Ross Woods
Revised Nov-07; minor edits 2012-15, '17, '23
Fostering and implementing change in a complex organization is often a considerable challenge, even if it is constructive and beneficial. If you need to turn the organization around, it usually takes two or three years to implement the changes and get everybody comfortable and confident with the new way of doing things. Change usually gives key people quite a lot of pain, even if you can save most people from most of the pain. Most people don't find it easy to accept new ideas. At first, people find that new ideas don't even make sense and go against their traditional, familiar logic.
Changes take many forms, for example:
This section is about how to identify the need for change. Of course, sometimes it will be horribly obvious, such as when the government makes major changes to the rules that affect most of what you do or most of the people who do it, and then gives you a compliance deadline.
Recognizing the need for change is not always so easy. For example, in a growing organization or a changing context, it often takes at least a year to realize that your old systems are no longer working. The systems might be very good, but they don’t work any more. Look at this case:
"We had a system of paper and email documents. It worked fine while we were small and it was a good system. But later on, it became quite frustrating for one person to keep track of so many documents, for example, checking we had received everything we needed, following up people who sent documents late, and then filing them in such a way that we could retrieve any document we needed. We thought, "It’s a good system; we just have to work harder at it." Eventually, we realized that it wasn’t just about being better organized. The system wasn’t working any more and we needed to replace it.
Design and implement processes to continually review your organization. You will need to keep its philosophy relevant to the needs of clients and key stakeholders. This normally means that you need to have staff meetings often enough to keep people on the same page.
In a community organization, your main source of input will be input from stakeholders, both informal (keeping notes as you go along) and formal, through questionnaires, surveys, focus groups, opens-spaces sessions, etc.
Your review should include some kind of ongoing evaluation:
Keep an eye out for changes and trends. For example, trends affecting a community organization may be social, political and economic, and may be driven by various forces. They include:
Your industry knowledge will be helpful. Competitors might prosper or fail depending on how they adapt to market conditions. Some will be leaders and others will be followers. Some will find niches where they have little or no competition.
Besides, different industries have different structures according to a range of factors, for example:
You will probably be watching for emergent trends. This means being the first to identify something that is actually starting to happen and could be more important in the future. Assess the new trend and put a plan in place before it makes a serious impact.
This is more realistic than guessing what might happen or being the last organization to make the changes. (Not much good being the last cow to follow the herd.)
Cheat sheet
In many cases, you don't need to be the first to spot a market trend and innovate a new service to meet the marketplace. (That is the best scenario.) You will often be doing very well just to keep up with the forefront of best practice of other providers.
Why is that cheating? Because most of your competitors are probably lagging behind best practice.
You will usually need to do some research on the change requirements.
In a very small organization, you would probably use only anecdotal evidence from your constituents and your network of professional contacts. But in a large organization, you will need more solid research and some hard data. In more complex cases, you will need to seek expert advice or research for detailed, accurate, current information.
You can use membership of professional associations, research organizations and networks to keep current with information and trends. Some websites are excellent sources. Other kinds of research sources include:
You will need to have a good working knowledge of relevant government policies and systems for two reasons.
First, almost certainly, your organization has been carefully structured to comply with a set of legal requirements, at the very least for incorporation and taxation. As far as possible, it is best to make a set of simple rules and structures that carefully meet all requirements while still meeting the unique needs of your organization. Consequently, even small changes are sometimes illegal. Before you consider change, find out the current requirements so that any changes will keep you compliant with legal requirements.
Second, government policies and systems are often changing and you need to keep up to date. Some changes will be reversed depending on election results. But many changes often follow particular directions over time, and even an election bringing a new political party will make little or no difference.
Other than that, consider a range of alternatives. (They probably came up in your research.) It is unusual to have only one answer for the challenge. Your board will need very good reasons for approving one in favor of others. If they see you have not considered other options, they might not approve any changes on the ground that it is not yet properly researched.
First check whether you can short-cut the whole change process and sidestep a lot of pain:
As a result of trends, you need to assess management and work structures. What changes will you need to implement to reflect trends as you have researched them?
Look at your planning framework. What plans are already in place? Will you need to get board approval to change them, or can you simply work within it? What extra planning will you need to put in place, and who will have to improve it?
What is current accepted good practice? Will changes affect how your practice standards? What about your organization’s quality assurance processes? Will the changes affect them?
Then look at your policies and practices. What needs to be changed in them? Who will need to approve changes? How will you suggest changes?
Your planning should also:
People naturally tend to resist change. You can change behavior fairly easily. Changing attitudes is very difficult. People tend to water down new ideas to make them like old ideas ("same system, new terminology")
Here's a marketing concept: an eighty-twenty principle.
In a good board, at least half the people will be able to adopt new ideas very quickly. The slower adopters will often be financial people who know how easy it is to go broke. Avoid putting people on a board if they resist change at any cost.
Having said that, the 10-80-10 proportions vary between organizations. Some whole organizations resist any kind of change, and will probably die. Other organizations are innovative risk-takers that want to lead the way with new changes. In for-profit companies, the risks bring about either bankruptcy or huge profits, and there is sometimes a danger of being so far ahead of what the market wants that new ideas don't take on.
With thanks to Nick Randall
When a change is introduced, people tend to go through several stages of emotions. Change is also partly intellectual: people need time to get their head around it as a workable idea. Here they are with the kinds of comments that people give:
The Kübler-Ross cycle
The version of the stages above is very similar to the Kübler-Ross cycle, which describes five stages of emotions that people go through when facing death. It may be their own impending death through terminal illness or the death of a loved one.
Here's one version of the stages:
Source: Wikipedia
Here's another version, this time with seven stages:
Source: changingminds.org
Note:
At this stage, you will probably need to consider what approaches you will use to gain widespread support for change. The biggest danger to change is misunderstanding and dissatisfaction, which can derail the whole change process.
Consult people. Ask their opinions and listen more than you speak. People can accept ideas more readily if they feel that their comments are/have been listened to. Have you done a good job of informing people of trends beforehand?
Work with people's positive attitudes. Put people in win-win relationships. Let people run with the idea and think it is theirs. Change happens through personal networks; let people talk each other into it.
Give them value. People are basically selfish and want more value for less money or effort. They also want to see advantages or benefits for them as individuals, not just the organization. Motivating people is generally identifying or generating incentives that appeal to the self-interests of individuals and groups. Some incentives appeal to higher ideals.
Avoiding particular feelings of resistance. Don’t make people feel blamed or threaten their self-worth. It creates resistance. Small put-offs loom large. Even when people want to change; they are naturally afraid of doing something different.
Make sure people’s "turf" doesn’t get threatened. "Turf" might result from a legitimate sense of responsibility for delegated areas. Don’t presume that "turf" is the result of simple egotism, although it might be.
People will follow a leader whom they respect better than an impersonal policy.
Most of what you do should be recorded in writing. This will often be:
Written reports in an organization only get you so far. You’ll need to discuss things face to face with Board members, senior management and community leaders. You probably have to navigate and negotiate a complex range of issues and relationships.
Some meetings will require you to give formal presentations, especially if you are trying to get approval for a proposal thaty ou wrote. If it’s a big meeting with senior personnel and time is limited, you will need to be very confident, clear and convincing. Show leadership. People expect someone to know where the organization is going, and answer their questions honestly.
You will need some way to give people clear information about trends and explain clearly the effects (and potential effects) on your organization and your clients. Your explanation needs to overcome any frustration that people might feel if they are a long way from the decision-making process:
(Here's a couple of hypotheses that I haven't proven. In fact, they probably depend on organizational culture. The first is: "The lower down the organization, staff tend toward incremental change of existing systems rather than strategic change." The second is: "The higher up the organization, the more likley managers are to see the strategic picture, but less able to understand what happens on the workshop floor.")
In a larger organization, you will need to analyze quite carefully who should be told what. Different kinds of stakeholders need different kinds of information, and sometimes for different purposes:
If changes affect your total marketing strategy, you might have to reshape the organization's image up from consumer tastes, through to product design, advertising, distribution and delivery. This is more than simply instigating change and is a separate field of expertise.
Give decision-makers time to process a new idea.
Good decision-makers process the whole proposal and make a decision as quickly as possible, which may be slower than you'd like. If your people are good and think more widely than you, new aspects and implications will probably come up in the meeting.
People want to think through a new idea at their own pace. If you push people to make a decision prematurely, they tend to reject the proposed change. The consequences are:
Give staff time too. If you simply announce an imposed change to staff, they often will not implement it and the changes simply don't happen. Staff also need time to accept change. Your job is to let them go through the stages. You can call it a team meeting, training, professional development, consultation, mentoring, or coaching. The effect is the same: for people to look at proposed changes and make the transitions.
Some groups will simply talk themselves into the change, going around and around in discussion. Some will find out how to adapt the change to their particular context, and may produce useful insights and improvements for the change. But your job is not done until 80-90% of staff and all team leaders are supportive of the changes and feel comfortable that they know what to do.
At this stage, you now have to promote changes to stakeholders and get them implemented. This won’t be so hard if you’ve brought people along with the information on trends and the development of new policies and systems.
Will you need to consult anyone else? Will you need to negotiate with any employee groups or unions? Who else do you need to communicate changes to? What are the most effective kinds of communication for your context?
Messes are often inevitable. While there are no simple answers, it is important to put these possibilities in your risk register and keep track of what's happening and practice early intervention.
You might need to adjust the plan during implementation. In some cases, the operating environment changes. It is also quite normal that change brings about unexpected effects and consquences.
Don't blame yourself if you couldn't have foreseen them at the planning stage. At the very least, even in the unlikley situation that the plan goes perfectly and produces only intended outcomes, the organization will look and feel different from what you intended it to be. The main reason is that people have gone through an emotional journey with perspective-based perception.
A word of warning. It's easy to misjudge what is happening. Some people can easily panic if all does not go as they thought it world, say that the plan is not working at all. On the other hand is the rare case where the plan is shown to be wrong and a major rethink is necessary.
It is quite likely that you will lose some people during periods of rapid change. You might simply have to let people go if they resist necessary changes for whatever reason, and the process is often messy.
Perhaps of greater concern is that valuable people will burn out. In fact, the people at highest risk can be those on whom you most depend to carry the burden of change, and whom you can least afford to lose.
Okay, most people are tough and can rise to a challenge. But we're not talking about them. Your people can feel trapped:
The last stage of change is consolidation, which is mainly review. You'll probably want to ask questions like: