Hard times
Simon Harries reflects on how to make change work for everyone in the post-recession world.
The more I see of large change programmes, the more I believe that the only people who really like them are the consultants being paid to make them happen. Most people dislike the impact of change in their lives and in their places of work. It isn’t positive for them: it is often a source of fear and deep concern for the future...
The impact of change
Yet change, on a huge scale, is happening in every sector and every country. You can’t get away from it. Whatever
you did yesterday, you’ll probably be doing something different tomorrow. Many people fear, of course, that they
may be doing nothing tomorrow. Governments are cutting their deficits, taking billions out of their economies,
while the markets watch them closely to make sure there is no back‐sliding. Jobs are being lost in the public sector
in most European countries, and not just a few of them: hundreds of thousands will go.
In the private sector too, as enterprises continue to cope with the aftermath of recession, the picture is much the same. Companies are moving fast in order, first to survive, and second to gain competitive advantage in an increasingly tough marketplace. They are seeking to make their processes more efficient, to cut out all spending that is not strictly necessary, and are using strategic partnerships to share risks and reduce capital expenditure.
So let’s get back to the point I made at the very start. Nobody likes corporate change programmes, yet it seems we
cannot avoid them. So what normally goes wrong? And what can we do to help avoid these problems in the future?
Gaining the benefits
My colleagues and I have been involved in plenty of change programmes over the years, so we have been in a privileged position to see what works, what doesn’t and, in both cases, why particular policies either succeed or fail. For a start, there are some things about a change programme you can normally be sure of. It will:
- Cost more than you had budgeted.
- Take longer than you expected.
- Destabilise and upset your people.
- Not deliver all the benefits you had hoped for.
And yet we all begin with such good intentions! We always want to achieve perfectly reasonable outcomes, such as:
- Permanently reducing your operating costs.
- Making your organisation more responsive to market‐driven changes.
- Ensuring that your technology serves your business strategy instead of obstructing it.
- Cutting headcount without major business problems...
But change is not a predictable process. The moment you begin to transform your organisation, you have taken a step you cannot reverse, and you cannot be certain of where the process will take you. The questions you need to ask on day one are: how to reduce the risk? How to make it more likely that the benefits will be greater than the disadvantages? For that, you need a rational, systematic approach to the whole subject of change, and I am going to explain our views on the subject over the next few weeks.
The key factors
We’ll do this step by step, looking at each of the six key factors in managing change effectively and without major problems. These are:
- People.
- Processes.
- Products.
- Partners.
- Platforms and...
- Risk itself.
Each week, I’m going to post a new document on one of these topics until we have a complete paper on the subject of transformational change. This is what our company does, after all, and we have strong and (I hope) rational, well-informed opinions on the subject. Check our views and see what you think.
Risk
Let’s end this piece with a few thoughts about perhaps the most critical of all change factors: how to deal with risk. We are seeing a big change in ownership of risk, just as we are seeing changes in ownership of key infrastructure items (ICT, some processes, even employees, for example).
In the old world, the client took the risk and hired a contractor to carry out specific services for an agreed price and with defined outcomes. This old form of risk management is now disappearing. The future will be based on risk sharing, which means that the “client-contractor” relationship is gradually being replaced by a “partnering” approach, backed by an entirely new commercial model.
A large transformation, therefore, will in the future be a cooperative effort between the company being transformed; the specialist partners who will take over non-core activities for the long term; and a change specialist that is likely to be a risk-bearing partner in the whole enterprise. A new commercial reality is beginning in the consultancy market as everywhere else: and that will make the whole business of risk management look very different.
And finally...
Why did I use “Hard Times” as the title for this piece? It refers to the first book on the problems of change that I know of. It was published in 1853, was written by Charles Dickens, the most popular novelist England ever produced, and is all about the impact of change (in this case the original industrial revolution) on the people caught up in it. There is nothing new under the sun, it seems: the stresses and challenges of change were urgent concerns over 150 years ago and probably always will be. Times are hard again for many of us, so let’s be creative in our responses and make the changes we all have to go through as stress-free and positive as they can be.
