Change or Chance (part 10) - Institute the Change
You’ve created a sense of urgency.
You’ve built a guiding coalition (GC).
You’ve formed a strategic vision (SV)
You’ve evolved a hybrid organisational
structure with your hierarchy now running alongside your creative network
(CN).
You’ve recruited your enthusiastic
Volunteer Army (VA) to innovate towards the change vision and you’re
continuously communicating for stakeholder buy-in
You’ve enabled action by removing
barriers.
You’re generating and celebrating
short-term, and now long-term wins.
You’re sustaining momentum for your
change.
You’re nearly there, or are you?
Well, there are a few more things we need
to cover not least “institutionalising” the change.
Change initiatives can run out of steam
even as they are approaching the strategic goal.
Your change program will, necessarily,
take time (months, sometimes years) to be fully realised, and having diligently
followed all the steps above, your need and desire is for the change to be
sustainable, otherwise what was/is the point?
And that IS the point.
Your change MUST be sustainable and
actually BE sustained, and that means ensuring that your organisation’s culture
and systems are adapted to the new normal.
There is little point in working through
the complexity and investment of generating a strategic vision and then
allowing your organisation to default or drift back to the old status-quo.
The new practices and procedures, the new
language reflecting the change, need to become an intrinsic part of your
organisational fabric.
The leadership (and remember, we now
recognise leadership at all levels) needs to consistently stand behind and
champion the change.
The full value may not be visible in some
leading or even some trailing indicators but if it’s working as intended, there
will be metrics that will show the advances and the realisation of the fruits
of the opportunity taken.
Take the holistic view.
For example, how are your engagement
scores looking (before and after)? If your communications have been
effective throughout, there should be no surprises here.
What’s your stakeholders’/consumers’
feedback – what more needs to be done?
Clearly, continuing and effective
dialogue with your people, including the resisters, remains an essential
element of embedding change.
How have you capitalised upon the
emergent outcomes?
What has been missed, if anything?
The need for gross-error checking is
constant.
Is your hierarchy and creative network
communicating optimally? If not, why not?
What lessons have been learned in your
after-action review?
Has your organisational culture really
adopted the new change?
And remember, your next change
initiatives may already be underway.
Institutionalise your change to sustain
it.
Barry Eustance CMgr MCMI
Kotter Change Leader Certified
Principal Consultant – The Sixsess
Consultancy
Empowering Clients to Seize Opportunity
from Change
https://sixsess.org/the-sixsess-consultancy-insights-archive/
