Sunday 23 January 2011

"Six Keys To Changing Almost Everything" ... can it work in business?

Tony Schwartz - 6 keys to change anything - HBR


I found Tony Scwartz's article in the Harvard Business Review totally fascinating. It's impossible to argue with his great advice on making personal change stick.

My big question is can this really apply to business as well as personal changes?

"Put simply, the more behaviors are ritualized and routinized — in the form of a deliberate practice — the less energy they require to launch, and the more they recur automatically."

Tony gives six rules for making change stick:
1. Be Highly Precise and Specific.
2. Take on one new challenge at a time.
3. Not too much, not too little.
4. What we resist persists.
5. Competing Commitments.
6. Keep the faith.

I believe the complexity and political nature of all the clients i've worked with makes this too difficult to achieve! Despite having had numerous conversations with clients around strategy deployment and the need to focus on one major change at a time it is very rare that any organisation will stop, defer or delay much of it's change portfolio to allow these six rules to be forcefully applied.

Many of my clients, for example, are virtually forced to run concurrent change programmes for legislative, operational requirement or merger integration reasons.

I once worked with a public sector client who had 300 seperate programmes in it's change portfolio.  Clearly this was unmanageable, caused change fatigue and led to systemic failure. After many hours sweating and negotiating it was reduced to 20 concurrent programmes to meet immediate operational needs. For an organisation with 10,000 plus personnel you would have thought this was manageable. However, the same, stressed out names kept coming up on the programme resource lists.

In the pressure of the programme world, temptation is everywhere and at times resistance can often be futile. Trying to get full time, focused change teams can be a challenge. Even when this is achieved the urge to dabble in their old role or do someone 'a favour' is often overpowering.

So if in business we are to make Tony's solid rules work to enhance our change programmes, I believe we need an executive board who can:
  • Undertake strategy deployment to create one, manageable, time bound, change portfolio
  • Work tirelessly and actively to maintain the change portfolio in the light of emergent requirements
  • Provide full time, focused change personnell
Let's hope that all the senior management teams we work with stick to rule 6 and keep the faith!

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