10 Hard Truths of Change Management

For more than 2,500 years, there has been one unavoidable truth about change – ever since Greek philosopher Heraclitus stated this (circa 500 BC): “Change is the only constant.”

In her recent CIO article, 10 hard truths of change management, writer Stephanie Overby builds on the above adage when it comes to IT: “Rather than tackle organizational change management with an end in mind, IT leaders and their organizations must now exist in an environment of persistent flux.”

She quotes Kevin Martin, chief research officer at the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) as saying, “In this era of continuous disruption, the goal should not be to build an organization that reacts quickly to change. Nor should it only be to build an organization that is almost impervious to disruption.

Rather, the goal should be to build an organization that succeeds via a systemic approach to managing amid change.” (Details on Pink’s systemic approach for this are provided later in this blog.) 

The list of senior IT leaders that Stephanie has quoted (below) are Kevin Martin, chief research officer at the Institute for Corporate Productivity; Matt Mead, CTO at SPR Consulting; Wanda Wallace, leadership coach and managing partner of Leadership Forum; Swamy Kocherlakota, executive vice president and CIO for S&P Global; and Wendy Pfeiffer, CIO of Nutanix. To see the attribution for each quote, please click here.

The 10 hard truths about change management that Stephanie identified that IT leaders and their teams need to deal with when leading and managing change are:

  1. Change is about people: First, last, always: “You cannot overemphasize the importance of three core elements in executing on any strategic change: your firm’s culture, leadership, and talent. To that end, it’s important to consider whether the culture will support or impede the change you seek and how to address those issues.”
     
  2. It’s not about your vision; it’s about their why: – “We’ve found at SPR that the first communications about a change should focus on why the change is happening. This could be expressed in the form of questions: Why is this change happening? and What is the risk of not changing?” While CIOs and business leaders have often had time to understand the rationale and wisdom of an initiative and what it will mean for them personally, others will also need some space to understand the impact.
     
  3. Change involves loss: “Even if someone loves the rationale for the change, they still have to grieve the loss of what was and the loss of the ease of knowing what to do, even if it wasn’t efficient.”
     
  4. It’s impossible to overcommunicate: “The first casualty of change is often information. Keep in mind that in the absence of communication, employees will fill in the blanks by themselves – forcing you to dig out of a hole of misinformation to establish messaging.”
     
  5. There is no try. Only do: “Clarity in measuring promise-and-delivery gaps is key. For every initiative, we have activities, leading indicators, and lagging indicators.” At the same time, he notes it’s important not to confuse ‘activity’ with outcomes in planning or communicating progress.
     
  6. Speed matters: It’s not just the execution, but how fast an organization can move from insight to action that can make the difference. Greater information transparency can help.
     
  7. Monolithic changes (almost) never work: “Early in our transformation journey, I read James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits, and was struck by the potential for us to adopt a much more iterative and gradual approach to implementing IT changes.” Making smaller changes over time yielded more significant and sustained operational improvements.
     
  8. Metrics are mandatory: “If you don’t measure it, it doesn’t matter.” “Take time upfront to determine how progress [in the desired change] will be measured, monitored, and reported. Define what the leading indicators of a successful change should be and put in place mechanisms to monitor the transformation progress.” “It’s important to think carefully about what we measure, and what we don’t measure.” 
     
  9. You can change more if you don’t care who gets the credit: It’s more effective to give the business more ownership of systems and changes with support from IT. “Today, we ensure that the company’s functional teams have a frictionless way to create, configure, and operate the services for which we provide technology. They are champions of their process and drivers of change, supported silently by the flexible technologies that IT provides.”
     
  10. Change (in IT) never ends: Organizations that are committed to improvement know that transformation truly never ends. It demands a mindset open to continuous change.

As Stephanie states in her article, “Maintaining the status quo is tantamount to going backward in IT.”

Pink invites you to move forward with us. All ten of the above hard truths are prominently featured in our systematic approach to organizational change management…

Pink Elephant’s Organizational Change Management Training Portfolio

At Pink, we walk the talk about change and the need for continual improvement. We’ve recently updated our own organizational change management portfolio – and have just introduced our brand-new Organizational Change Management Applied certification course. These modifications will better enable IT leaders and practitioners to successfully guide their organizations through change initiatives – especially the people side of change. Here’s a brief summary of each organizational change management certification course:

  • Our Organizational Change Management Essentials certification course provides the core concepts and practices intrinsic to organizational change management and advises on how to gain employee commitment and overcome resistance.
     
  • Our Organizational Change Management Applied certification course goes beyond learnings from the essentials course and provides actionable, practical solutions for IT leaders and practitioners to actually apply change concepts, theories, and models within their own organizations. Participants work with several case studies to complete a series of exercises that enable them to experiment with and practice applying the comprehensive framework, which includes the Pink 20/20 change model.

An entire track of Organizational Change Management sessions that are focused on meaningful subject matter and delivered by an unsurpassed lineup of speakers is being offered at Pink22 – our 25th Annual International IT Service Management Conference and Exhibition, June 19-22 at the incomparable Bellagio in Las Vegas…

Pink22
In addition to the organizational change management focused track, you will find content-rich sessions, delivered by some of the world’s most progressive IT leaders, with cutting-edge information on various frameworks and quality systems. These include, Lean, Agile Scrum, DevOps, cloud, remote working, business relationship management, IT asset management, sustainable IT, and much more.

You can also register for either or both of our organizational change management pre- and post-Pink22 conference certification courses being delivered in person in Las Vegas and – by taking advantage of our Spring Sale – conference attendees can save 50% off the cost! (Non-attendees can register for the courses, too, but won’t receive the discount.)

Spring Sale
Everyone can save 15% with our Spring Sale on numerous live, instructor-led virtual courses being delivered in April and May – and save 15% on our self-paced online certification courses. Please note purchases must be made by April 22, 2022 – and exams are included.

Stay in the Loop
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