A quick snapshot of Change Management as seen through the eyes of large consulting firms

In order to better frame future discussions, I have been focusing my first couple of blogs on defining the status quo. The next step will be to further identify the need and wants of the PMs who read this blog, and then we can move on to discussions around tools, frameworks, etc … As I mentioned earlier, this blog focuses on change management associated with business transformation efforts (e.g., process, IT, or operations-related), a domain that is still primarily controlled by large consulting firms. I felt it would perhaps be valuable to visit the websites of some of the largest consulting firms out there and take a  quick snapshot of change management-related web marketing paraphernalia and white papers they have made available though their portals. One of the interesting observations is that the approaches being used by these consulting firms haven’t changed much over the past decade, even though there have been many developments from the academic side.

In the process of writing this blog, the websites of 50 of some the most prominent management consulting firms were reviewed in search of white papers and other documentation describing their change management approach. This non-scientific endeavor was aimed at (1) getting a quick assessment of the frameworks that were being used and (2) getting a sense of recurring themes around change management, as described by these practitioners in the frontlines. Given the non-empirical/non-scientific nature of the review, the full list of websites is not being provided. The goal was not to criticize specific consulting firms but to provide a cursory review of the lay of the land.  The review of the websites resulted in the following observations:

--- I should first of all say that I am not affiliated with any of the firms I mention in the following bullets. I was always told that if I didn’t have something nice to say, I should keep it to myself. In that same spirit, I will only identify and highlight companies/firms I have positive things to say about ---

• Change management can improve the odds of successfully implementing a business transformation initiative. Almost all of the consulting firms highlighted the value of change management as a means of increasing the likelihood of a successful business transformation effort, whether it be IT, process improvement, strategy, or specific to the operations of a particular functional area (such as finance, HR, customer service, and others).
• John Kotter’s 8-step approach is still one of the most popular frameworks. Many of the firms tended to use a lot of buzz words and cited Kotter’s seminal 1996 work on managing change. Among the firms that offered white papers describing their change management philosophy, many described variations of Kotter’s 8 step process, selling it as their own innovative, pioneering, ground breaking methodology.
  
  Note: If you are interested in learning more about Kotter’s work you can browse excerpts of the e-book version of “Leading Change”.
• There seems to be little thought leadership/original ideas out there coming from the large consulting firms. Overall, the quick review of these websites highlighted that with the exception of a few outliers, there is very little thought leadership across the large consulting firms. Many claim to collaborate with academic or research institutions but it seems that in most cases, the surveys were primarily designed to better highlight a need for their offerings, these surveys seem to be marketing tools rather than original contributions to advance the field. I must mention that two consulting firms seem to clearly be an exception to this trend.  The Katzenbach Center which is now part of Booz  & Company and McKinsey & Company’s McKinsey Quarterly have been prolific in publishing thought pieces and attempting to leverage academic research to improve practical change management models. You can check out their websites for articles and other insightful documentation on managing change.
• There seems to be a confusion between Change Management and Communications Management. Many of the consulting firms seem to blur the line between change management and communications management. In some cases the documents on the websites seems to suggest that change management is somehow a subset of their “communications” offering.
  
  My thoughts:
  I know it depends on how one defines “communications” but I personally have an issue with this for a variety of reasons:
  1) A well designed communications strategy is a tool, not an end. At the end of the day, the goal is to enable the desired changes in behavior not just to communicate what the project team plans to do. In many large programs, the change management strategy seems to rely primarily on pushing out project “propaganda” which in most cases is not very effective.
  2) You need to keep in mind that people don’t necessarily resist change because they don’t understand. If resistance is simply due to lack of understanding, I believe it is easier to address. In many cases the most potent and effective resistors are the ones who do understand the change and its implications. Simply pushing out project propaganda does not help address this type of resistance.
  3) Many of the sites seem to claim that the best approach is to push out communications from as many channels as possible as much as possible. I’d say that can actually be dangerous. If you over-communicate, your stakeholders will eventually tune you out. The best approach is to properly assess your stakeholders and communicate appropriately. The approach should be custom tailored to the various stakeholder groups and that’s where a good stakeholder segmentation strategy comes in. Furthermore, I’ve found that a good indicator of an effective change strategy is when information is being “pulled” by the stakeholders (as opposed to having the information “pushed” on them by the project team) or information is being shared within and across stakeholder groups. Depending on the organization and its culture, Web2.0 technologies, collaboration and information sharing technology (such as MS SharePoint) can do a pretty good job at facilitating these types of interactions.
• There seems to be a belief that change must be driven from the top. Most of the firms promoted a top down approach to managing change, highlighting their experience working with executives. Not to be cynical but one could assume that having the consulting firms continually working with senior leaders in an organization and having exposure to the top decision makers does make sense from a marketing and sale standpoint. Very few of these consulting firms broke that mold, notably Aon Consulting which highlights its approach that “focuses on the middle” and stresses the importance of middle management in driving change.
  
  My thoughts:
   I disagree with the notion that change must necessarily be pushed from the top, I’d say that it depends on the situation. Don’t get me wrong, I believe the change must be supported by the top managers: they must provide the resources for the transformation. In the end, the most effective way to enable change is through effective change agents and these people are not always at the top of the organization. In a bureaucratic/hierarchical environment with a strong command and control culture, pushing change from the top makes sense. Such an approach would work well in the military and other organizations where command and control is critical and where abiding by the rules and regulations is mission critical (the nuclear industry comes to mind). Modern organizations tend to be matrixed, more decentralized, and the post potent and effective change agents are not necessarily at the top of the organization. One of my favorite books on change leaders is Real Change Leaders (1997) by Jon R. Katzenbach. Identifying these change agents is a science and quantitative/mathematical models have been used for that purpose, if you’d like to find out more, you can Google “Organizational Network Analysis” (also known as ONA). Rob Cross (at the university of Virginia) is one of the foremost experts in this area and provides various resources on the topic on his website. Sadly, very few consultants use tools such as ONA. I plan to devote one of my future blogs to explaining the concepts behind ONA and talk a bit about how PMs can leverage the results of a well designed Organizational Network Analysis to improve the success of a business transformation effort.
• Some consultants seem to think that culture is an easy thing to change. There is a myriad of references to culture change as the miracle elixir that can cure most transformation related problems. Reading the documentation on many of these websites, one would think that changing an organization’s culture is one of the most common and perhaps easy task to undertake. One large consulting firm even claims that a culture change at a large corporation can take “months or even years” but thanks to their suite of web2.0 tools, breakthroughs can now be achieved in “as little as 72 hrs”. That said, it must also be noted that a few firms such as Oliver Wyman highlight the phenomenal effort that is required to change an organization’s culture and also provide detailed on the their comprehensive approach to address the challenge, but Oliver Wynman is one of the exceptions.
  
  My thoughts:
  When it comes to culture, unless cultural change is in-scope and a distinct component of your initiative, the project team should refrain from assuming that changing a few processes and putting in place new technology will automatically change the culture. New systems and technology could “nudge” the current culture into a particular direction and can even trigger an evolution but that doesn’t always happen. Culture can be defined as an organization’s “personality” and is difficult to change in most situations. That said, I’d like to stress that it is critical that the project team understand the culture and attempt to forecast the potential impacts of and organization’s culture and sub-cultures on their implementation plans and adapt them accordingly. If you don’t take into consideration an organization’s culture, it’s more likely that people will find workarounds to the new processes you put in place instead of blindly embracing the changes. At the end of the day, unless you are implementing change in a manufacturing environment, the most critical element in driving change is the human element, performance improvement specialists who come from a manufacturing background or use tools that were originally designed to be used in a manufacturing environment (e.g., some of the six sigma tools) usually struggle with this, they tend to forget that humans are not machines or processes: they REACT to change. If the reaction is in the right direction, great but often enough, it’s not. The “build it, they will come” approach is usually not very effective.
• Most of the consulting firms seem to identify resistance as a bad element that must be eradicated. The common listed root causes for resistance ranged from lack of communications, people’s natural apprehension to change, fear of the unknown, etc.
  
  My thoughts:
  Resistance and skepticism are not always bad things. People don’t always resist for the sake of resisting. Sometimes the solution that is being pushed by the project team is a bad one, sometimes the project team makes a decision that is not well thought out, sometimes, there are variables that were not taken into account by the decision makers, in these cases, the challenge is not to simply  eradicate the dissenting voices but to properly identify the ones that are genuine concerns from the ones that are simply crying wolf.

This quick, cursory review of the web materials put forth by the 50 consulting firms seems to indicate that the range of change management capability of consulting firms vary. In some firms, it seems clear that they want to be positioned as thought leaders in the change management, change enablement, organization transformation arenas. At others, change management seems to be a secondary source of income, their core competence being either IT implementations or business process reengineering, with change management being another way of extracting revenues from established clients.

As I reminded you in an earlier blog, 2 out of 3 projects that aim at changing the way a business operates FAIL. I’ll flatly say it: these initiatives fail not solely because of the absence of change management but also because of poorly designed CM strategies. I’ll conclude with a reminder that a communication strategy by itself, is not a change management strategy and culture change is HARD. As a project or program manager who is running an initiative, you must be aware of the culture in order to successfully operate within it. You should not assume that having leadership support will automatically mean that you will be able to eliminate pockets of resistance. If properly managed, resistance can be a potent tool in helping identify issues the project team didn’t even see coming, and it can strengthen the project’s risk management framework by expanding it to include organizational issues that are often overlooked by project teams.