IT'S OVER: Why we need to fall out of love with Change Management

We need to fall out of love with Change Management.

I recently ran my free Change Advisor Bootcamp, where a big point that I was making was about adding real business value.

One of the consulting tools I shared was the Experience Journey, a fabulous and engaging exercise to run if your project is stalled or not even started yet.

As I do, I asked the audience to co-create the Experience Journey with me by asking what type of activities could we do for a particular stakeholder persona to help them understand and come on board with the change.

Brainstorming change activities for stakeholders

For the next couple of minutes, the Zoom chat was abuzz with answers:

• Identify who will be impacted, what is changing, Change Impact Assessment, understand change impacts, impact analysis
• Stakeholder mapping, stakeholder engagement and plan, understand SME mappings
• Change Management strategy – discuss purpose, why value, benefits roadmap of the journey, save time and happier customers
• Change work plan, comms plan etc.
• What training will the staff need and when
• Pain points with the current process, job loss fears, managers reassuring staff of their new roles
• Educate her on system improvements, advantages of automation, how job will be easier/more effective, create certainty on what is changing, when it’s changing etc.
• Map out current process steps/decision points/as-is activities and future state/new business processes
• Change readiness to see how is the team prepared to cope up with change and what needs to be done to help them effectively manage change
• Map out future state and how work will change/improve
• Identify and select change champions, assign change agents
• Key messages and narrative on why for the affected team members - what has impacted them and how the role has changed also, what is in it for them

The problem with surface-level Change Management

Now… these are perfectly acceptable answers when it comes to a well-defined and managed change.

But tell me what the problem is with all of them. There’s something they all have in common…

They’re more about what the Change Manager gets than they are about what the stakeholder gets.

These are all Change Management deliverables, but they aren’t Change Management delivery activities.

They are the behind-the-scenes scoping and planning, understanding and clarifying, theorising and philosophising.

And that’s not where the value is created with Change Management. Don’t get me wrong – we want to do these important change planning activities. But they actually don’t have the stakeholder at their heart, they have the Change Manager as their end user. They aren’t what stakeholders see, they aren’t what people care about, they aren’t going to shift the dial on engagement.

I don’t show projects or stakeholders my Change Impact Assessment. Most of the time, I don’t even show most leaders and teams my Change Plan. They get the outcomes of these strategy and planning tasks, not the outputs of the tasks themselves.

And this is the big difference between methodology and practice. Between theory and delivery. Between most Change Management courses and the way I approach and teach Change.

Because if you always talk in fluffy concepts with Change and focus on planning and preparing the Change Management tools and templates, you lose sight of the real focus: the Change Management delivery activities you actually give to stakeholders and what they experience is the critical part of change.

Reframing our focus for Change Management

So I helped the group to reframe and refocus on the change activities we could do to actually map out the stakeholder journey. And it wasn’t long before we were really playing with fire!

• Training – user manuals, training modules, screen recordings incl. navigation, cheat sheets with key shortcuts and links to videos, quick reference guides, training feedback, micro training etc.
• Drop-in sessions, 1:1s, discovery sessions, feedback sessions
• System demos of workflows
• Timelines
• Manager / SME focus discussions
• Superuser testing incl. customer use cases
• SharePoint resources folders
• Sandbox access
• Updates to policies, processes, role descriptions etc.
• Pulse surveys and feedback loops
• Support for customers
• Hypercare and BAU support and help for go live

The content in these activities can come later, but just mapping the types of activities we will do for stakeholders sets the tone, maps the experience, and helps us make sure we’ll have everything we need to help bring stakeholders on the journey and feel confidence. And the best part? You don’t even need the project to have kicked off to start the Change work.

So yes, I do think we need to fall out of love with our own Change Management theories, concepts, models and templates, and back in love with our stakeholders and their experience and engagement.

If you’d like to come learn how to do this, I’ll be running my first-ever live in-person Leading Successful Change program in August in Sydney. This isn't just a course; it's an immersive leadership training experience designed to equip you with the practical skills, proven strategies, and unshakeable confidence to navigate any change, big or small, and transform it into a resounding success.

After 4 years of my successful online Leading Successful Change program, it's the first time ever that I'm running the training live in-person and I'm SOOOO EXCITED!

Find out more about Leading Successful Change Live here

Let's make some magic happen and fall in love again.

Lata xx