Consider three typical checklists and consider how the change agent should choose between them.

Read the following and answer the questions:Chapter 10: Change Management Perspectives 

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Options for Managing Change
Change Is Disruptive—Live with It

A true transformation is disruptive. It doesn’t just work with the existing governance, the existing processes, the existing budgeting cycle, the existing ways of doing things. It is going to disrupt. And it’s going to create challenge and tension and friction in the organization. Because it is so disruptive, it’s also a top priority of the organization. This is not something that can be third or fourth down in the CEO’s list of things he or she must do. We view those characteristics as being necessary co-travellers to delivering a true transformation of the company. (Bucy et al., 2017a, pp. 2–3).

The perspectives discussed in this chapter include change management checklists, stage models, and process and contingency theories. They offer advice on managing change, but make no mention of the personal styles and preferences of individual change managers. Let us first fill this gap.

The Director and Navigator Images of Change Management

Two of our six images of change management are particularly relevant to the approaches explored in this chapter. The director image underpins the change management approaches associated with the work of large consulting companies, and also of academics who work as change consultants in this field. Those who adopt such approaches take a strategic view, adopting a pragmatic, managerialist approach to achieving lasting organizational change. The checklists and stage models that we explore fall into this category. They suggest that change can be managed and controlled in a predictable manner as long as the correct steps are taken, in more or less the correct sequence. However, given the number of different sets of recipes and frameworks that are available, it is not always clear which to adopt, or the criteria on which the choice should be made.

Contingency frameworks can also be seen as consistent with the director image. Rather than claiming to have discovered “the one best approach,” however, these frameworks argue that “it depends” on a number of context factors, such as the scale and urgency of the proposed changes. For example, one of these contingency frameworks, the change kaleidoscope (Balogun et al., 2016) does not offer prescriptive advice on how to implement change in particular contexts. That framework instead highlights for the change manager the contextual issues to consider when reaching an informed judgment with regard to change implementation design options. This approach is also consistent to some extent with the navigator image of change management. Change can be controlled in part, but external factors (contextual enablers and constraints, competing interests) can generate emergent and unintended outcomes over which the change manager has little or no influence.

The idea of establishing “fit” between change implementation and organizational context is not consistent with a processual view of change. Process theories see change unfolding over time in a messy and iterative way and thus rely on the image of change manager as navigator. Here, the change outcomes are shaped by a combination of factorsPage 321 including the past, present, and future context in which the organization functions; the substance of the change; the implementation process; political behavior, inside and outside the organization; and the interactions between these factors (Dawson and Andriopoulos, 2017). The role of the change manager is not to direct, but to identify options, accumulate resources, monitor progress, and to navigate a path through the complexity.

It is therefore important for change managers to be aware of, and perhaps on many occasions to put to one side, their preferred image of change management. It is also important that managers are comfortable with their actions, with regard to both personal capability and how actions are perceived to fit with the context. However, implementation design decisions should ideally be more heavily influenced by the context factors that we explore in this chapter than by personal considerations.

LO 10.1 Why Change Fails
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. (Albert Einstein)

Trying is the first step towards failure. (Homer Simpson)

In this chapter, we explore approaches to implementing organizational change effectively, drawing on a range of change management, processual, and contingency perspectives. First, however, we will explore why change fails. If we understand the common mistakes, perhaps we can avoid them.

Ask a group of managers to reflect on their experience and to identify what to do to make organizational change fail. Their response usually comes in two stages. First, they laugh. Second, they generate without difficulty a list of practical actions to guarantee that an initiative will not be successful. Table 10.1 illustrates the typical results of such a discussion. This suggests two conclusions. First, ensuring that change fails—should one wish to do that—is not difficult. There are many tools at one’s disposal, involving a combination of actions and inactions. Second, if we have such a good understanding of what can go wrong, then getting it right should be easy. Just turn the negatives around: clear vision,Page 322 commitment and leadership support, honest communication, simplicity, break down the silos, highlight successes and positives—and so on. Sadly, while this approach is helpful, “getting it right” is not this easy.

TABLE 10.1
How to Make Change Fail: A Management View

From his research into over 100 companies (most but not all American), John Kotter (2007; 2012a) argues that transformational changes often fail because of the mistakes that are identified in table 10.2. Understanding what not to do, Kotter turns these mistakes into a positive model of successful transformation. That involves careful planning, working through these issues more or less in sequence, and not missing or rushing any of them—which takes time. However, given the rapid pace of contemporary change, many organizations perhaps try to take too many shortcuts, to put change in place quickly, and get it wrong as a result.

Although it may be an oversimplification to claim that successful change just means avoiding these mistakes, they should be avoided nevertheless. It is also important to recognize that there are many of these mistakes, and that in any particular setting, several of those factors may be combining to ensure that the change program fails. Success or failure can rarely be explained with reference to only a single factor. What are the costs involved in avoiding these mistakes? Almost all the remedies are cost-neutral, involving changes in leadership and management style and in organizational policies and procedures. In short, while ensuring that change will fail involves little or no cost, most of the actions required to “get it right” are also free.

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LO 10.2 Change by Checklist

There is a certain relief in change even though it be from bad to worse; as I have found travelling in a stage-coach, it is often a comfort to shift one’s position and be bruised in new places.

The landscape of practical advice for the change manager is dominated by simple checklists. These have also been described as “n-step recipes,” where n is the number of items on the list. This approach is open to the criticism that it oversimplifies a complex process. However simplified, it is probably accurate to claim that, in most cases, if the change manager does not follow most of the advice in these checklists, then the change program could run into trouble.

Checklist approaches to change management assume that the process is logical and linear and can therefore be controlled by planning and then following the correct set of steps. This “rational linear” model of change has been widely criticized, but it remains popular with professional bodies and management consultancies. This is probably because these checklists or recipes codify what is usually a messy and iterative process and thus offer the busy change manager straightforward advice on what to do to improve the chances of success. In this section, we will consider three typical checklists and consider how the change agent should choose between them.

The Boston Consulting Group’s DICE Model

Management consulting companies typically develop their own recipes, often with a memorable acronym. The DICE model developed by the Boston Consulting Group, for example, identifies four factors that determine whether a change program will “fly or die”: Duration, Integrity, Commitment, and Effort. These four factors are outlined in table 10.3 (Sirkin et al., 2005).

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