The 5 Most Common Reasons Why Change Fails
Why is it that most change programmes fail to achieve their objectives? Why don’t they survive beyond implementation (if they get that far)? Research proves that roughly 70% of all change initiatives fail regardless of sector. Experience shows that the five main reasons for failure are:
- Communications: insufficient, not the right sort and not to the right people;
- Plans are cast in concrete – once set, they will not be changed - and they do not take the larger system (within which the change occurs) into account;
- Change is imposed from above without buy-in of those affected;
- The change process is seen as linear, rather than iterative;
- Insufficient thought is given to sustainability and next steps.
The costs can be enormous, not just in wasted money, but in de-motivated teams and even damage to your reputation or to your product.
Look at each of these problems in turn
1) Communications
Almost the first thing you hear from people is that they feel like mushrooms – kept in the dark and fed ‘rubbish’. They want to know more, they want transparency. No matter how well you think you are communicating, or how often, people just aren’t satisfied. So what can you do?
Consider not just how often you communicate, but – remembering that it is a two-way process - with whom you communicate, the way you communicate and the methods you use. Different people need different kinds of communication and in different amounts or frequencies. Do you know all of the people with whom you should communicate? Have you done an extensive stakeholder mapping, keeping the larger system in mind? From your stakeholder mapping, you can identify groups of people and think through what KIND of communication they need, how OFTEN it should be and via what sort of medium you should send it. Different individuals have different preferences as well, so a mix of media is always a good idea.
2) Plans
When change initiatives fail, the second thing you discover is that plans are cast in concrete and do not take the larger system into account. Whatever change programme you are implementing, it is part of a larger system. There are many more people and parts of the organisation (if not other organisations) who are affected by what you will be doing differently, not only the people in your team. It is useful to consider not just who these people and organisations might be, but also how that might affect your plans. What impact might they have on the programme? Can they be an obstacle to the programme? Can they help you? How might you encourage their help?
Plans need to be flexible. That is, for the very near term, you may be quite clear about what you will do, but as soon as you approach the medium term, you will need to test where you are and see if adjustments need to be made. This requires extra thinking at the front end of the programme – how will you know that you are on track? What do you need to see that tells you? Use a simple ‘Plan/Do/Check/Act’ cycle: Plan what you are going to do, Do it, evaluate how well it has gone and Check if you are where you need to be; re-plan the next steps (for it usually is re-planning) and go for it, DO it – Act - and go around the cycle again.
3) Change is imposed
Frequently, change is imposed from above and that is all that there is. Buy-in is not sought or it is not achieved. People are told what to do and how to do it. However, to get buy-in, you need to allow people the freedom and creativity to have input into the process. The best way to do that is to make sure that those who are affected by the change are involved – have a say – in how it happens. Business is not a democracy – we make a decision about a strategic direction for instance, and that decision is made by you or by you and your leadership team. But, unless there are good reasons, if you allow people to work with you on HOW the change will be made, you are more likely to achieve buy-in, motivation and pro-activity.
This probably feels quite risky – after all, how do you know you can trust people to do what needs to be done? It means you have to share not only the direction you need to go in, but also the constraints…
4) The change process is seen as linear rather than iterative…
There are many different models of change to choose from, but they are only a guide. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ model. Whatever model you use, you will need to continually monitor where you are in that model. You are working on change for a whole system, not just your particular unit. Whatever changes you are working towards in your unit have an impact on the larger system of which your unit is a part and in turn that larger system has an impact on your unit. You need to keep that in mind during your planning and when you monitor to see where you are. This tells you what you need to do next. For instance, you could be working with a smaller unit within your larger unit and people are being very resistant. By monitoring where you are on your model, you may discover that despite having communicated with everyone the reasons for the change, you need to go back to the beginning and enquire into what is happening for this particular group of people to cause the resistance you are observing.
You may be humming along quite nicely and suddenly the programme hits an obstacle. Again, by looking at where you are in your model and what you need to do to move forward, you can ‘un-stick’ the programme. Don’t go in with pre-conceived notions about what you should be doing next – this is a time to ask questions and listen to the answers.
5) Not enough thought given to future sustainability and next steps…
How will you know that this change is ‘sticking’? What benefits will you see? What will people be doing? What will they have stopped doing? How will they be behaving? What will your customers say?
Frequently organisations finish the implementation, then just stop feeding energy in and things go back to the way they were, the change is not sustained. It needs to become embedded in the ‘way we do things now’ through repetition to redevelop new ‘habits’ for several weeks, even months. This is not to say that sustainable change requires continual energy, but it does require that attention is paid to the change at the individual’s level - that questions are asked of stakeholders on how things are going for them and that learning is captured and shared.
Then there is always the question of ‘what next.’ An agile organisation is one that responds to its environment. Whatever change you are implementing is around a business issue – has the change solved the issue, or do you need to do more (or different) work on it? Has the issue gone away? Has another issue arisen? What are your next steps? How do you maintain and sustain the change?
©Patricia Lustig, 2006
Photo – Flower seed. August 2007 ©PMLustig