WHY DO CHANGE PROJECTS FAIL?

SEEING THE WOOD FOR THE TREES

For all the investment, attention and organisation energy, the literature is littered with stories of

change programmes which have failed to deliver on their aspirations and objectives. What is perhaps more worrying is that there have never been more books, techniques, tools and ap-

proaches devoted to the subject… It’s not as if we’re not giving this a lot of thought – and in-vestment...

www.suleis.com If you want to use anything in this, please cite Sue Pritchard @ SULEiS Ltd sue@suleis.com

Someth ing f rom SULE iS

So why do change projects fail?

1. Leaders craft the solution before people agree what the problem is…

All too often, change processes follow from intensive strategy conversations in

darkened rooms with the boards and top team of the organisation, who take on the whole responsibility for articulating and solving the problem. The drivers for change are explored, debated and agreed and the solution is lovingly crafted –

often to be handed on to the OD team to make it work.

2. One way communication takes the place of real

engagement

Selling the solution, or even worse, calling it consultation but in a tokenist way, squanders

the opportunity to engage those who have to implement the changes. In the words of one

of our more ‘direct’ clients – “their ‘cascaded communication’ is our ‘p****d on from a great height’…” ‘Selling’ change starts from a con-

sumerist mindset that we know now simply does not work outside the world of washing powder or jeans.

3. Change leaders rubbish what has gone before

This is a particularly true when new leaders are brought in to turn an organisation or department around. They are appointed to ‘solve a problem’ and end up seeing

the whole organisation as ‘the problem’, without appreciating the fundamental rule that “...generally, things are as they are for good reasons…”

4. Change projects become fragmented

To make them manageable, programmes are organised into projects – the SAP project, the LEAN project, the Culture project, HR project and so on… with their

own leadership teams, aims and objectives. Without integrating mechanisms, this can lead to…

5. Delivering the change project overtakes delivering the change outcome

It becomes more important to tick the milestone boxes in the change project plan than to work intelligently and purposefully to-

wards the outcomes that are wanted.

At worst – a highly resourced and important change pro-

ject can default to a programmatic, command-and-control project, pushing top-down targets through disconnected organisation silos, generating unintended and unmanaged

consequences, failing to engage people and destroying trust, staff morale, customer satisfaction and reputation….

s u e @ s u l e i s . c o m

2

So what works?

There are two things to work on for effective change leadership.

How change programmes are organised and led

1. Engage the whole enterprise - including partners and customers - in understanding and exploring the case for change

2. Genuinely and curiously enquire into the different perspectives and positions on the

issues - even when they may sound difficult or disruptive

3. Seek out, appreciate and build on what works already.

4. Lead the project as a ‘system’, focussing on the interconnectedness of the parts – it is in the joins and the relationships that most problems occur.

5. Ensure that the change programme is – and be seen to be – in service of the business

or service task so that you focus on the outcomes you are creating for your customers, service users and people, not getting the ticks in the project plan...

The Change Equation – DxVxM > P (C) – still needs to be taken seriously.

D = the importance of hearing and giving voice to Dissatisfaction with the status quo – the ‘burning

platform’ for any change

V = a Vision, or belief about how this could be better

– in service of the real work of the organisation

M = the Means of getting started - or practical first

steps*

Must be Greater Than the Pain (or Cost) involved in change…

How we understand and work with why people change

The second area is to understand how and why people change. In spite of popular miscon-ceptions, human beings are perfectly capable of handling change. Time and again, we see examples all around the world of just how resourceful, resilient, creative, innovative, adaptive

and courageous we can be. And yet change programmes assume people ‘resist change;’ have to be ‘sold solutions’ and that all the intelligence and insight about the organisation -

along with responsibility for making things happen - resides solely at the top. These faulty assumptions are deeply rooted in our collective mindsets about people and organisations - and are implicit in the vast majority of leadership and change

literature.

Margaret Wheatley says “...there is no power greater than a

community discovering what it really cares about.”

So - how to develop the new leadership and facilitative skills to work with people and organisations at deeper lev-

els than we are currently used to – at the levels of our mindsets and assumptions, not just behaviours? Attend-s u e @ s u l e i s . c o m

3

ing to this – both at an individual level and at an organisational or cultural level – is crucial. And the latest research in human psychology supports this. Harvard’s Robert Keegan, in his

new book “Immunity to Change,” points to the latest thinking in cognitive development and suggests we are ‘hardwired’ to protect those deep mindsets and assumptions at almost any cost. If we do not take up the challenge to work at this level too, we will not properly address

the causes of ‘pain’ involved in change.

We need to do two things: first we need to examine our own mindsets and assumptions - to

challenge ourselves, become more reflexive and self aware about how we can ‘be more of the change we want to see;’ and second, we need to harness the new methods, and with them new metaphors, to mobilise peoples’ innate capacities for connection, innovation, improve-

ment, adaption and change.

* (not necessarily the whole project plan – for big complex change programmes we often use the analogy of stepping stones in the raging torrent – you know that they are there, just below the surface, but they only really become visible as you take your next step..)

See also:

• Leading Change – a guide to whole systems working. Attwood M, Pedler M, Pritchard S, Wilkinson D. The

Policy Press, Bristol, 2003.

• Complex Programmes: a whole systems approach, Pritchard S, in Project, October 2008

• Immunity to Change, Kegan R and Lahey L, Harvard Business School Press, 2009

s u e @ s u l e i s . c o m

4