Change Management (CM) is the identification of necessary changes within a company and its controlled implementation. It is the management of change and its development in a company or organisation.
Managing digital transformation has become increasingly important in the digital age. Companies are under pressure to continuously adapt to innovative technologies, market opportunities, and consumer preferences. This can be a challenge, but one that can be overcome with a solid digital transformation and change management strategy.
Change management and digital transformation are often thought to be the same thing. However, this is not the case, they are just very intricately linked and digital transformation often requires change management. When developing a strategy for change management, important questions need to be considered. Firstly, the question of objectives and then also the question of what success looks like and how it can be measured. Once you have a clear vision, you can develop a plan to realise it.
Change management provides the process, tools, and principles to support transitions to the future state of the organisation.
In many organisations, change management often simply consists of a communication plan in which executives or initiative leaders tell the organisation that a change is coming (usually in the short term). However, change management is much more than simply communicating what will change. It has evolved and matured as a discipline over the last quarter of a century.
Change management is the application of a structured process to manage the human aspect of change – a set of tools to achieve the desired outcome. It is also:
Experience from change processes has shown that change can only be successful if we prepare, equip, and support the people who are to implement it so that they can accept it successfully. Without their acceptance, change will not succeed, and we will not achieve the desired results. Companies need to support their employees in the transition from the current state to the future state. They need to understand what it takes for everyone to embrace change.
In this way, companies can significantly increase the likelihood that the changeover will be successful and that the investment in the changeover will pay off.
There are significant and important differences between change and change management. A clear distinction can give people clarity about what is needed to move a change initiative forward. The better we define and address change and change management separately, the better we, as change management experts, can provide a clear framework and a common direction and objective.
While change is about achieving a future state, change management is about supporting employees in their individual transitions from the current state to the future state. Let’s take a closer look at the differences between change and change management.
Change is about moving from a current state (how things are today) through a transition state, and into a future state (how things will be in the future). This concept of the three states of change is widely used in change management literature and other improvement disciplines. Change is happening all around us: at home, in the community, and at work. Change can be internally or externally motivated. It can be a drastic departure from what we know, or it can be minor. Change can be expected or unexpected.
Normally, when we talk about change, we take an organisational perspective:
Each of these examples has a clear current state and a clear target state. When we take an initiative in the organisation, we structure the effort to design the future state and develop a solution for the transitional state. However, every organisational change has individual impact on dozens, hundreds, or thousands of employees who will have to do their jobs differently when the solution is introduced. This is where the change management comes into play.
Change management is about supporting people with their individual changes. Change management is necessary because organisational change; the transition from a current to a future organisational state – ultimately affects the way (probably many) people do their jobs. For example:
While change is about achieving a future state, change management goes further by supporting, equipping, and enabling employees affected by change to transition from the current state to the future state. Some employees will be quick to embrace change. Others will be hesitant. Some will be happy with the change; others will reject it. Some employees will change quickly, others will take some time, and there is a group that will not embrace the change at all.
Change management provides the process, tools, and principles to support the transition to the future state of the organisation.
The relationship between “change” and “change management” can be characterised as follows:
Changes in our organisation create new future states for our company. To achieve this, every employee must do their work differently. Achieving the desired future state of the organisation depends on individuals achieving their personal future states. Change management is the structured and deliberate approach that enables employees to embrace the changes required by the initiatives. If the results of an initiative depend on employees embracing change and doing their jobs differently, change management is essential to achieving those results.
Change management and digital transformation are not the same thing, but they are often mutually dependent and are both used to implement a company’s digital transformation successfully. In a modern company, change or transformation cannot take place without the use of data and digital technologies. In a digital transformation, digital technologies and tools are used to change the business model.
Change management supports the digital transformation process through its systemic approach to planning, executing, and implementing the necessary changes across organisations. The idea behind CM is to anticipate problems, mitigate errors, manage resistance, measure impact, and coordinate adoption to ensure a smooth transition for all users to minimise the negative impact of digital transformation.
Digital transformation involves the use of digital technologies in all areas of the business, leading to fundamental changes in the way the company is run and how value is delivered to customers. As such, digital transformation has a deeper and broader impact on the people associated with the changes, not just in terms of working with the new systems and processes.
When companies embark on digital transformation initiatives, they typically bring in organisational change management experts to support them. Organisational change management can help manage the human aspect of the risks associated with proposed changes.
Change management takes place at both individual and organisational levels.
Individual change management is about managing change from person to person. Organisational change can only take place if individuals change. There are five elements or outcomes that serve as successive building blocks of individual change.
Prosci’s ADKAR model (Professional Science) defines the five outcomes that an individual must achieve for a change to be successful.
This model is used to guide people through a particular change and remove obstacles or barriers that occur along the way. By ensuring that all five elements are in place, the individual can embrace and utilise the change.
Although changes happen from person to person, organisations manage these individual transitions collectively. Organisational change management consists of the design and implementation of change activities that enable individuals and groups affected to embrace and benefit from change. The process of organisational CM is the crucial link between individual change and organisational change.
Prosci’s three-phase process is a structured and repeatable approach that enables the people involved in the change to be successful and add value to the organisation:
Each phase comprises a series of simple questions to be answered for a specific change, and a result documenting the completion of the phase.
Enterprise change management is the structured and targeted introduction of change management throughout the entire company. Deployment goes beyond the application of effective organisational change management to all change initiatives. Enterprise change management is embedded in the structure of the organisation:
By institutionalising change management practices, processes, skills, and competencies throughout the organisation, this implementation becomes the norm, part of your company’s values and DNA.
When enterprise change management is done well in the company, the ability to anticipate and effectively implement change becomes a core competence and a source of strategic advantage.
While the specific goals and strategies of change management may vary from organisation to organisation, any effective CM for digital transformation plans has four main objectives.
All changes, especially those associated with digital transformation, should be implemented with the aim of improving the efficiency and productivity of your employees. Whether it is technology to improve communication between departments or tools to effectively perform skilled design work, all changes should help your employees do their jobs better and faster.
Companies evolve and change to become better. By structuring the change process, CM can help companies identify opportunities to reduce costs, specialise, innovate, or improve service quality.
Employees buy-in is essential to the success of any change initiative, but change can be intimidating, especially if users have been doing things a certain way for a long time. Change management helps employees feel recognised and supported, which empowers them to support change initiatives.
By anticipating the needs and wants of their customers, companies can stay ahead of the curve and position themselves to offer the best possible products and services.
When used effectively, change management can be a powerful tool for ensuring business success.
Old habits are hard to break, we are reluctant to change our habits, especially when the desire for change is forced upon us. For this reason, there are formal CM techniques. They facilitate a smooth and trouble-free introduction of new practices, deal with resistance, and minimise turbulence during the change phase.
However, as change takes different forms (and manifests itself in response to different stressors), there are several change management tools that leaders can use.
Dr. John Kotter, Author and Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School, developed an 8-step framework for leading change:
Each of the proposed change management steps aims to mobilise people for the purpose of change, achieve unified buy-in, and ensure swift action.
This model of change management identifies 7 strategic areas that organisations need to focus on to change sustainably.
These include:
ADKAR is an acronym for Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement; the five main components of effective change management, according to Jeff Hiatt. This model provides an excellent framework for formalising the scope of the change and identifying ways to support employees during the transition.
This model is about helping managers to go through three phases:
Organisational change and development are multi-stage processes that require strong employee and stakeholder engagement. To be successful in change management, managers should focus on the following 4 actions.
As the name suggests, in this phase, managers analyse the current situation, refine the vision, define future goals, analyse the risks, and implement change plans. To be successful in the subsequent implementation, managers must:
In most companies, change happens from the top down. However, directives from the top can unsettle employees at lower levels and lead to unnecessary tensions or, worse still, to open resistance. To avoid such situations, make sure that you listen to employees at all levels and seek their support.
Part of being an outstanding leader is the ability to communicate appropriately with others: you need to motivate, engage, influence, and communicate to people the positive impact of the changes ahead.
Address and dispel concerns at an early stage. It is understandable that some employees are reluctant to change or feel threatened by it. Talk to them. Reassure them and give them additional information about the impact of the changes.
Provide regular updates on the status. To facilitate faster acceptance and adaptation, you should provide plenty of information: update your company’s practices, provide information on the status, plan training if necessary.
Assume a servant leadership position. Servant leaders take a supportive position and act as “enablers”. They empower, support, and emphasise their employees and rally them around the common cause.
The change management phase is about monitoring how people, processes, systems, and other moving parts are contributing to the goal of change. This phase requires the most specific action, as leaders must constantly monitor progress and respond quickly to even the smallest deviations in the CM timeline. In this phase, you should focus on ensuring that:
Encourage knowledge sharing. Ask early adopters to help others make the leap to new practices. Create and support peer-to-peer learning opportunities and remove bottlenecks in the flow of information.
Offer training courses. Some employees will need to be trained to find their way in the new environment. Plan formal training initiatives.
Recognise and reward. Ensure that positive behaviours are maintained by recognising the pioneers of change. In the early stages, external motivation can be crucial to encourage intrinsic motivation later.
Maintaining the changes is the final phase of transformation. At this stage, your main objective is to ensure that the change has been successfully implemented and all roadmap initiatives have been completed. Focus on reinforcing positive behaviour, eliminating remaining inefficiencies, and helping employees reach a productivity plateau in the new environment. The change is complete when the proposed change is fully implemented and integrated into your organisation.
Plan a review. To better reflect on the entire change process and its successes and failures, you should plan debriefing meetings with your team.
Create evaluation plans. To better monitor and evaluate the status of the change, you should set additional milestones – short evaluation sessions that take place every 3 to 6 months during the first year – in which your team analyses the defined success metrics and develops ideas to strengthen the change.
Every organisation will experience a transition or change at some point. Every change happens from person to person, be it on an individual level, on the level of initiative, or as a competence for business change. Understanding what change management is will give you an idea of the discipline, but there is much more to know about the human side of change.
Regardless of whether they are triggered by external market conditions or internal process inefficiencies, the scale of change can have a major impact on the viability of the business. To truly understand why change management is so important, we encourage you to keep exploring and learning. Today, change is complex, global, and pervasive, and change management helps you and your organisation make the most of it.
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