Key points:
Myth#1 –You Need Reward and Recognition to Drive Change in Behavior
Myth # 2 – You Need a Change Manager and a Change Team
Myth# 3 – You Apply Change Maturity Models to Design Your Approach
I write this article in the hope that we seriously re-assess how the practice of Change Management has evolved and become destructive. Let’s go back to basics with realities that work! I write this not only for Change Managers (CM), but mainly for CEOs, COOs, CIOs, Transformational Leaders and Change Sponsors. Know that there is still value in the practice of Change Management and the standards that have evolved as long as they are applied in the appropriate context while recognizing that they are limited. As CMs, we need to educate ourselves with the bigger picture and the various interacting systems we operate in. Like it or not, we are in the business of changing people’s lives. We facilitate the creation of value. We remind leaders to appreciate diversity from which innovation springs. We remind leaders the humility to allow emergent solutions in the face of uncertainty. We remind leaders what it is to have a heart. We remind leaders to make sustainable choices. We facilitate alignment of values and the “spirit” of an organization.
Being template-fillers have reduced us to our lowest common denominator. It is time we have the courage to bust myths that are destructive. We need to provide a more useful lens with which to view change.
When we go beyond limiting standards, we fulfil our best potential as a force for positive social transformation. Our world needs it more than ever.
Three Destructive Myths of Change Management
In 1996, I started my profession in organizational development, change and transformation. Since then, I have seen first principles* packaged and re-packaged into fads that come and go. Change Management evolved. Standards sprung that have become obstacles to the very change they were meant to enable. They became entrenched into professional standards, competencies and certifications. Change Managers got recruited, reviewed and rewarded for some of these costly, value-destroying practices.
You see, some of us have known this all along. Only recently did it become very salient for me that I can no longer keep quiet. I have to say something.
I ventured from the corporate sector into the humanitarian international development sector. International development is like a different universe altogether. I found myself thrown into the deep end of evaluating strategies, programs and services of a human rights organization in a developing country. I found myself engaging stakeholders unlike I’ve never met in the corporate. The usual frameworks, methodologies and templates that have become standard in change management weren’t necessarily workable. In fact, they would’ve been destructive had I mindlessly applied them.
Co-intelligence was imperative. Not just for organizational change, but more so for social transformation. By being open-minded, I took into context the local frames of reference, working co-operatively to discover emergent solutions together with the leaders and their stakeholders. Together, we created approaches that not only work for them, but ones that they own.
It is in this practice of co-intelligence that I busted three myths of change management, bringing to fore realities imperative for change that works and change that lasts.
For some of you, these are not new. We’ve known these all along.
Myth#1 –You Need Reward and Recognition to Drive Change in Behaviour
Reality: Shared Values Drive Successful Change and Will Make Life More Meaningful For You
I dealt with empowered leaders who were not driven just by KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). What drove them were social consciousness, doing what is right, facilitating social change, advocating equality especially for the disadvantaged and keeping leaders to task. In fact, it would have been offensive to incentivize change with the typical rewards of recognition, promotion or benefits in cash or in kind. This is an organization that ran out of funding, and had to operate out of their pockets for a few months. They pushed on driven by their beliefs, by what they stand for. Their values got them through the most challenging times that have made others simply close shop.
They are the most high-performing group I have ever come across – and they are having so much fun while at it!
A lot of organizations aspire to be values driven. Yet when it comes to driving or changing behaviors, values get easily forgotten. KPIs become an easy crutch. How many change strategies or plans have we come across that insist on adding more KPIs to drive change and lose focus on values? The worst approach I have seen is multiple change initiatives competing for a space in an overly crowded balanced scorecard that ironically, no longer has any semblance of balance. No wonder “change fatigue” got added to the vocabulary of change management.
The reality is that, change happens when it is driven by shared values from the top-down and bottom-up. Yes, to a certain extent, I still believe what gets measured gets done –that is, if you want to maintain the status quo. Nothing is as powerful and as transformational as being driven by passion for what you believe in.
Myth # 2 – You Need a Change Manager and a Change Team
Reality: You Need Change Leadership within the Existing Structure To Get Things Done
You would think that an organization who has a network of more than 215 organizations internationally, manage relationships with a network of more than fifty grassroots organizations locally, deal with cross-border issues from human trafficking to labor abuse, contributing to bilateral and multilateral negotiations – you would think they would need an army of staff. But no, I was surprised that a core team of four women – empowered feminists as they call themselves – are able to locally and internationally make a huge difference to people’s lives. The government agencies consult them. Politicians engage with them for bills and laws. Migrants with issues from different countries seek their assistance. Their beneficiaries span the globe. International organizations seek their help to mainstream international instruments, bilateral and multilateral agreements concerning multi-sectoral issues. They are policy advocates, researchers and think-tanks for transformation.
It was humbling they asked me to be their organizational development advisor and help them with strategy, change and improvement. I did. They implemented. One thing was clear: they did not need a change team. Let alone a change manager. They simply had the change leadership to get things done.
Myth# 3 You Apply Change Maturity Models to Design Your Approach
Reality: You need Co-intelligent Design to Establish Ownership of Change and Make it Stick
Prevalent change maturity models are fundamentally flawed. The problem with prevalent maturity models of change is that they are framed within a limited perspective of mechanistic models of organization, a legacy of the industrial revolution. These are intrinsically linear frames that limit progressive applications of first principles from system dynamics, double-loop organizational learning, positive organizational psychology, let alone new developments in cognitive neuroscience. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, until you start applying a limited model inappropriately generalized beyond the context it was designed for – inadvertently destroying value instead of creating it.
Using maturity models as a lens, I would have grossly misjudged the high-performing team I was dealing with to be grossly ineffective operating at a level I maturity. For most models, this means “ad-hoc” or lack of visible structured approach, which can get easily confused with “intuitive”.
Using commonsense, bar none, I recognized I was dealing with one of the fastest-learning organization I’ve come across of all clients I’ve dealt with. They were evidently highly effective based on their social impact: the policies they successfully advocated that took effect, life-and-death international negotiations that helped migrants in distress, etc. They are by no means perfect. Otherwise, they would have had no need for me. Asking what were their gaps within the limited framework of a 5-level maturity model would have been intellectual arrogance and simply naïve. I instead asked, what were they doing right? What frameworks apply in their domain? Working together, we applied a more suitable model such as Theory of Change and Logical Framework – widely applied in the domain of international development, but was not part of the business Change Management vocabulary.
In all humility, I learned more from them than they had from me. And it is only through co-intelligence that we discover this, and uncover the resources that already exist and/or is accessible to achieve successful change.
Notes:
1. First principle – “is a basic, foundational proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption” – Wikipedia. In the practice of organizational effectiveness, which include in its scope change management, there have been really few first principles underpinning the profession primarily drawn from the domain of organizational psychology, social science and cognition. The problem with certifications and standardized competencies in change management is that these do not encourage practitioners to understand and apply first principles. The ability to think big picture and co-develop approaches across different domains and perspectives require a good grasp of first principles.
2. The Co-intelligence Institute is a very rich resource for co-intelligent design. The site provides tools that change managers and leaders can readily apply.
3. I personally like using maturity models as they are effective frames of reference in creating roadmaps for change. Level 5 — or the highest level of maturity for change — in some models, reflect exactly what I am describing: being intuitive and highly adaptive. The problem with having a 5-scale model to begin with is that this thinking presupposes linear progression. Well, turned out, some organizations who are capable of leap-frogging and double-loop learning that don’t necessarily fit a linear progression. This is where co-intelligent design comes in.
4. “Intuitive approach” is often misunderstood as ad-hoc or level 1maturity. Imagine if the 5-level maturity model is applied to individuals. That just goes against the very foundation of positive psychology, the widely accepted notion of flow and high-performance. As an outsider looking in, people in flow do not seem to “think”. They operate intuitively, almost instinctively. They look as though they are “ad-hoc” with no observable structure, when in fact what is being demonstrated is “unconscious competence”. Fluid. Adaptive. Anti-fragile. Only when you are a highly skilled modeler of behavior (coding and decoding behavioral programming and patterns) would you uncover the system in the chaos. Similary, only when you are grounded on first principles of organizational behavior would you be able to deconstruct what makes an organization effective and create a suitable model.
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