Why do change projects fail?

Citation

Pritchard, S. (2010), "Why do change projects fail?", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 9 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/shr.2010.37209bab.005

Why do change projects fail?

Article Type: Q&A From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 9, Issue 2

Leading industry experts answer your strategic HR queries

Sue PritchardSue Pritchard is based at the Bath Consultancy Group.

Change programmes still fail to deliver on their aspirations and objectives, even with investment, leadership and all the organizational energy behind them. What is perhaps more worrying is that there have never been more books, techniques, tools and approaches devoted to the subject. However, some common mistakes are still made, including the following:

Leaders sell the solution before people agree what the problem is

All too often, change processes follow from intensive strategy conversations with the boards and top team of the organization. The problem or drivers for change are explored, debated and agreed and the change programme solution is lovingly crafted – often to be handed on to the OD team to make it work, who then engage the line in its implementation.

One-way communication takes the place of engagement

Selling the solution, or, even worse, calling it consultation but in a tokenist way squanders the opportunity to engage those who have to implement the changes.

Change leaders rubbish what has gone before

This is a particular issue when new leaders are brought in to turn an organization or department around. They are appointed to solve a problem and, in turn, risk seeing the whole organization as “the problem,” without appreciating the fundamental rule that “things are as they are for good reasons.”

Change projects become fragmented

To make them manageable, programmes are organized into projects – the SAP project, the LEAN project, the Culture project, the HR project and so on – with their own leadership teams, aims and objectives. Without integrating mechanisms, this can lead to fragmentation.

Delivering the change project overtakes delivering the change outcome

It becomes more important to tick the milestone boxes in the change programme plan than to really embed the outcomes that were required.

At worst, a highly resourced and important change programme can default to a programmatic, top-down approach pushing down targets through silos, generating unintended and unmanaged consequences. This fails to engage all the key players, creating negative effects on levels of trust, staff morale, customer satisfaction and turnover (Attwood et al., 2003).

So what are the antidotes to these common failings?

There are two dimensions of really effective change implementation. The first area is around how the programme itself is created, led and managed and best practice includes the following:

• •

  Ensure that the change programme is, and is seen to be, in service of the business or service task – the shared purpose of the organization.

• •

  Engage the whole of the enterprise (including partners and customers) in understanding and exploring the case for change as part of strategy development.

• •

  Lead the programme as a “system,” focusing on the inter-connectedness of the parts – it is in the joins and the relationships that most problems occur.

This reminds us that the change equation – DxVxF > R – still needs to be taken seriously (Beckhard, 1969). It involves the following:

• •

  D – the importance of corralling (or creating) a widespread, shared sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo – building the case for change.

• •

  V – a vision, or perhaps more importantly, a belief about how this could be better – in service of the real task or service of the organization.

• •

  F – the first steps (not necessarily the whole project plan – for big complex change programmes we often use the analogy of stepping stones in the raging torrent – you know that they are there, just below the surface, but they only really become visible as you take your next step.)

• •

  R – resistance, or the cost and the pain involved in change.

The second area, and the really challenging one, is to develop the new leadership and facilitative skills to work with people and organizations at deeper levels than we are currently used to – at the levels of mindsets and assumptions, not just behaviors. Attending to some of the deep and underpinning mindsets and assumptions, both at an individual level and at an organizational or cultural level, is crucial (Hawkins and Smith, 2006). And the latest research in human psychology supports this. Harvard’s Robert Kegan, in his new book Immunity to Change, points to the latest thinking in cognitive development and suggests we are “hardwired” to protect those deep mindsets and assumptions, or what he calls “competing commitments,” at almost any cost (Kegan and Lahey, 2009). If we do not take up the challenge to work at this level too, we will not properly address the causes of resistance to change.

There are six inter-related components to a successful change programme (Pritchard, 2008):

1. 1.

   Strategy. Engages all stakeholders, so that it is inextricably linked to the business task and its capacity for implementation.

2. 2.

   Governance. Balances the triple challenges of accountability, integration and drive for implementation.

3. 3.

   Culture. Understands the five components of culture and how to work with them.

4. 4.

   Program skills. Balances good programme management with the need to manage complexity.

5. 5.

   Leadership. Develops “post-conventional” leadership skills, such as distributed leadership, working with complexity and liberating the talent in the system.

6. 6.

   Learning. Ensures rapid cycles of feedback and acting on them, embeds processes for reflecting and acting on deeper patterns in the system and people and makes learning a public process so that intelligence is shared and used.

About the author

Sue Pritchard is a managing consultant with the Bath Consultancy Group, where she specializes in leadership, organization and “whole system” development in public, private and not for profit organizations. She was a visiting research fellow at Revans Institute for Action Learning and Research and has written on leadership and working in partnerships, including Leading Change; A Guide to Whole Systems Working (Attwood et al., 2003). She also sits on the editorial board of the journal, Action Learning: Research & Practice, and is on the committee for the International Action Learning Conference. Sue Pritchard can be contacted at: Sue.Pritchard@bathconsultancygroup.com