The Harvard Business Review (HBR) weekly poll cites John Kotter’s definitive work on leading change featured in the well known HBR article, Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail.
“Although Kotter’s advice for leading change is well-known, successful organizational change is still notoriously elusive.”
I have written before about the missing results from the field of change management and how change leaders are saddled by surface level change management best practices. This is why I write about why change management needs a big dose of design thinking — a problem solving methodology to design successful change. Change is filled with challenges, problems, the unanticipated. Leading change without a problem solving methodology is similar to getting your car stuck in the snow without a shovel. No problem solving tools, no shovel, and you’re stuck. If there’s any blip in your plan, which there will be, you have a problem to solve. Change management training that doesn’t teach you how to solve problems is… well, failing to give you shovel when you get stuck.
I welcome your thoughts. Do you use a problem solving methodology along with your change management methodology?
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Successful OCM is not about problem-solving methodologies; it is about engaging employees and impacted stakeholders as partners in the process instead of informing them of a done-deal and treating them as an incidental audience. The statistics on failed change are clear – perpetuating autocracy and mismanaging employee adoption are among the most significant contributors to project failure.
Hi Henry,
Thanks for the comments. Consider your statement turned into a question, "How might we engage employees and impacted stakeholders as partners in the process instead of informing them of a done-deal and treating them as an incidental audience?" That's a question, a problem to solve. Not everyone knows HOW to engage people in the solution. That's why I believe a problem solving methodology like design thinking is a powerful and complementary discipline to change management. Design thinking is a human-centered approach to problem solving to engage others to realize change. Design thinking is way of thinking that embraces collaboration, participation, empathy, and exploration. The tools of designer are all about engaging others. I.e. brainstorming, observation, storyboarding, positive defiance, prototyping, and so on.
Thanks again for your comments.
Kind Regards,
Melissa
Take a look at Dave Koehn and Rich Adler's approach to change called CALM — Change Adaptation Learning Model. Quite unique and is a parigigm shift in the thinking about change.