Sooner or later every change manager find themselves completing a change impact assessment. This is an activity that does exactly what it says on the tin. It analyses the organisational impact that a given change will produce. And after a while every change manager gets very familiar with the process...
In my medium-sized experience I've completed change impact assessments in two universities, a major retailer, the UK parliament and a large number of police forces. With that in mind, I've written up a few things that I think we have to get right when completing change impact assessments. The first one is below and I'll publish the others in posts to follow later this week.
Sometimes assessing impacts feels quite scientific. You find yourself making predictions based on clear, falsifiable data. You feel confident, rational, objective. A lab coat wouldn't go amiss. This tends to be the case with the impacts that you can easily test after the event. Normally it's things like the potential increase in delivery activity thanks to a new more productive manufacturing machine. A common one would be the total hours spent away from the 'front line' in order for staff to be trained in readiness for change.
However that's only some of the time. Often what you need to assess, including most of the really powerful stuff, doesn't lend itself to measurement. No lab coats. No objectivity. Just you alone with your unfalsifiable opinions.
For change managers this second category is by far the greater challenge. The temptation is to continue the falsifiable approach in the hope that some reassuringly rational judgements can be achieved. It shouldn't happen but it does. Maybe change management suffers from a kind of 'physics envy'.
And maybe this is particularly the case when we find ourselves doing change management alongside other business consultants who take more of an engineering-style approach and look down on change management as 'the soft stuff'. They look like they're getting hard, quantifiable answers so we feel we have to respond. So we strive for more and more quantifiable judgements and end up getting further and further away from anything useful.
Take this example - how will two teams in a large, bureaucratic organisation respond if they are merged? Will their morale be boosted by the creation of a new, purposeful team out of two redundant functions? Will they feel a sense of bereavement at the loss of the old team? If so, how much and for how long? How will that impact on productivity? How will that impact on staff retention?
Trying to form falsifiable answers to questions like this is a fool's errand. You're likely to veer into pseudo-scientific soothsaying.
The right response? Embrace subjectivity! Read the relevant literature! Aim for empiricism rather than falsifiability! And make your subjectivity an informed, well-articulated judgement rather than a stab in the dark.
Want to predict the impact of a merger of two teams? Look at the empirical evidence of previous mergers in similar organisations and inform yourself about the aspects of human psychology that are likely to come into play.
That may sound simpler than it is and the reality always contains complexity for which the theory doesn't take account. Nevertheless, following the advice I give above is far from impossible. After all both the psychology and the empirical studies form core parts of the change management body of knowledge. Luckily enough for us this has been written down and made available for study.
And if we do we won't be operating with scientific certainty, but we will be offering an educated opinion and seeing the organisation through a frame of understanding that other consultants don't tend to use. Do it well and we'll be offering something unique.
Even my cat knows what a 'change impact assessment' involves (Effective Change Manager's Handbook p259)
In my medium-sized experience I've completed change impact assessments in two universities, a major retailer, the UK parliament and a large number of police forces. With that in mind, I've written up a few things that I think we have to get right when completing change impact assessments. The first one is below and I'll publish the others in posts to follow later this week.
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If change managers did science...
However that's only some of the time. Often what you need to assess, including most of the really powerful stuff, doesn't lend itself to measurement. No lab coats. No objectivity. Just you alone with your unfalsifiable opinions.
For change managers this second category is by far the greater challenge. The temptation is to continue the falsifiable approach in the hope that some reassuringly rational judgements can be achieved. It shouldn't happen but it does. Maybe change management suffers from a kind of 'physics envy'.
And maybe this is particularly the case when we find ourselves doing change management alongside other business consultants who take more of an engineering-style approach and look down on change management as 'the soft stuff'. They look like they're getting hard, quantifiable answers so we feel we have to respond. So we strive for more and more quantifiable judgements and end up getting further and further away from anything useful.
Take this example - how will two teams in a large, bureaucratic organisation respond if they are merged? Will their morale be boosted by the creation of a new, purposeful team out of two redundant functions? Will they feel a sense of bereavement at the loss of the old team? If so, how much and for how long? How will that impact on productivity? How will that impact on staff retention?
Trying to form falsifiable answers to questions like this is a fool's errand. You're likely to veer into pseudo-scientific soothsaying.
Goya - 'El sueno de la razon produce monstrous', (The dream of reason produces monsters)
The right response? Embrace subjectivity! Read the relevant literature! Aim for empiricism rather than falsifiability! And make your subjectivity an informed, well-articulated judgement rather than a stab in the dark.
After all it's your subjectivity that the client will be paying for not some false promise of rational objectivity. With that comes an absolutely fundamental responsibility - you have to make sure that your subjectivity is well-educated.
Want to predict the impact of a merger of two teams? Look at the empirical evidence of previous mergers in similar organisations and inform yourself about the aspects of human psychology that are likely to come into play.
That may sound simpler than it is and the reality always contains complexity for which the theory doesn't take account. Nevertheless, following the advice I give above is far from impossible. After all both the psychology and the empirical studies form core parts of the change management body of knowledge. Luckily enough for us this has been written down and made available for study.
Our professional hinterland has been developed specifically to deal with this kind of organisational ambiguity - why on earth wouldn't we use it?
And if we do we won't be operating with scientific certainty, but we will be offering an educated opinion and seeing the organisation through a frame of understanding that other consultants don't tend to use. Do it well and we'll be offering something unique.