THE ABC'S OF SUCCESSFUL CHANGE PROGRAMS

Why change programs fail 

When I was at EY Consulting, we used to have these planning days for the partners to work out how we could create opportunities for each other’s service lines. They were quite entertaining for a lot of reasons, not least because we could barely understand each other. The tech guys thought we strategy types were from another world. We thought they were geeks, and both teams thought the corporate finance guys were just alchemists, boondoggling millions out of thin air.  

But we all shared a love of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms), even if we didn’t understand what they meant. We were going to create a service line called AFE – Acronyms For Everything. The techies tried to explain to us what an ERP was (Enterprise Resource Planning), which was very helpful, but then they bamboozled us with PER. This must have been a local variant, I couldn’t find it at www.acronymfinder.com – it meant Package Enabled Re-engineering. The idea was that the ERP system (Oracle, SAP etc) would drive companies to re-engineer their processes and thereby transform. 

But it almost never happened. The corporate graveyard is littered with the skeletons of ERP rollouts that went horribly wrong (you really only get to hear about the public ones – remember Incis?). I was on the receiving end of one at Southern Cross, which was where I learned what these acronyms meant in real life. And developed a few of my mine which are NSFW. 

The main reason (according to the ERP consultants) was that clients tried to customise the program to their processes rather than the other way around. The piles of modifications meant that the system could never work the way it was intended, so it could never drive the promised transformation.  

Fast forward. We’re rolling out our Active Manager Program at a big organisation, with about 70 of their managers on the first stage. Their Exec Team members have people on the program, so they’re involved through our Leader Coach Playbook. They have a monthly catch-up with our facilitator, but what’s really cool is that the whole Executive Team is meeting with the facilitator in their own co-lab to review learning and what they should do as a leadership group to support their learners. 

McKinsey talks about leadership at scale, and describe 4 features of successful transformation through leadership development (they call it the McKinsey diamond). They say that building the capability is only 25% of what’s required. The rest lies in integrating the program into the organisation’s systems. And that’s not modifying the program to fit the organisation, it’s changing the way the organisation operates to fit the program. Daily practice, leader check-ins, and feedback loops make the new habits stick. 

They’re closing the loop between learning and leading. They’re changing the business by coaching their managers and modelling the behaviours they expect. Daily skills practice is built in, so managers apply what they learn straight away, on the job. Each skill becomes part of their daily rhythm. And because they’ve hard-wired their business to this program, the results won’t fade when the course ends. The learning is built into the way they run their teams every day.  

That Executive Team is doing the hard work of transformation. They’re using the language and practices of the program to induce the culture and attitude they want. They’re leading that rarest of beasts – a genuine transformation.