In the sweltering Oklahoma summers of my youth, a favorite pastime was swimming in Mr. Colby’s pond. In place of a diving board, we used the horizontal branch of a large elm tree that hung about ten feet over the water. The pond was too shallow for deep diving, but we didn’t have the skill for anything fancy anyway. So the favorite launch protocol—after all, teenage boys like to make loud noises and big splashes—was the belly flop. In exchange for congratulatory whoops and hollers, we often paid a painful price.
What the belly flop lacks in grace and elegance it makes up for in the raw force of fundamental physics. It hurts. Sometimes a lot.
Many so-called change efforts seem to employ the launch protocol of the belly flop. Lots of noise, big splashes, a few congratulatory whoops and hollers. But then the pain sets in. Sometimes a lot of pain.
Every time an implementation fails to achieve its stated objectives on time and on budget, there are costs. The costs are both short-term and long-term, both direct and indirect.
Short-term, direct costs of an implementation belly flop include the waste of valuable resources like money, time, and people. And of course the business objective is not achieved—the service is delivered late, the customer is dissatisfied with quality, the organization remains stuck in a weak market position, or hopes for an energized workforce are not realized.
Another common short-term, direct casualty of implementation failure is the job security of the people charged with making the change work. Fair? Maybe not. But it’s a reality.
A short-term, indirect cost of implementation belly flop often involves a decline in morale. Culture studies in a wide range of industries show that a common ingredient in low morale is the belief that “we have trouble finishing anything right around here.” A disheartened employee is a disengaged employee.
The most familiar long-term, direct cost of implementation belly flop is simply that strategic goals are not accomplished. For example, the merger fails to produce its intended synergies, managers fail to make the transition from command and control to a more facilitative style, the organization misses the mark on a range of evolutions that would make it more competitive.
And then there are the long-term, indirect costs of an implementation belly flop. They are often the most painful of all, and they affect the organization’s ability even to survive. These costs can include diminished confidence in leadership, increased resistance to change, and an even higher likelihood that the next change effort will fail.
But of course change is inevitable. Change is relentless. Change is ever-present. In fact, as one Army general put it, “If you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevance even less.”
Trouble is, as our family obstetrician used to say, for most folks it’s easier to conceive than to deliver. That truism applies not just to making babies. It also applies to dealing with change. By nearly every account, the majority of leadership strategies aimed at creating change are doomed for failure.
How challenging are effective change and implementation? Consider this analogy from the chief operating officer of a large corporation, quoted in the Harvard Business Review:
“It’s like the company is undergoing four medical procedures at the same time. One person is in charge of a root canal, someone else is setting the broken foot, an- other person is working on a displaced shoulder, and still another is getting rid of a gallstone. Each operation is a success, but the patient dies of shock.”
Change takes us out of our comfort zones and produces stress. It’s often the stress that people resist, not the change itself. Even positive change produces stress. Just ask anyone who’s planned a wedding.
Another reason for resistance is that change tends to be cumulative, as indicated by the previous quote from the chief operating officer. Simply put, there’s a lot of simultaneous activity going on in most organizations—a lot of competition for time, budget, and other resources. Even when we find smart people doing smart things, we often find a lack of integration. The result is fragmented focus. It’s very frustrating to good people—sort of the way you’d feel if you spent your day trying to push water uphill with a rake: lots of activity but only marginal results.
Every day’s headlines report yet another plan, another reorganization, another big idea that has fallen flat. Tall dreams. Tall talk. Short results. Inertia is winning by a wide margin.
Change can take many avenues. Change can move an organization and the people in it to an exciting new future. Change can seduce people into a limbo of change for change’s sake. And change can suck organizations and people into oblivion.
As with many things in our world—like the notions of “culture” and “accountability”—change management has become trivialized and diluted by a multitude of sometimes conflicting and often damaging definitions. Regardless of definition, change is not the enemy. The enemy is poor management of change.
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