HR Blog

Travel log: Jan Mouton from Washington

From the 31st of may until the 3rd of June, the Washington Convention Centre will host the 2009 ASTD International Conference. More than 8000 visitors will have the opportunity of attending conferences brought by 300 lecturers on the latest trends in training and coaching.

Jan Mouton, management coach at BCT Training & Coaching – a division of Acerta – attended the conference and will exclusively report his findings on www.goingforhr.be.

Part 1: The ‘Certificate Programme’

Before the conference started, ASTD gave its guests the opportunity of taking a ‘certificate programme’ and so to start my week I attended the two day programme “Facilitating Organisational Change”. An essential course, as it turned out to be.
Research shows that more than 50% of all change tracks in organisations fail and that 58% never reach their stated goal. 

This is mainly because vital aspects, which would make a successful change, are neglected. From several different approaches, ASTD has created an integrated formula, which consists out of 6 essential steps (the ASTD change model):

Step 1: Carefully analyse the current situation. This first step recognizes that doing things differently is possible; that a different future which breaks the status qua is a positive thing. This step is usually put into motion by someone with a higher rank. Questions here are: Why are we doing this? What do we want to see happen? Change is mainly driven by two things: pain or gain. In other words, we either have something to lose or something to win. Ironically enough, of the two, pain is the easiest point of departure. When in pain, the need for change is obvious.

Step 2: Harmonise and streamline leadership. Here the organisation needs to leave old habits behind and learn new ones. This explains why experts in the old ways are most resistant to change and suffer the most. For successful change, it’s extremely important that the organisation’s leaders are on the same wavelength. To do this, create a challenging and attractive vision. Here it is the responsibility of leaders, to present a consistent message to the rest of the organisation.

Step 3: Activate commitment. This is where teams are formed to design the change process. What will be kept the same? What are we going to change? How will we deal with natural forms of resistance? What needs to happen before actual implementation can start?

Step 4: Develop and formalise the realisation. Often organisations skip the first three steps and immediately go on to step 4. Once the decision has been made to change, that change is put into effect immediately. Unfortunately it doesn’t take long before the first bumps in the road are met. In this type of situation, external help is often brought in. In this phase risk analysis is important as well as identification of critical success factors.

Step 5: Navigate implementation. This step may seem short because nothing new happens. Senior management has the tendency of losing interest at this point. However, this the phase where the change agent gets extremely busy making sure implementation stays on track. During this phase, forms of resistance that were originally misjudged will surface.
Only two really new activities are started up here but they are no less important:

1) Making sure first successes get booked
2) Finding ways of keeping motivation high

When company management reaches step 5, they often don’t realize that middle management is still stuck at step 3 or 4 and that operational staff is still going through step 2. Because of this managers don’t understand why the rest of the organisation isn’t following behind.
Before you know it, management will start a new change track while the original one still hasn’t been digested.
A second problem is the empathy gap between management and their troops. Managers seem to not understand that the bulk of the effort needs to come from the underlying layers and that these are also layers who will feel the changes most strongly. As a result they are unable to understand any resistance that might arise. Reversely, operational functions often find themselves asking the question who could possible have dreamed op a change they perceive as completely invaluable.

Step6: Evaluate and institutionalise the change. Once implementation has been completed, many organisations stop the project and go over to the next battle. To bring about real change, physiological changes in the brains of those involved need to also be made. New circuits need to be made and that takes time. This is why it is vital to anchor processes, products, services and philosophies in the new company culture. Research, however, shows that up to 20% of employees never latch on to the changed situation. Alas, a lot of energy gets lost on trying to convince them to do so. This waste of energy is better spent on the 16% innovators and early adopters. Once this set is onboard, the rest will follow.