Leading organisational change in practice. Some ideas.

This blog, by Pete Vowles, was originally published here on Medium.com on March 5, 2016.

There were 5.6 billion returns to my recent Google Scholar search for ‘leading change’ with Kotter’s classic “Why Transformation Efforts Fail” at the top of the list. But, putting the theory on one side, how do you do this in practice?

Over the past 3 years a group of us have led a change programme in Department for International Development reforming the way we design and deliver programmes to tackle global poverty and its root causes. Without any previous organisational change experience, learning by doing, we have had some real successes, a few failures and learnt masses about change. Here are some reflections on our experience and potential lessons for the future…

1. Have a strong narrative and theory of change that binds everything you do. From the start we agreed a narrative that shaped how we would work, framing engagement around our core poverty reduction mission. We agreed that our work could not be a technocratic exercise focusing on structures, organisational charts or processes, the natural (and easiest) target for many change programmes. From the very start, we were clear that the only way to achieve lasting change would be to focus on the way we think and work. This is far harder and a lot less tangible, but we agreed that unless we did this we would ultimately end up with a different but similar set of problems. This became a touchstone, guiding everything we have done, strengthening our resilience as we’ve gone through the ups and downs of change.
2. Build coalitions of change by appealing to people’s self-interest. Change programmes in organisations like ours often – and maybe inevitably – come from the top of the organisation. Despite the best intentions to consult widely and engage front line staff, it is very easy to slip into a top-down narrative that focuses on making people more effective or more efficient. This quickly becomes demoralizing for front-line staff who are working hard and only hear that they need to do better. From the start we have worked hard to appeal to the self-interest of the front-line, focusing on what they wanted and needed not what we thought.
3. Engage everyone to co-produce change. From the start we made sure that people across the organisation had the chance to help to diagnose the problem, identify the need for and then and shape the change process. This went beyond conventional ‘user testing’ to ‘user-creating’ and meant sharing our approach widely, however nascent, and integrating ideas from across the organisation. We used social media and informal networks to cut through the hierarchy and create an organisation-wide conversation. Quickly we found that leadership was coming from everywhere.
4. Open the space for challenge and critique. Throughout, we have tried to be open with the organisation, creating the space for people to challenge and interrogate plans and being honest about the barriers and tensions. The space to vent and air grievances has been critical to gaining and sustaining trust and credibility. Our experience has been that having a structured process to to dig into – and air – concerns and gripes from internal and external stakeholders is key to building credibility and learning what’s most important to focus on.
5. Be honest with the insights. We gathered loads of data through this process. We’ve replayed the feedback, uncensored, to the top of the organisation. We’ve found that this has been hugely valued (despite a few uncomfortable moments) and realised that this kind of data doesn’t automatically reach the top of organisations, often filtered out through the hierarchy and personal vested interests.
6. Deliver value early and often. Learning from ‘agile’ approaches to digital project delivery, we’ve made a concerted effort to deliver change early and often. There have been a few ‘big bang’ moments, but a large part of the change has been incremental, brokering solutions to sticky issues on an ongoing basis to deliver early wins, building credibility as we’ve gone. When people have raised issues, however small, we dedicated time to trying to help resolve them, feeding back what we have done and how it helped.
7. Be prepared to ‘pivot’ to adapt to changing contexts. During the early days of our work there was an external report that was highly critical of the organisation and threatened to undermine the momentum of the project. Being prepared to respond to this new context, adapting our approach to turn it into an opportunity was key. Rather than derailing the project, we succeeded in turning it around and used the critique to add momentum and sustain organisational interest.
8. Leading change in partnership. Having two people leading a change process in a partnership of equals was hugely empowering. We agreed a single set of objectives (no individual performance form) and agreed that we would succeed or fail together. This allowed us to work as a tag team, especially in tricky meetings where one person could be speaking and the other observing and thinking, switching as we went. This made us far more influential and resilient than either of us could have been alone. And it was was hugely empowering; it brought different perspectives, networks and significant resilience. And it was great fun.
9. Find different ways to sustain attention. People are busy and will quickly move on to other things. We found that the best thing we could do was find ways to sustain the conversation by phasing the change programme, constantly finding different ways to communicate. And whatever communications you do — however boring you feel you might be becoming — it is not enough.
10. If you do have to do things ‘top-down’ with limited time to genuinely engage, be relentlessly honest in explaining why. We found that people are generally happy to engage if they understand why. We have also found that people can see through the ‘good news spin’ very quickly and will quickly discredit you if you attempt to gloss over problems or tensions. Spend time explaining why and admit responsibility if things haven’t been managed or communicated well. People will trust you more.

We have learnt how hard organisational change is and how fragile and reversible changes can be. Hopefully these experiences remind us that to achieve long-term impact we need to see organisational change as an iterative process that focuses on people instead of processes, behaviours instead of organisational structures, honest & open debate instead of corporate spin.