Choosing your weapons for change

This blog is 5 of 6 in this series of blogs that focuses on developing a change management strategy to help your organisation transition to an Enterprise 2.0 model of operation.

1. INTRODUCTION

In this blog, I provide some models that you may like to adapt or consider as part of your change management strategy. These models are categorised into individual, group and organisational models.

2. INDIVIDUAL MODELS

Table 1.0 – In this table, the 4 models to individual change are presented; behavioural, cognitive, psychodynamic, & humanistic.

As a change manager you might adopt some of or all of these models to individual change. ‘Different strokes for different folks’. Get to know your stakeholders, and you will quickly know why your stakeholders are either resistant or indifferent to change. You then can assess which strategies to apply to which people and groups. There are a number of ways to get to know your stakeholders both formally and informally.

3. GROUP MODELS

Table 2.0 – Change models for dealing with social and organisational groups.

In this section I will provide three example of models that can affect group change. These three examples are presented in Table 2.0. If you do not like any of these models, there are more models that you can explore as part of your toolkit and strategy.

Core Group Theory

The basic premise of CGT is that an organisation’s direction is the aggregate of the decisions made within its boundaries. Organisations strive to fulfil  the needs and wants of
a core group of people. We can know and change an organisation only by knowing and influencing the perception of the core group.

Identity Control Theory

The affect control theory states that individuals use some reference value as a model for their own behaviour. This reference value is considered by using some specific evaluative method.  When behaviour is performed, the individual observes and receives feedback from others and the impact on the environment, on the appropriateness of this behaviour. The individual receives and has perceptions about the effectiveness of this behaviour.

One way of practically putting this knowledge into action is to get stakeholders to discuss the change in specific groups in controlled situations. Get them to make conclusions in groups.

Role Clarity

As part of any change you need to make it very clear to stakeholders how their role benefits from the change. Explain the change in terms of physical, practical and social terms.

4. ORGANISATIONAL MODELS

In this section, I present three examples of organisational models to change.

The Learning Organisation

“A learning organisation as an organisation skilled at creating, acquiring and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behaviour to reflect new knowledge and insights”. Learning organisations or organisational learning (OL) however is currently highly debated as an effective means for organisational change, and organisational development when learning alone is the conduit of change (Senge, 1990; Garvin, 1993; Schein, 1992).

Total Quality Management

Hackman and Wageman (1995) in their paper on total quality management state seven principles that are needed to improve quality within an organisation, and include;

1. TQM’s focus on the business processes.

2. There is an ability to analyse any variances from these business processes.

3. Ability for the organisation to manage with true organisational data.

4. There is a commitment in the organisation to have continuous improvement through continuous learning.

5. Knowledge of the customer, and feedback from the customer as a method for evaluating the change process.

6. Organisational partners (suppliers) bring quality products into the organisation.

7. A wide range of skills and roles within the organisation contribute relevant and pertinent information to the organisation so that decisions about organisational-wide problems can be made.

Six Sigma

Essential to the utilisation of these elements is the five phase DMAIC process define-measure-analyse-improve and control (Goh and Xie, 2004). This methodology is basis for the majority of innovation based programs that seek to improve some aspect of quality within the organisation (Buch and Tolentino, 2006). Consists of Vision, Skills, Resources, Action Plans, Incentives.

This blog has presented a number of change models that can potentially be adopted as part of your change management strategy. In my final blog of this series, I will present a full change management framework that I developed for a payroll project where I was change manager. This project affected 8000 staff.  I will talk through the plan and provide information and justification for the structure of the change management plan.