Our role in change isn’t to ‘manage’ it.
It’s about enabling others to run with it.
There’s a reason the phrase ‘change is a constant’ now sounds tired and clichéd: the world has never been a static place. Change occurs whether we plan it or not. Similarly, the idea we can harness and direct the flow of change on behalf of other people through the practice of ‘change management’ is also tired and clichéd.
So where does that leave this discipline now?
We sat down with STCK’s Head of Adoption and Influence Cate Maguire and Strategic Design Director Steve Graham to chat about what’s next for transforming the people side of change.
Cate, you’ve been ‘doing change’ for nearly 15 years now. What’s changed in change?
CM: At the start of my career, the change management discipline was working hard to tie itself to project management effectiveness. As practitioners, we had to spend our time proving the impact we could make to our projects’ return on investment, all to justify a few lines in the budget for communication and training activities.
In true Waterfall delivery style, we were brought in at the tail-end of projects, just in time to deliver the comms and training that would translate a new system, process or org design into reality. We were often required to follow strict methodologies and detailed templates to understand and plan for change needs caused by a solution that was already designed and mostly built by the time we arrived.
The strange part for me was how this strict approach to governance was seen as helping to manage the risk of the change failing. Inevitably, governance was not the solution to that problem.
This approach always bothered me, because it was based on traditional industrial organisational models which assume that organisations generally operate in a stable state and that change is an exception to the status quo rather than the norm.
In the course of those early years, I saw a big shift in the role for this discipline in large organisations like the ones I previously worked in: practitioners were being asked to contribute more to upfront business case development, project scoping and partnering with business analysts to better understand the needs of those the change directly affected.
In the past ten or so years, I’ve seen newer approaches pop up to complement ’new’ production and delivery approaches like Agile, which (ironically) is 20+ years old, and Lean, which is nearly 30 years old. And of course, in the past five years, change managers have started to bring more influence from human-centred design to what they do.
Why do you both think a shift is needed?
CM: While all of these are valid, organisations and problem-solving approaches continue to evolve. Taking a prescriptive approach based on methodologies inhibits our ability as practitioners to flexibly use the base concepts of change management in more creative, diverse and effective ways.
The clue to the challenges we’ve seen in this discipline comes from part of the name we’ve traditionally given to what we do: ‘management’. This discipline was born of trying to manage the impacts of something a business does as it affects people and translate that effects of this vision downwards.
People are complex, unpredictable and unique. It’s a much harder job to ask people to change themselves to suit something new than to ask them to help shape something new that suits them.
SG: I think too often, organisations think they can manage all change the same way. Regardless of what the change is, it's a one-size-fits-all, everyone-needs-to-get-on-board, go-and-do-it approach. The problem is, they're ignoring the nuance, culture and differences across their organisation that might make a change get adopted.
It no longer works to just have a leader who says ‘we're going this way’ and everyone trusts and goes with them.
The world is now shifting to a place where you have to bring people along on the journey.
I think we’re seeing more emphasis on the need to allow people to come to their own decisions about the change they need to adopt, rather than having things forced on them.
We need to better understand why a change is required and what that means in the context of the lives of the groups and individuals who need to take on that change. When you're doing that, you'll inevitably have to question whether the change is the right thing, so it's kind of forcing you to consider if your strategy, your organisation and people all align. It makes everything more holistic.
What’s missing in change management today?
CM: Even now we’ve seen the shifts to newer ways of producing and delivering, there still seems to be a focus on doing ‘some change activities’ to get people to change, rather than enabling a change that people will drive themselves. Really, we should be creating the right conditions for people to create and make their own change in connection with the vision.
This is why STCK bases our perspective on the human side of change on the concepts of Adoption and Influence.
So, what has led you and STCK to the concept of Adoption and Influence?
SG: My career has been about helping organisations create visions for their future and how they can enable themselves to deliver on the vision. A big part of this is recognising that the end destination you have in mind will change as you work on making the vision real.
What I've learned is it’s really powerful and useful to have someone in your team with the skillset to help understand what it means for people to adopt new ways of working, practices, policies, processes, technologies, whatever it might be.
In my experience of working in large consulting firms, the best skills to do that tend to be from the change management discipline.
So, something that I've done throughout my career as a service design leader is incorporate those skills into my teams, which therefore helps you embed the things that drive change.
Because we were then tackling questions of how to embed new policies, how to help people adopt, how to help influence for the right level of engagement in the change, it prompted me to look at change through the lenses of influence and adoption – which is where the idea for this practice in STCK was born.
CM: We think what we should be doing is on two fronts.
Using the act of designing the change to help propel the change forward and make it stick (adoption). We do this by bringing the people the change affects into the design process and using this process to help them understand, desire and shape the change for themselves (influence).
This covers everyone from frontline teams, to the often difficult-to-engage middle layers, all the way to the highest leaders of the organisation. Each group has a vision for what a change should do to succeed and it’s in the best interests of the change to factor in these perspectives from the initiative’s get-go onwards.
As well as being STCK’s Head of Adoption and Influence, Cate volunteers as an IDEO U Alumni Coach for the Designing for Change course, helping learners from around the globe to design people-driven change movements.