In My Innovator Toolbox is Change Management 92.0
I have a new project involving corporate culture change. The project is constrained so that I cannot use John P. Kotter’s popular change management model. The same constraints also do not allow me to adapt from Henry Mintzberg’s later ideas that propose a different approach. Still, as an innovation practitioner, change management is in my toolbox developed and honed from relevant professional experience. I do think there is another way.
In his 1996 book (Leading Change, 1996 John P. Kotter, Harvard Business School Press) and the HBR article a year earlier, John Kotter suggested eight steps to change management based on errors why firms fail in transforming organizations. Among the eight steps are:
1. Establishing a sense of urgency;
2. Creating the guiding coalition;
3. .
4. .
5. Empowering broad-based action;
6. .
7. and,
8. Anchoring new approaches in the culture.
Professor Kotter’s book is a great read. His approach is also acclaimed by some of the great CEOs and managers. I heartily recommend it for a deeper understanding of the opportunities than the little to be gleaned from the summary above. Click the Amazon link below for more information about the book.
Henry Mintzberg in his Jul-Aug 2009 Harvard Business Review article (Rebuilding Companies as Communities) recommends a different approach built around strengthening the middle managers and building community. The HBR issue with the cover theme, “Managing in the New World,” is available on bookstands now.
He does have some critique of the Kotter approach that bear study and consideration. His main comment about the Kotter approach is that it is top-down and is dependent for continuity on that of the existing leadership.
Karl Popper calls the approach social engineering. It may not work in all change situations.
Both approaches have merit.
All these just tells me is that there is no generic approach that works in all situations. The correct one must be customized for the actual situation on the ground that is being changed.
The approach I have chosen for my project – the client is in the innovation business – emulates one of the great transformations of the 1980s that has been the subject of many books and case studies, in itself. I have chosen one of its most basic elements that I think will work in my project’s constrained situation. I should have initial results in six months of which some learnings I can share with you in SYNTHESiST. It will take a few years to see if real results embedded and institutionalized in the organization.
You are spot on! The technical leaders of change projects, especially those in the PMO, have long understood, at least at an intuitive level, that those models were not as effective at ground level. The difficulty leveraging the value of proven change models may lie less in the construct of any change model itself, and more in the challenge of applying a rational and uniform framework to the irrational and unpredictable elements of human behavior, especially on change projects. As Frank Lloyd Wright once said about architecture, “the architect’s most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board and a wrecking bar at the site.” So, too, with managing change, the most useful tools are those that help you behave adaptively once the project begins.
A change management methodology, much like an architect’s blueprint, provides the overall design and objectives for managing the human aspects of a project. But as you have discovered, it’s not enough. There is another level of change that takes a linear blueprint like Kotter’s and leverages the value of adaptive capability to “finesse” the change into place.
Successful change leaders have always applied this adaptive capability intuitively. Now we need to help all change leaders apply it consistently.