Lessons from IBM’s Global Business Services team on how to ensure the success of your change projects.

If you want the most up-to-date research on how to manage change successfully, you need to take a look at IBM’s Closing the Change Gap report (2009), which is based on the results of surveys and interviews with more than 1500 change practitioners from 15 nations across the globe between 2006 and 2008.

Not surprisingly, project success isn’t evenly spread across these companies: the pareto rule applies, where 20% of the change practitioners (the so-called Change Masters) are responsible for 80% of the successful projects. In contrast, the bottom 20% (the Change Novices) report a success rate of merely 8%.

So what is the key to the Change Masters’ success? IBM’s summarises the key facets in a Change Diamond as follows:

• Real insights, real actions

• Solid methods, solid benefits

• Better skills, better change

• Right investment, right impact

Now you’ll be forgiven for thinking that this is all a little obvious. It’s perhaps where the IBM model falls down. In their haste to create something which looks well-balanced and compact, persuasive and acceptable to business, I think that the IBM team has glossed over the real gems of the research, which means that you have to dig a little deeper into the report to find them.

What are the real gems?

Although it’s been recognised for years in management theory that project success is due to people and not to technology, it seems that the vast majority of the organisations which took part in IBM’s research have been a bit slow on the uptake. Either that or they’re companies which believed that technology really is superior. So the main strength of the Closing the Change Gap report is the acknowledgement that “…the ‘soft stuff’ is the hardest to get right”. In fact the top 6 of the top 10 factors which make the difference to the success of a change project are soft:

1. Senior management sponsorship 92%
2. Employee involvement 72%
3. Honest & timely communication 70%
4. Culture which motivates and promotes change 65%
5. Pioneers of change 55%
6. Change supported by culture 48%
7. Efficient training programmes 38%
8. Adjustment of performance measures 36%
9. Efficient organisation structure 33%
10. Monetary & non-monetary incentives 19%.

The role of Positive Psychology

And where does positive psychology come into all this? For me the big ticket items are the two Rs: resistance and resilience. IBM mentions the first but oddly enough, not the second. So even though ‘for its very survival, the Enterprise of the Future must better prepare itself as the pace, variety and pervasiveness of change continue to increase’, nothing is really said about how organisations should be preparing their staff from a psychological perspective to cope with this. It’s assumed that understanding and implementing a robust change management process which covers all four facets of the Change Diamond will suffice. Hmmmm, I’m not so sure!

Fortunately there is a great deal organisations can do to increase the resilience of their staff, including developing optimism, taking control of emotions, understanding the impact of beliefs on behaviour, and how to manage unhelpful thinking patterns, as well as actively managing stress levels. All of these things can help employees get back in the driving seat with renewed energy, engagement, sense of purpose and focus. Which is exactly what organisations need to meet the challenge of continual, complex change head on. And be successful.

Thanks to Paul Barrett for the link

Continuing the theme of career and personal change, here’s an excellent book for anyone contemplating the possibility of a new career: Career Detection: Finding and Managing Your Career by Brian McIvor. It covers everything from identifying your transferable skills and benchmarking your expertise to dealing with rejection and creative alternatives to the CV. It’s part of a series of management books specifically designed with busy managers in mind.

You can even try before you buy, by downloading a sample chapter. Brian has over 30 years experience as a management skills training specialist, plus a long association with the Open University Business School, which is how we met. His areas of expertise include:

• Career planning and development
• Interpersonal and communication skills
• Corporate communications including corporate video and multimedia

For more details, see Brian’s website here.

Image: thinkpublic reused under Creative Commons Licence.

Recently several of my close friends have lost their jobs or are in the painful process of redundancy consultation with their employers, so my posting on Positive Psychology News Daily this month focuses on what positive psychology can tell us about human reactions to imposed (negative) change.

I had to include the good old Change Curve model (it explains the emotional roller coaster we experience as a result of change we didn’t expect or didn’t want) which you may already be familiar with.

There are various practical steps that we can take to increase our ability to manage negative change more effectively; I’ve suggested three activities here. I’m sure you can think of many others – please share them with us in your comments. To paraphrase Darwin, it isn’t the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give”. Winston Churchill.

In December 26th’s article on Positive Psychology News Daily, it was appropriate to take a look at the positive psychology research behind giving, and the related subjects of altruism, kindness and empathy.

If you’re in Secondary/High School teaching, please do take a look at G-Nation, which works with young people aged 11-16 in the UK to show them how they can change the world by giving. And there’s research which shows that acts of kindness can boost your well-being too. A no-brainer, as my old boss would say!

Image credit: Special/Krystle Fleming

In our MAPP class today we were fortunate enough to have Mark Templeton, O2s Director of Organisation Development, present to us on the positive psychology approach to leadership development that he has implemented with great success over the past year.

One thing that really intrigued me was the mention of David Whyte, a.k.a the “Corporate Poet”. I’m a huge fan of using creative approaches in the workplace, ever since I took the fantastic Open University Business School B822 course in Creative Management (now called Creativity, Innovation and Change).

So I followed this up, to see what David Whyte had to say about using poetry in a corporate setting:

“Every worthwhile organization is asking for qualities of adaptability, vitality and creativity. And none of these qualities can be legislated, none of them can be coerced out of people. You cannot invite anyone into your office and say I want a 9 percent increase in your creativity quotient this week. The request is absurd because there is no lever inside that person that they can pull to turn on their creativity. If there was one, they surely would have pulled it years ago.

The only thing you can do is to create a conversation in the workplace that will be invitational to those great qualities of creativity that have long been associated with the soul, with a person’s sense of belonging. The main task of leadership is no longer strategic management, though this will always have importance, but of creating imaginative and participative conversations that bring out the best in themselves and others“.

I couldn’t agree more – what Whyte says here fits exactly with positive psychology approaches to developing leadership and positive organisations.

Photo Credit: Cygnoir, San Francisco