I would like to talk about change management and changing systems, structures and organizations on the one hand, and on the other hand changing people’s behaviour, attitudes, values and ideas.
You need to work with a combination of these. The point I am making is that working with change management you need to address the actual design of the change program according to the different types of change strategies you may use. You should always use Expert strategy. There is a goal, there is a problem, there are different alternative solutions to the problem, and the best alternative should be implemented… There are nine change strategies and you need a combination of them. You may need to use the Paradox, for instance. The Paradox addresses the issue that change should be in the heads of people; and if you only use an Expert strategy in order to achieve change you will not achieve anything. So you need to go inside the head of the person, not just one person but in all of the employees of the company, to create the new kind of thinking. You create the conditions for question, through this you own the paradigm and subsequently through this you start development.To give you one example: we were working with a client, the market leaders.
They were the best, they were profitable, and they had been the best for the last few decades. They had the largest market share, they were technology leaders, they were the best in everything except two factors: they were delivering with some poor quality and a little bit too late. In this case we used customer information data to show them this, however they didn’t bother doing anything because they were market leaders. We arranged for a meeting, starting at 9.00, and said that coffee would arrive at 10.00. There were nine people in the room. There was no coffee at 10.00. After fifteen minutes our secretary came with four cups of cold coffee. Four cups of cold coffee for all nine of us. We asked her for hot coffee for nine people. 10 minutes later she came back with seven cups of cold coffee. And then some of the clients got furious and said they wanted hot coffee. Then the client company thought: “OK, something is happening here, they are trying to tell us something”…
We wanted to tell them that we are demonstrating what it is to deliver poor quality and little bit too late. After 35 minutes our secretary arrived with nine cups of hot coffee… This is the Paradox, getting inside the head and shaking the client up, and from that point they looked to address their problem.
Then you can add the Power Strategy. Power is important. There is a story about a company that had built new headquarters. Then the top management team decided that there should be democratic process to decide where different departments should sit. This was a huge event and finally the decision was made and all was clear. Then two departments said that they were not happy and then the decision was re-formulated and a new composition was done… Finally the employees of the company went to the top management and said that they wanted the top managers to take the decision about where they should sit. The employees asked their top-managers to use their power.
Here you get three Change Strategies. You can add learning, reward, charismatic leadership, benchmarking and others… You, as a leader, need to find the relevant composition for the situation and also your own leadership style. And that situation is mainly dependant upon the attitudes of your employees but also the attitudes of the other key stakeholders: clients, customers, suppliers and other important factors in the external environment of the firm.
That is something that should be addressed and this type of Change Program is different when you compare industrial firms with knowledge based firms, also known as KIF (Knowledge Intensive Firms).
These are companies which base their business on knowledge and as such, they don’t have industrial operations and limited service operations; the knowledge is the value of the firm…
That is what we’ll be working with. Half of the problem is designing the process beforehand, focusing on how to work and analyzing the fundamentals of change. Those are the two major components in addressing the issue of how to achieve Change in the company and it is particularly relevant if you have a company that is intensive in human capital. This is what I like to bring into this kind of program.
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