Change Management: 7 Fundamental Shifts

Leadership Blog

Achieve Breakthrough

Written by Achieve Breakthrough

Change Management: 7 Fundamental Shifts

Change Management: Why do so many companies fail?

Change management has been in existence for over half a century. Yet despite the huge investment that companies have made in tools and training, most studies show a 60 to 70 percent failure rate for organisational change projects

European CEO speaks with Mike Straw, one of the authors of The Little Black Book of Change, on why so many companies fail when it comes to change.

Watch on YouTube: European CEO interview with Mike Straw

Interview with Mike Straw: transcript

Mike Straw: Change Management, why do so many companies fail?
Mike Straw , Founder of Achieve Breakthrough

With Jenny Hammond for European CEO
According to Harvard Business Review change management as a recognized discipline has been in existence for over half a century despite the huge investment that companies have made in tools and training most studies show a sixty to seventy percent failure rate for organisational change projects. With me to discuss this is Mike Straw one of the authors of the Little Black Book of Change.

Why do so many companies fail when it comes to change? 

The basic approach that everyone tends to take is to look at the process, systems and methodologies and completely disregard or ignore people's frame of reference, ie: their views, their mind-set, attitude and behaviour. I don’t think that people are blind to this, but more that they have no access to how you predictably and consistently manage to shift the way that people are thinking what is possible and what their aspirations are for the future. I think it is that one element that proves decisive on all of the efforts people do.

How do you assess a company to know if change is needed and what they are doing wrong?  

In this day and age change is always needed. The next impossible thing will always happen. The question is: whether your organisation is the one that will invent it or another one.

Everyone's chasing the Holy Grail. If you sit in different boardrooms in different organisations, they're all wanting to do roughly similar things. It’s left down to the people in the organisation and if they are quicker than the other people in an organisation. And that’s all really about mind-set and behaviours.

I think how you assess it is really by looking at how ready people in your organisation are to really embracing whatever new change comes along. Have they got a real capacity to be very ambitious? Most people look at the work done historically and then based on that decide what's possible in the future. This can kill all kinds of innovation. Lastly, whether the people in your organisation have got the capability to actually implement what they come up.

What are the basics of transformational change?

There is not a ‘one size fits all’ for every single company, but the basics of transformational change start with people conceiving or even considering a very big ambition. Everyone wants high-performance: you don’t get high performance by playing small. So you need to be able to conceive something huge. If you imagined living in the middle of a block of flats and somebody said to you what do you really want? You say: well actually I would like to live at the top of the flats so I can overlook the city and all of that. So if you had that, what would you really want? Well actually I don’t want to live in a block of flats, I want to live in a house with a garden by the sea. Hence by definition, most people commit to what they think they can accomplish, based on history.

Example in a real lift situation

One of the first internet credit card companies had a key performance business measure, which calculated how many people go on the website and get a credit card. This was tracking at about 40% over a number of years. The figure couldn’t seem to be moved. They went through this process and discovered that they were actually focusing on getting to 40%, when actually they wanted to get up to 99-100% of people coming on the internet to get a credit card. This was considered impossible by the organisation. They went through this process and started to identify why this was impossible: people already had a credit card and it usually had debt on it. Out of this realisation the company inventing the first zero balance credit card transfers. There market capitalization went through the roof. This was in essence what most people thought was impossible.


 

Little Black Book of Change - change management7 practical steps to change

The Little Black Book of Change talks about 7 practical steps to change:

Shift 1: Letting go of the past

Shift 2: Developing breakthrough ambition. People need to get this notion of really committing to something they may not know how to achieve (a real breakthrough). At the top of organisations people are generally good at his. In the lower levels they don't see this as their idea of a good time necessarily. So you have got to have the whole organisation really commit to something that could be a real breakthrough

Shift 3: Creating a bold new vision of the future. This breakthrough commitment needs to be articulated very clearly.

Shift 4: Engaging the players in the bold new future. Start to get all the players aligned with that vision and goal.

Shift 5: Cutting through the DNA. We all commit to things and then we don’t complete on them, like getting thinner after Christmas. If you think about it we are in February now and we are now stopping to go to the gym and breaking the rules. This is the DNA and there is a DNA in organisations. It’s like a gravitational pull back to normality that kicks in.

Shift 6: Keeping the organization future-focused. You’ve got to help the organisation be totally future focused: in every conversation that happens, in every corridor, by every water cooler – everywhere.

Shift 7: Gaining energy from setbacks. You need to be brilliant at overcoming the inevitable setbacks. The more ambitious you are, the more setbacks you have.

 


 

For a lot of leaders a common challenge is to understand the ‘Millennial’ mind-set. What does this add to the mix?

When you have Millennials coming in who can be instant experts at a lot of things very quickly, but also want to learn, you can have quite a destabilized organisation. The senior people don’t want to fit the Millennials into their shoes, as they don’t want to loose that bit, but the Millennials need to learn. So I think you need for both sides to recognise the brilliance in each other.

All these things require a different mind-set. What are we looking at here?

The days of just telling everybody has long gone so the ability to tune in and get people on board is critical. Also being good and ok with ambiguity and things not going the way you wanted them to and being able to be light on foot so you can turn on a sixpence and adapt to any situation. You just need to read the news and hear about organisations suddenly changing their strategy.

There is a lovely phrase: there’s a fine line between the experience you have and all the baggage you hold about it, and I think this is what needs to be handled.


Download a sample chapter of the Little Black Book of Change 

Find out more about joining The Extraordinary People Club HERE

Get your copy of this practical guide HERE

Bulk order? If you require a bulk order for distribution in your organisation, please contact Achieve Breakthrough HQ: HERE.


Share

Published 01/08/2017

Subscribe by Email

Achieve more breakthroughs. Get expert leadership ideas, insights and advice straight to your inbox every Saturday, as well as the occasional bit of news on us, such as offers and invitations to participate in things like events, webinars and surveys. Read. Lead. Breakthrough.