dwell on the ways that these factors are systematically incorporated into reasons for and ways of producing, monitoring, communicating, interpreting, and sustaining them.

But the key point there is that these are management issues, not change issues.

In other words, we need to be able to define change independently of defining management. Having done that, we can get back to a rational discussion of what affects management might predictably have on change.

Factors of change are different from factors of management, and they also get modeled whether the change is managed or not. The essential factors of change have to do with what kind of distinction is needed, recognized, likely to occur, and persistent enough for its occasion. Those factors are all influenced by the agency of its production and by the affected parties.

Management imposes intentionality on change. This is normally a desirable fact, but it is in no way meant to say that change without management is likely to fail.

It is not meant to say that 65% of intentional change efforts should not have been intentional or should have been intentional in some different way than they were.

But it is meant to say this: to make good decisions about where and how to apply any model of management to any model of change. understanding the scope of “intentionality” is probably a prerequisite.

In the following illustration, we have a “bird’s eye” view of the interaction of management and change. This “high-level” representation stages a survey of “change management” that works without dependencies on schools, trends, or domain-specialized lexicons.