Delivering Transformational Chance

Delivering Transformational Change

Feature
Change is becoming more frequent, radical and complex. Failure rates of change projects are high because organizations fail to implement the change fully. To overcome these challenges, the knowledge, skills and processes must be developed by people inside the organization.

The leadership challenge
Demand for deep, sustainable change inorganizations is being driven hard by forces coming from all directions. Radical disruptions to competition, regulation, technology and customer expectations are creating an almost constant need for change. Shareholders are demanding more, from fewer resources. Empowered and innovative employees are mandated to find new ways to enhance profitability, business performance and competitive advantage—fasterthan ever before.
This new type of change is more difficult and complex. Business-critical global, regional and local change agendas are frequently overlapping, and often conflicting. Employees are becoming better educated and more questioning; they are much less receptive to autocratic, compliance driven leadership styles. While transformational change is difficult, disruptive and expensive,organizations are often faced with no real choice when the alternatives—standing still or putting faith in a superficial ‘quick fix’—are even riskier options.
Having a clever strategy is not enough—and successful organizations should proactively develop the internal capacity to implement change faster and more effectively than their competitors. Each change initiative must deliver the intended benefitsand contribute to developing overall change capacity. If corporate adaptability is to become embedded into the organizational culture, a prerequisite is that organizations successfully implement individual initiatives. Yet research consistently reveals high failure rates for transformational change initiatives:
* according to many independent studies seven out of ten change efforts that arecritical to organizational success fail to achieve their intended results.
* independent IT research firm Gartner Group reports that for major corporate systems investments:
♦ 28% are abandoned before completion
♦ 46% are behind schedule or over budget
♦ 80% are not used in the way they were intended to be or not used at all six months after installation.
“Having a clever strategy is notenough—and successful organizations should proactively develop the internal capacity to implement change faster and more effectively than their competitors.”
Many so-called failures are actually change projects that have been partially “installed”, rather than fully “implemented”. The organizational, strategy, process and technology components of a change initiative may have been put in placeeffectively, but are not being applied or used in the intended way with the required level of understanding, commitment and personal ownership. People readily slip back into their old ways of working when change leadership efforts are prematurely withdrawn.(Fig 1)

Executives regularly report familiar problems:
* changes either take too long to deliver their intended benefits, only realizebenefits in limited areas or are never completed.
* people, often already overwhelmed with their workload, become more cynical about the likelihood of any new changes being successful, particularly if there is a legacy of poorly implemented change.
* it is increasingly difficult to build sustained employee commitment to new changes.
* organizations become unable to deliver their corestrategies owing to high levels of resistance.
* limited genuine individual and organizational learning takes place, leading to over-reliance on external expert support and loss of control over business critical changes.
* leaders’ credibility is undermined as they ‘over-promise and under deliver’ through a lack of realism, discipline and competency, around the challenges of implementing major...