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Make Change Happen Copyright Pearson Education LTD 2014 (print and electronic)
Change in business is constant. Manage it well and you’ll grow your business, stay ahead of the curve and take full advantage of every new opportunity. The key to successful, well-managed change is in this book. Written by a specialist, its practical, visual, step-by-step approach will make sure you’re always on the right track, that change in your business is smooth, stress free and well-structured, and that all your stakeholders remain on board every step of the way. Make Change Happen gives you the startto-finish plan you need to implement your change programme and make sure you know what to do: • Before you start – consider what change really means for your company: your motivation, your goals and your expectations • Once you’ve started – agree the goals, understand the change curve and what you can do to make a difference • In the middle – mastering the mid-project slump, closing gates and focusing on progress • At the end – knowing when you’re finished, evaluating how you’ve done and understanding why, if things went wrong This is your practical toolkit for the change process and how to get it right – first time, every time!
Available to buy now in eBook or print at your favourite bookshop.
Introduction: whY MaKinG ChanGE happEn is so iMportant Death Taxes Change there are few things that are constant in life. Change is constant. the world is changing so frequently and so quickly. being able to create successful change is the single most important competency that will make you successful. successful change is not easy. it requires focus, a series of tools, effort, emotion and drive to be successful. anyone can make change happen badly. anyone can force through change with enough time, money or authority. this book will give you everything you need to make successful change happen with the resources you have at your disposal.
start, middle and end there are many ways to describe change. Getting from a to b. Freeze – Change – Freeze. i have chosen a much simpler way which is that change has a start, middle and end. the reason i have chosen this way to describe change is that the tools, approaches and how it feels in each stage are very different. the start of change is typically a positive and ambitious time, whereas the middle is often tougher and requires
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introduCtion: whY MaKinG ChanGE happEn is so iMportant
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much more discipline. when you come to the end, there are things you can do to increase the impact of your change. at each stage there are concrete things you can do to maximise the success and impact of your change and minimise the risk of failure.
My journey this book is based on over 10 years of making change happen. some of these changes i have led, others i have been part of, working in a team who made the change happen. You will also see that along the way i have had a fair few failures, and i expect that there may be a few more in my career before i finally hang up my proverbial change boots. but there are a few constants along the way which you should also remember as you move through your change career.
You are always learning Just as the pace of change continues to increase, so the need for you to continuously learn. learn about the environment you are making change happen in, but also about the change process itself. You will also learn about yourself and how your natural style fits in making change happen.
No two changes are the same i delivered six change projects in the same organisation, sometimes in the same division of the organisation. and while what i learned on the previous change helped me understand how the next change could be better, more successful and deliver even more impact, no two changes are the same. this is why i am giving you a series of tools you can apply in any change situation to increase your chance of making successful change happen.
ntroduCtion: whY MaKinG ChanGE happEn is so iMportant
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What do you mean by ‘done’?
done is a strange word. When I ask someone if something has been ‘done’ I don’t ever feel hugely confident in their answer. there is nothing specific about ‘done’. done is also a binary option. you either are or you aren’t done. but there is actually a huge spectrum of what people mean when they say ‘that is done’. Change can fail because things don’t get ‘done’. they may get started, but they don’t get done.
Defining ‘done’ here is the actual poster from the wall of a project room. I was in charge of a team doing communications across an organisation of nearly 150,000 people.
What do you mean by ‘done’?
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you may think that something as simple as writing a communication wouldn’t need a set of rules, but to deliver high quality, knowing when done is done is key. this list was built from some painful learning points. there are failures which make up these lessons.
Written but not done
doing things on mondays has its pros and cons. Communications are good on monday, particularly the morning, as people aren’t quite into the week ahead. on this particular Friday, before this particular monday, I asked a member of my team ‘are the communications done for monday?’ and the reply was ‘yes, we are good to go’. We went off for a lovely weekend. on monday morning, we sat down and pulled up the communication. It had been written, but it was still not in the correct format to be sent out to the whole firm, all 150,000 of them. It took an additional 30 minutes to get it ready and then it was ‘done’.
The importance of ownership
Someone has to set the standard for ‘done’. Lesson 2 means either I or Jo, who was my main communications person, had to sign off all communications before they were done. the true reason for doing this is not about control, or even the desire to see everything that goes out. there is another, more subtle, reason for making this rule that someone
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had to sign off communications. When you know someone else will review your work, you are more careful and thoughtful about it. the actual process of review improves the quality of the work produced.
Know who you are talking to
another monday morning incident taught me lesson 3. With any communication, you need an audience. I had actually reviewed a communication which was meant to be sent to all of the finance staff globally in the organisation. the communication was written, it had been put into the template the firm used to communicate and was waiting and ready to go. monday morning came and we opened the communication, put it into the email and onto the internal website and were about to send the email when we realised something. We didn’t actually know who all of the finance staff were. We knew most of the central team in most offices, but couldn’t be sure of the rest. there was no list of finance staff kept centrally. We managed to get around the issue by sending the communication to each head of finance in each country and asked them to communicate to their teams. We knew we lost some credibility that day and lesson 3 was learned. We thought we were done, but we weren’t.
What is the worst that can happen?
What do you mean by ‘done’?
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Lesson 4 happens pretty often. I have worked in small and large teams, and one thing that can derail the best planning is not spotting a single point of failure. People are always a single point of failure because they have knowledge and are involved in making your change happen. So when you expect someone to be there and they aren’t, it can really derail your plans. the final rule meant that whenever someone completed a communication, and sent it to the target audience, they put the final version on the server, where it could be accessed by the whole team. on the monday morning if they couldn’t be in the office, then change could continue.
Know what you want to be ‘done’ the example I gave is focused on writing and delivering communications within a specific timeframe. that was the most important element of our change, a series of communications that went out over an 18-month period. In your change you need to decide what is the most important element of your change. If the most important element is meetings with clients, or producing reports, or interviewing members of the public, or training people on a new product or system, then that is what you need to make sure is ‘done’.
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Key learning point ●● Remove ambiguity in quality and completeness by defining
what you mean by ‘done’.
What do you mean by ‘done’?
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Aim for A+ and you will get an A
Very rarely, I would even go so far as to say never, have I ever delivered a change which was exactly the change that was defined at the very start of the change. to be clear, I have delivered extremely successful change, and all of the outcomes and changes in behaviour that were needed happened. but they weren’t exactly what was written down at the start. throughout this book there are lots of frameworks and ideas to take change, and make it granular and achievable, but there is one element which can increase the likelihood of success significantly.
Deadlines throughout our lives we are driven by deadlines. In the order that I can remember deadlines that occurred in my life, here are just the first ones that come to mind:
Bed time School starts Break time Home time Homework Essays
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Revision Exams Closing time Dissertation Train times Work time Quarter end Year end Appraisals Promotion submissions And the ones still to come: Pension age Retirement Taking up golf Death the origins of the word ‘deadline’ are unclear. Some say it originated in the 19th century and relates to a line over which prisoners were not allowed to pass otherwise prison guards had the right to shoot them. It was popularised in the early 20th century in the newspaper industry as the time after which stories were unable to be included that day. I have my own version.
Deadline = When change isn’t well planned. It is how you feel as you reach one. Dead.
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dead, and you often limp over the line rather than soar past the marker on your way to the next. this is because people aim for deadlines. they actually aim to finish exactly on time. either they wear themselves out and limp over the line exhausted or miss the deadline and wear themselves out in catching up; then limp over the next deadline, doubly exhausted.
A new view of deadlines – planning the journey I have been lucky enough to have always travelled globally for my work. my very first job was in new york so a big part of my life has been getting to and from airports. Some of my roles have seen me in different continents every other week. Some airports are easier than others to get to and navigate through. and through 16 years of travelling, I’ve never missed a flight. never. on one occasion I ran through a closing door on the way back from Switzerland but that’s the closest I have come in what I estimate to be over 250 flights. I have a simple approach which has never failed me. I aim to arrive two hours early for all flights regardless of how long they are. Sometimes I get stuck on trains, in traffic, at security, but a two-hour window has always served me well. When planning change, and in particular looking at the deadlines you have to hit, I would recommend the same approach. Would you rather arrive sweating, running towards the gate, or with an hour to spare and have time for a coffee and browse the book store for something to read on the flight. you should view deadlines in the same way. Looking to arrive just in time is a dangerous and risk-ridden approach.
aIm FoR a+ and you WILL get an a
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Why long planning is flawed I have lost count of the number of changes I have been part of, some spanning many years, where there is a plan which runs from start to finish. and in some detail: you can fast forward to a Friday in december next year and know what everyone will be working on and what we will all be doing. this approach is completely flawed for change purposes because: ●● We are always optimists, and we are always wrong. ●● Change is more than just a series of deliverables. ●● you are dealing with people, who are hard to predict. ●● Successful change adjusts constantly based on what you learn on
the way. you have to have a plan, but I will share with you a better and simpler planning process for change planning: it’s based on hooks, Change Pieces and Re-estimation.
We aRe aLWayS oPtImIStS, and We aRe aLWayS WRong you will see later how everyone feels at the start of a change. It’s a positive time when it’s easy to channel enthusiasm into writing very ambitious project plans. add to this the fact that, typically, project managers are seen to be better if they can deliver projects more quickly, so optimism is seen as an good thing. typically we also have no idea of the impact our change will have on the organisation and how many times we will need to adjust what we are doing. the second area of optimism, which is even more flawed, is what happens when we realise we didn’t estimate how long things would take in the first place. this is a scenario I have seen, quite literally, hundreds of times. It usually unfolds in these steps.
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Step 1: Create a plan at the start of the plan, we look at the time and resources needed. It’s not quite flat as there are some busier times than others but you have your four phases and some associated deadlines. It can be delivered within the resources you have and you have your optimism.
Effort
Falling behind
Time Step 2: Fall behind the plan as the change begins to unfold, we see that actually the first part is taking longer than we thought. but that’s ok, we’ll just work harder to catch up.
WRONG!!! this is the trap that you always end up in by planning too far ahead. at the start of the change you made your plan based on linear effort, but now you see your first estimate was wrong. your estimates were out, but rather than re-assess the project, you decide to extend your stupidity. not only were your estimates correct for the rest of the timelines, you actually think that you can beat them. even though you just proved your estimates were wrong and took longer than you expected. So now you have a change that looks like this.
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Effort
The reality gap
Time the x represents where you are after the first phase of the project. the bottom curve is what you actually can achieve now that your first estimates are wrong. nothing has changed since you started, other than knowledge that you over-estimated the amount you can deliver. yet you are sure that you can achieve more than your ambitious, flawed, first estimates. the double arrow on the graph below is what I call a ‘resource gap’ or ‘reality gap’. you can only deliver as much as the resource you have allows – time, people, money. you’ve estimated even less accurately if you think you can do more.
Step 3: Fall further behind plan not surprisingly, the catch-up rarely happens. this has two hugely negative impacts on the team. they are to do with perception and morale. the team’s perception of ‘deliver on time’ and ‘stick to a plan’ can be affected. Working for a team which is seen as underachieving is doubly hard. you always have to go the extra mile to dispel the perception of under achievement. Credibility, as you will see, is one of the key pillars to making change happen. If the team loses this, it can sometimes never be recovered.
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Effort
The reality gap grows
Time the morale of the team is also affected. no one likes working long hours, putting in all of their effort and missing the deliverables. Look reality in the face, drop the optimism and focus on successful outcomes rather than what is usually an artificial deadline. the pain of re-planning and going back to your stakeholders with a new plan is significantly less than the pain of driving through change with a team with low morale. It’s short-term pain for long-term gain. and makes a change a successful one.
Change IS moRe than JuSt a SeRIeS oF deLIVeRabLeS traditional projects relate to a series of tasks, which have dependencies and resources needed to make them happen. the sequence of these tasks and the resource needed to make them happen are fairly well understood. Change isn’t as straightforward as this. Change involves making sure people are changing behaviour, adopting new processes and systems, moving in the right direction and doing the right things. measuring the success of change is also never binary.
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Project tasks can be binary, and measuring if they have happened can be answered quite simply. have they happened or not? have we launched a product? ●● yes ●● no
Is the new system live? ●● yes ●● no
does it work? ●● yes ●● no
on the other hand, change outcomes are never binary. because change is about behaviour and people, very rarely will you have absolute outcomes. are we seeing more innovative behaviours from our team? ●● yes ●● In some offices ●● It depends what area of the business ●● We won’t know until the first quarter finishes
have the new systems improved how our clients perceive the quality of what we do? ●● not sure ●● Finance are getting invoices out much more quickly ●● orders are up 5% but that could be seasonal 16
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Is the new team structure helping us to be more effective at delivering our projects? ●● yes ●● yes, but it’s slower than we had hoped ●● no, because no one understands who is meant to be running the
team therefore the idea of being able to plan too far ahead, without understanding the impact of your change, is not possible. Successful change is about making smaller changes, measuring the ripples on the pond and deciding where the next stone should go and how big it should be. Change is a series of interacting parts of a puzzle; changing one part may move another. you need to have a plan, but you will see that there are ways to plan, measure and re-plan in a systematic way.
you aRe deaLIng WIth PeoPLe, Who aRe haRd to PRedICt People are hard to predict. and therefore looking far ahead in time at how they might behave in response to a change you haven’t started to implement is dangerous and, at best, guesswork. there are elements of your plan which you have complete control over, and can predict with great accuracy. how long will it take to write the training plan? how long will each workshop be and how long will the preparation take? these are all within your control, and involve you and the resources combining to make change happen, delivering what is needed.
Asking the wrong question one of my biggest failures at making change happen was also my biggest learning experience, in more ways than I realised at the time.
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the change was so vague that, even this short way through the book, I hope you can see my first mistake. between 2007 and 2010, companies were obsessed with innovation. you couldn’t walk out of a meeting without hearing how important innovation was for organisations to survive. that was the ethos in the office where I was working. but I had the challenge: ‘make innovation happen in our London offices’. I didn’t have much more detail than that, and had a small budget assigned to make it all happen. a year or so earlier, we had done some really interesting experiments in crowd sourcing for our clients. these two – innovation and crowd sourcing – came together into what was affectionately known as ‘the Little Jam’. a year earlier, we had run ‘the big Jam’ across the whole firm, a concept where everyone in the firm submitted new ideas to improve processes, improve client relationships and reduce risk across the firm. It had been a great success, not only in coming up with new ideas but also showing that the firm was open to new ideas from its people, and would implement them. these questions were available on a web site where everyone could log on and see the questions and post answers. So, the Little Jam was aimed at around 4,000 people in our London office. We had three questions from our senior partners in the firm that they wanted everyone to brainstorm. We turned them into what we thought were catchy and easy to understand questions with enough context so that most people could answer them. on the morning of the launch, the execution of the communications went like clockwork. as someone entered the office, we had the Jam playing in reception. as they went towards the lift, someone in a t-shirt advertising the Little Jam handed them a jam doughnut. as they entered the lift there were posters on the inside of the doors, and as they exited there were posters immediately opposite them suggesting they logged on and posted an idea when having their morning coffee. 18
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Finally, as they sat down at their desks, employees had an email waiting in their inboxes and their screensaver was suggesting that once they logged in, they should post some ideas on the Little Jam. the Little Jam was not something that could be avoided. at our desks, we waited, hoping for an explosion of ideas around the questions which were posted on the Little Jam discussion board. and waited. and waited. by 10:30, only 15 people had actually logged on and only two had posted anything to answer the questions. and we knew that by this time 3,000 people were in the building. We thought quickly and decided that ‘Jam at Lunch’ would be a good idea. We rapidly drafted a new email to send to everyone suggesting they log on at lunchtime and post some ideas over their sandwich. We also decided to buy some more doughnuts and personally take them round the office to talk to people and see why they weren’t putting ideas into the Little Jam. that last idea was the best, and the first lesson I learned through this process. If things are going wrong, go and find out why. don’t leave your actions to assumptions. assumptions are no substitute for reality. over lunch we learned a few harsh lessons.
●● no one remembered ‘the big Jam’, so ‘the Little Jam’ seemed
like a strange thing to them. ●● they didn’t know what the Little Jam was. We just had lots of
posters telling people to log on. Some thought it might be a video, others just a website they had to read, over and above being really busy. ●● those who had logged on saw the questions, and logged
straight off. ●● People were busy and this didn’t seem that important. It
seemed like fun and they might get around to doing it. but they might not.
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the last one was the most shocking to us. our marketing had worked, we had spiked their interest enough to take the time to log on, read the questions we had posed, but for them to immediately log off… When we went back upstairs to our office, we checked the statistics for the website and saw that around 90% of the people who had logged on, did exactly the same. the average time spent on the site was 7 seconds. Long enough to read the questions and log off.
The wrong question It took us a day or two of painful failure to recognise the problem. the big Jam had been a success, people had taken the time to contribute ideas to that. and with the Little Jam, we had upped the marketing efforts, so assumed that with everything else remaining the same, we would have even more success. on the third day, we decided to look failure right in the eye. We made a list of our ‘seven-second’ people – those who took the time to log on, read the questions and then log off. We had a list of about 120 people, so split it four ways across the team and called them all. We managed to speak to about 40 of them by the end of the day. the results gave us one of those ‘gosh, aren’t we stupid’ moments.
one of them didn’t understand what they were meant to do once they got there. one person took a call and needed to look something up on the web. 38 people saw the questions and thought: ‘great, more work. no thanks’.
the key difference between the big Jam and the Little Jam was what we asked people to give us ideas about. the big Jam was a creative discussion about improving processes and how we interact with clients. the Little Jam was a set of questions about very specific client issues – 20
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which is what 90% of the consultants spend their days solving. When we boiled the Little Jam down, we were saying to our consultants
‘Hey – I know you all work really hard, but why not log onto this website in your breaks and work some more!’ So, despite everything we had done to make people aware of the Little Jam and convince them to go there, when they arrived, they didn’t want to do more work. It was just the wrong question. you are dealing with people, and people are hard to predict.
SuCCeSSFuL Change adJuStS ConStantLy baSed on What you LeaRn aLong the Way the Little Jam is a great example of learning along the way. From the Little Jam, we realised that we could engage people and get their interest through quirky approaches, like doughnuts and 1970s rock music! We also learned that asking busy people to do more work, doesn’t work, even if you offer them doughnuts. this is the final reason why you need a new way of planning change. Planning start to finish will lead you to miss deadlines, become exhausted and ultimately fail in delivering successful change. this is where hooks, Change Pieces and Re-estimation come in.
Key learning points ●● you need to have a plan. ●● but that plan will change based on what happens during your
change. ●● Change is about people, not systems or tools, and people are
unpredictable. ●● If your plan was over-ambitious at the start, do not build more
pressure and risk into the process. ●● there is no substitute for reality. If things are failing, go and
find out why.
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Ian Coyne makes change happen in the world’s largest and most high paced organizations, such as KPMG, Royal Bank of Scotland, Pearson, Supergroup, the Co-operative Group and BP. As a change leader, he delivers projects to improve people’s working lives; changing culture & behaviour. In an ever more complex world, Ian excels in communicating changes simply and making successful and sustainable change happen. He holds a Postgraduate Certificate in International Management and Executive MBA from ENPC Paris.
‘A practical, step-by-step approach for anyone managing change in their business.’ Clarke Murphy, CEO, Russell Reynolds Associates
‘Packed with insights, engaging and full of great, easy to implement tips.’ Jodie King, General Manager, Organisation Effectiveness, People. Air New Zealand
ISBN: 9781292014746
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