Just Read an interesting post on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/importance-culture-your-digital-transformation-hilton-barbour by Hilton Barbour. 

It's interesting to consider the impact of culture on organisations. It's even more interesting to consider how we will control the culture that accelerating, digital technologies will engender. 

At times some feel as though they are helpless to control and get the best from the technology - we are but victims of the technologists development trajectories; going in a direction of their choosing. 

Clearly the answer is to take control appropriately and test and adopt the opportunities the technology continues to provide. The knack continues to be in developing an organisation agile and flexible enough to achieve this! 

Change Management the Easy Cut

I was chatting to a fellow change professional the other day and we were having the age old conversation ... "why is change and communications support always the first part of a programme to be cut?"

There is lot's of evidence and reasoning out there that highlights how critical the human and change support factors are in making a programme a success John Kotter and others have clearly articulated the common causes whilst survey after survey highlights the cost of failure.

The research points to a failure rate of between 60 and 90% with most scholars settling on 70% as the mean likelihood of failure for your change project [ref. Burnes, Kotter, Senge, Hammer & Champy, http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/change-management-the-horror-of-it-all.html]

Bain & Co, McKinsey and so the list goes on] ... yet change support still gets cut.

So why does change support get cut first?

So here's my theory. We as a group of change professionals are just hopeless at clearly defining and articulating what the benefits of the specific change support are! I believe there are some age old things we still fail to do effectively to avoid the dreaded axe:

• Have the numbers and believe in the numbers - many of my lean colleagues can articulate a benefit statement to 7 decimal places. Their view is as subjective as anyone elses but they articulate it as fact based not conjecture.
• Communicate a clear case for change - clearly communicate to colleagues and clients what will happen if change support isn't included. This once again is fact based not an emotional outburst.
• Use the research - there is plenty of research out there on why programmes succeed / fail. Know it, use it, quote it.
• Cultivate the sponsors - we all know the importance of clear and tough sponsorship. How often do we use it to benefit our own change agenda though?

So as we enter 2011 as a community let's make change stick.