Change is intensely personal. For change to occur in any organization, each individual must think, feel, or do something different. Even in large organizations, which depend on thousands of employees understanding company strategies well enough to translate them into appropriate actions, leaders must win their followers one by one. Think of this as 25,000 people having conversion experiences and ending up at a predetermined place at approximately the same time. Small wonder that corporate change is such a difficult and frustrating item on virtually every company’s agenda.
The problem for most executives is that managing change is unlike any other managerial task they have ever confronted. One COO at a large corporation told me that when it comes to handling even the most complex operational problem, he has all the skills he needs. But when it comes to managing change, the model he uses for operational issues doesn’t work.
“It’s like the company is undergoing five medical procedures at the same time,” he told me. “One person’s in charge of the root-canal job, someone else is setting the broken foot, another person is working on the displaced shoulder, and still another is getting rid of the gallstone. Each operation is a success, but the patient dies of shock.”
The problem is simple: we are using a mechanistic model, first applied to managing physical work, and superimposing it onto the new mental model of today’s knowledge organization. We keep breaking change into small pieces and then managing the pieces. This is the legacy of Frederick Winslow Taylor and scientific management. But with change, the task is to manage the dynamic, not the pieces. The challenge is to innovate mental work, not to replicate physical work. The goal is to teach thousands of people how to think strategically, recognize patterns, and anticipate problems and opportunities before they occur.
Managing change isn’t like operating a machine or treating the human body one ailment at a time. Both of these activities involve working with a fixed set of relationships. The proper metaphor for managing change is balancing a mobile. Most organizations today find themselves undertaking a number of projects as part of their change effort. An organization may simultaneously be working on TQM, process reengineering, employee empowerment, and several other programs designed to improve performance. But the key to the change effort is not attending to each piece in isolation; it’s connecting and balancing all the pieces. In managing change, the critical task is understanding how pieces balance off one another, how changing one element changes the rest, how sequencing and pace affect the whole structure.
One tool that companies can use to provide that critical balance is the Transition Management Team, a group of company leaders, reporting to the CEO, who commit all their time and energy to managing the change process. When that process has stabilized, the TMT disbands; until then, it oversees the corporate change effort. Managing change means managing the conversation between the people leading the change effort and those who are expected to implement the new strategies, managing the organizational context in which change can occur, and managing the emotional connections that are essential for any transformation.
Here’s the way most companies approach change: the CEO or division head announces, “We have to make some changes around here. The following people are appointed to a task force to come up with our new design. The task force will report back to me in 90 days.”
What happens next is predictable. The task force goes to work, closeting itself away in a meeting room, putting in long hours to meet the deadline. The members don’t talk with anyone else in the organization. They’re involved in trying to work out their own group dynamics and testing a lot of what-ifs. Among themselves, they agree: trying to keep everybody else informed is a diversion, a luxury they can’t afford. Once the 90 days are up, and it’s time to report to the boss, then the task force will figure out a way to let everyone else know what it accomplished.
