Top Tips for Planning Organizational Change - Part 1

Organizational Change Management can be significantly easier than organisations currently make it. This is also true of our historical efforts at organizational change.

This article features four top tips to help combat change challenges and make your changes activities that little bit easier.

Most organizations do not, despite protestations, apply their organizational knowledge to facilitate organizational change planning.

Regardless of the previous change activities and the pro forma efforts at lessons learned, there is often flawed "Groupthink phenomenon" applied to planning the current or next change. There is passive or even active knowledge and experience resistance within the planning process.

Think about how difficult (for difficult, read almost impossible) it is to have a value-based lessons learned workshop during or at the end of a change. This should be relatively easy to achieve though often isn’t. Why so?

Culture, taking two rough cuts here, can be either an accelerator or blocker to effective organizational change. Most organizations have a page or two on their websites about their culture and the positive benefits brought to organizational life and customer or service delivery.

Reality often differs from the description. The gap between reality and statement is a significant factor in creating a robust change plan. As the popular announcement on the London Underground system goes; mind the gap between the train and the platform!

What is the gap between stated culture and reality in your organization? Where does it show-up in your change planning process?

Any gap will have a significant effect and impact on creating a robust change plan. The bigger the culture/reality Gap, the bigger the impact. Does your change readiness reflect fact or fiction?!

Here’s a thought: should you be creating a change plan or a change planning process/method? I’m sure you have heard, or even said… “we need to get back on plan”. Why so?

A plan and a change plan are no different; it’s an organizational best guess given a specific set of circumstances/assumptions at a specific point in time with a specific set of deliverables. That is a considerable number of variables, with all of them dynamic rather than fixed.

Creating a plan is a useful activity allowing measurement and structure to the delivery timeframe. It’s useful to remember though that a plan is not planning. An organizational culture supporting a planning mindset increases the chances of implementing effective organizational change.

Think about continuous process improvement; this is a dynamic process.

A plan tends to be static whilst planning is dynamic, reflecting the emergence of delivery realities.

A current example: how many organizations had a plan to manage a pandemic? How many of those same organizations transitioned to a planning process as every variable became more dynamic and multiplied?

Culture and process positively combined can create a continuous organizational change mindset which can be a real accelerator for effective change.

The effort in creating a plan can be significant. This can create a particular mindset and behaviours – consciously or unconsciously – that are resistant to adopting planning rather than a plan.

How Agile is your organizational plan/planning process? Even if the organization hasn’t partly or fully transitioned to an Agile operating model, it could still utilize the elements of the mindset and principles.

As we move further into 2022, there remains a barrier to organizational change planning which is an oxymoron in that taking thinking time is not always seen as time well spent. Much better to “do stuff”. Even though there’s a good chance some of this “stuff” isn’t really what’s required and/or effective.

Thinking time with the appropriate focus and people can be extremely valuable in the change planning and delivery phases. It has the potential to deliver the biggest impact at the least cost of any key activity.

Here’s an experience-based question: why is it organizations seem to value doing things quickly and then doing other things when the initial things are proven to be ineffective?

And another, related question: why is it organizations can always find the “doing things” funding but are reluctant to find or allocate the “thinking” funding?

One of these papers-over organizational waste while the other has the potential for creating value.

Quite a simple summary, really. There’s a lot more to planning organizational change than there is creating a change plan. And be sure to allocate genuine thinking time; it will be time well spent!

Part 2 to follow soon!