Concepts: Managing Organizational Change

Affecting organizational change is hard and understanding change is crucial to success. Humans resist change. There is some fundamental inertia, or some fear of the unknown that will slow down or even defeat attempts to change, and you need to harness the forces necessary to cause the change. In its simplest form we view the forces of change as a formula

Pain + desire = change

The fundamental tenant of this formula is that ultimately change is driven by emotions. Pain and desire are the forces which drive us to make a change, to accept a change. Pain is the catalyst that initiate a change, while desire is the force that pulls us towards a goal. A successful transition entails understanding and managing the perceive level of pain and the desire for a solution. This is what [CON92] calls pain management and remedy selling.

Pain management is identifying and communicating what the real problem is and why it is necessary to change. Sometimes finding the root cause of a problem can be very hard, but this will in the end be very valuable to initiate the change. It has been our experience that many of the root causes of problems are in the process or rather the absence of process.

Remedy selling contains two activities: solution selling and transition planning. It is not enough to describe the ideal goal, to define a solution, you also need to have a path from the current point to that goal with some clearly defined intermediate points.

The change will not happen, just because management said so; you need to identify the change agents, the set of individuals that will take on the mission to make the change happen.

The change agents must understand the pain, formulate the real nature of the problem and communicate it to the organization, so that it becomes really aware of its pain. Then the change agents must formulate and describe both the goal, and the path to the goal, and gain communicate it to the various parts of the organization. This communication is not simple. It is too easy to generalize about both problems and solutions. "everybody must be a team player. " is a sweeping generalization about how individuals should act but does little to initiate change. To affect change, the change agents, the ‘champions", must communicate in terms of tangible, quantifiable activities. [JEL93] speaks about levels of language:

• At 30,000 feet: indictment of ability.
  The focus will be only on the problem (or even symptoms of the problems), not on the solution. "The development group does not have a sufficient understanding of object technology."
• At 20,000 feet: high level solution.
  But still very little things concrete to start action. "You need to improve communication between teams."
• At 10,000 feet: specific actions but no qualification of scope.
  "Construct a use case model to capture the functional requirements of the next generation system."
• At ground level: concrete requests.
  Actions and measurements are communicated. At this level we are down to exactly what the organization should do. "The design of each subsystem will contain from 1 to 3 class diagrams, with some 7 to 10 classes."

The right ground level will naturally depend on to whom in the organization the message is addressed. The real value of a change agent is to be able to understand the overall solution, and then to articulate each step using ground level language, focusing on one change at a time.

To successfully implement a process change, the adopting organization must:

• Identify change agents at various levels in the organizations
• Plan the change, in small reasonable and measurable steps
• Communicate the changes using ground level language appropriate for the level of organization

This is the role of the process implementation plan, when we are changing the process.