Cost Benefit of Change Management

I recently  had the pleasure to meet Lizette Tucker from US based firm Arrowhead Strategic Consultants in Paris. Lizette is looking to expand her business in France, as she seems to like our country very much. I did warn her that the initial enthusiasm may fade away as she slowly discovers the downsides of our country: in other words she may go through a steep change curve!

Our conversation turned around a recurrent theme for change managers: the challenge of conducting a good change management cost benefit analysis. For example, how can we quantify the benefits of turning initially resistant people into an engaged force? The task is not too difficult if a change management program is the one and unique answer to a business problem: if for example a program is carried out to change the behaviours of plant personnel to improve safety, then you would just take the usual safety performance indicators as a measure of success. 

It becomes however more difficult if change management is only one part of a global program for example in a merger or an ERP implementation. How can you then precisely quantify the contribution of change management to the overall results of the program? Lizette has been working on a cost benefit analysis tool, currently under test, that should be able to help us answering this question. 

Until then, here are a few key benefits I usually like to stress out:

• Avoid bad surprises: anticipate, understand resistance to change, and therefore prevent it from causing damage at the wrong time and jeopardising the project.
• Help building momentum: by installing a sense of urgency to change and giving people responsibilities, opportunities to take ownership of the change. The result is that they will start taking their own initiatives that will install the change, initiatives that the change leaders wouldn't have thought about themselves 
• Develop a know-how: engaging, empowering, explaining, listening, adapting; all of which are actions that, done over and over again change after change, will enable the organisation to change faster, naturally. 

Implementing a sustainable development initiative

I'd like to share with you a few slides which purpose is to give some hints for successfully implementing a sustainable development initiative, viewed from a behavioural change angle. Acting "greener" is something relevant to many of us (it should even be all of us) and is very much about how we can install new behaviours. I'd be very interested in your (constructive) feedback and comments. 

Sustainable development Initiative

View more presentations from Christophe Lastennet.

What Makes Change Easy or Difficult to Implement? Determining the Change Capacity

With a success rate for change initiatives as low as 30%, you may say there is no such thing as an easy change to implement. The assumption is certainly a good one to have to make sure you don't underestimate your change management efforts required. Some changes prove to be more difficult than others to implement. It can be because of the nature of the change, its depth, the context, the way it is managed and the level of preparation.

As soon as the vision of the change becomes clear, several questions typically arise for the change leader: can I make this happen? What problems can I expect and how will I solve them? Will people resist? What will help me through the journey? To start drawing a clear picture of what lies ahead, there are 4 parameters, you ,as a change leader, need to assess:

1. SF: the Strategic Fit of the change vision. In other words will the change support your company strategy? If the answer is yes, you will most likely be able to count on senior support and be able to remove barriers more easily. If the answer is no, the sustainability of the change will be jeopardised from day1.
2. SA: the Attractiveness of the change to its Stakeholders. The vision of a future that looks much brighter than present is clearly a strong motivational factor. What about redundancy programs or other changes looking initially negative? Resistance can be neutralised with this sort of programs if you make things clear from the start. Clarity is the first step to attractiveness. The attractiveness will also be different to the various stakeholder groups, which is why a global view is needed.
3. HI: Human Impact. What are likely to be the human consequences of the change and what efforts will be needed? I am talking about training, behaviours, culture and basically anything that means people will be impacted. A big human impact, like a major cultural change means a more challenging change to implement than having to train a certain population on a new software.
4. OI: Organisational Impact. To what extent will our processes, systems (management and information), organisational structure, have to be modified? New formal mechanisms take time to put in place and function properly. They represent a key factor to achieve behavioural change. Again, the larger the OI, the more challenging the implementation of the change.

These 4 parameters are the ingredients that will enable you to assess your change capacity, by definition the success potential of the change. The recipe comes next:

Change Capacity = SF x SA / (HI + OI)

What does it mean? This formula is meant to stress a few things:

• The higher the strategic compatibility of the change and its attractiveness, the higher the potential for success.
• A change that is totally incompatible with the strategy (SF=0) or totally unattractive (SA=0) has no chance to succeed
• The lesser the impact of the change, whether it be human or organisational, the higher the capacity to make it happen
• Changes with large organisational and human impact do not jeopardise your capacity to make it a success as long as their attractiveness and strategic fit remain high.

Assessing your change capacity will help you know where you stand before the beginning of the change journey. It may also help you finding the right depth of the change by comparing different change capacity results for different depths: for what change depth will the results expected, and therefore the stakeholder attractiveness most outweigh the efforts required by the impact?

How can I practically assess my change capacity? As a change leader, thinking yourself about these 4 factors and discussing them with other people involved will give you a sense of your initiative's success potential. A more thorough way of performing the assessment is by using a tool that will:

- assess each factor through a specific set of questions aimed at various stakeholders

- consolidate and quantify each factor

- determine the resulting change capacity index and benchmark it

Doing this exercise will help you prepare the journey. Preparation, as we know, is a large part of future success.

For more information about the change capacity formula, index and tool please contact me

What kind of change specialist are you?

On his excellent blog, “think for a change”, Paul Williams is asking: “what kind of innovator are you?”, referring to all the innovation specialty areas one can think of such as R&D, innovation management, new product development etc.
Reading this article reminded me of how change management/leadership/facilitation is often seen as a vast, unclear and too conceptual business area, particularly by SME’s managers busy with practical and operational business issues. To quote an ex-colleague: “my dentist could say he is doing change management”. Yes this has to do with how to explain change management in the most simple and practical way, but also being able to break it down into distinctive niches.
Thinking the exercise might be beneficial for myself, here is what I would call an early imperfect an incomplete attempt on a Mindmeister mindmap. And because we have now entered the age of online collaboration, don’t be shy to edit the map yourself here

From this early version, it is already clear that change management involves a wide range of specialties and competencies. Developing and rolling out a communication plan is very different from analysing the organisational impact of a change. From this, 2 questions:

1. What is my line of change management expertise?
2. Where do I need partners?

Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco

I have recently started to get acquainted with the reality of web 2.0, many thanks to Holger Nauheimer and his Change Management blog. Holger just went to the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco and came out with the conclusions quoted below. Key learning seems to be that Web 2.0 will be changing profoundly the way organisations work and interact with their stakeholders:

So, what's your executive summary? Web 2.0 has become mainstream, at least in the US and in Asia (so it will be mainstream in Europe in 1-2 years). It is clear what are the standard applications of social media for organizations, governments and non-profit communities. The tools have pretty much matured, and all further development just gives the cream on top of what we have already. It is now time to go vertical, i.e. deepen the diffusion of social media in organizations and society. This is a change project for most organizations, and for administrations anyhow.Holger Nauheimer, Change Management Blog, Apr 2009

How to avoid death by Powerpoint

If really powerful, a presentation can have a huge impact in a change process and contribute very clearly to change people's behaviour. Yet, we all know the difficulty of not falling into the trap of doing indigestive powerpoint slides with lots of bullet points, complex charts etc. In fact you could say it is quite simple to make complex slides and very complex to make simple slides.

Most people have also attended some sort of training on the subject and have learnt the ground rules like one message per slide, limited number of bullet points, visual aid, clear storyline etc.

For something that goes much more beyond those basic rules, www.vizthink.com offered last June an excellent webinar on powerful presentations by Nancy Duarte who actually advised Al Gore on his Inconvenient Truth presentation.

Link to the webinar: http://www.vizthink.com/blog/2008/06/18/webinar-creating-powerful-presentations-with-nancy-duarte/