In previous posts about adaptive Change Management (aCM), we reflected on the complexity of managing change in fast-changing, unforeseen environments. Organisations choose directions based on their longer-term goals and mission and in reaction to the environment in which they operate.
Our strategic planning processes must embrace this reality as we live in an era of polycrisis. As a famous general once said, “…planning is indispensable”, even if the resultant plans constantly change. So we cannot give up on strategic planning even if the strategy window necessarily narrows to half or less of what it was before.
Tim Creasey, the Chief Innovation Officer at Prosci, a leading change management organisation, reflected on the change-enabling systems and how these systems leverage capabilities to deliver value. In the strategic planning system, change management is finding a new place.
Where change management traditionally began its work once a change or strategy had been decided, we increasingly see organisations bringing strategic change management into the planning process to help decide which strategy the organisation can feasibly achieve. People’s capability to adapt and adopt change has a finite limit, and we need to know that limit as we approach strategy planning. This capability goes beyond building competency in people to manage change.
This competency is one of five strategic areas an organisation can develop if it wishes to increase and maintain its capability to change. The other four include how leadership deals with change, the processes into which we embed change management, the initiatives we choose to focus our change management capacity with the criteria for selecting them, and the structures we create and invest in governing and promoting change capability.
As adaptive change Management (aCM) is a highly iterative and fluid process, each of the strategic areas that build change capability must incorporate the same degree of fluidity and iterative nature so the area can mould to the organisation’s needs. We use a tool that provides for this kind of iterative process. It takes the form of a self-audit that leaders execute to measure observable attributes of the organisation that demonstrate change management maturity.
From this assessment can flow decisions on actions to take that build the five areas of change capability. So the audit provides a numeric baseline from which we can regularly assess how we are progressing in building capability, but it also allows us to gauge the effect of environmental changes that impact our capability to respond to the new crisis.
Specialist change managers use this tool to help them focus their change capability-building project that runs throughout the enterprise. So, often we find this process being executed in different organisational functions or locations. It is rare to find that an organisation’s capability to change is the same in all functions. I call this phenomenon the leopard-spots syndrome, differing capabilities in different areas of the organisation.
Change capability management, therefore, should be an integral part of the strategic planning process. The realities of our operating environment require us to invest in this iterative process while we also invest in managing individual projects of change.
*Tom Marsicano is the CEO of ‘and Change’, a global change management consulting and training company. He is a Master Certified Prosci® Instructor with an extensive background, especially in financial services and IT systems. His love for research makes him a widely respected facilitator and speaker. Write to him at tom@andchange.com or learn more at andchange.com.
