5 reasons your change process will fail

Over the years many organisations around the world have engaged Corporate Punk to course-correct change processes in crisis. The costs of these crises can be mind boggling: integration failures; staff churn; lost productivity; compromised leadership credibility; months of time wasted; millions of Euros in consulting fees down the drain.

Failure is almost always rooted in one or more of five problems. So we’re sharing them here, in the hope that they help you plan and execute a successful change process.

Problem #1. Playing a game of ‘ready, fire, aim’

No leader embarks on change management with a desire to get it wrong. But they are often operating on incorrect assumptions about how their people will react to change, and the factors that inform this.

Say you are making significant headcount reductions or reshaping your organisation. It can be tempting to think that the problem you need to solve is to avoid losing your top talent along the way. That might be true. But there are myriad underlying factors that might affect your people’s appetite to remain in their roles.

For example, they might be unclear on the strategic direction of the business. They might still feel wounded by historic change processes, and be projecting these feelings into the present.

Or they might sense, correctly or not, that the changes limit their scope for future development. If you fail to accommodate the factors that influence your people’s response to change, you can all but guarantee that at some point the response will derail progress.

Problem #2. Doing too much, too soon

Most organisations have an overt bias towards action. In a choice between moving deliberately and moving fast, they will do the latter. Money has a role to play here: the desire to realise commercial benefits often creates the perceived need for speed.

The consequence of this is a phenomenon we like to call the 27 Workstreams. (Imagine the obese offspring of a Gantt chart and a map of the London Underground.)

Wherever you encounter the 27 Workstreams or any of its many descendents, you can bet three things. Firstly, every single one of the various ‘streams’ will have been added with positive intentions. Secondly, this combination of activities will break the team trying to make it happen. Finally, the business will prove itself unwilling and unable to accommodate even 50% of the plan within the desired timescales.

Problem #3. Saying it once

“Everyone across the business loved and bought into the change strategy, and that was a great end to 2024,” announced a client recently. We turned to the Board: “Just out of interest, can you each write down the five main points from the strategy for me now?”

“Oh, ah, um.”

“If you can’t remember it, how will they?” [Cue awkward silence, solitary cough, paper shuffling]

Again, our good friend, the need for speed can bias leaders to believing that the communication job is done when the last Powerpoint slide has closed. But the reality is that even the best crafted strategic narrative is only ever the beginning. Change requires lots and lots of communication, and often mind-numbing repetition, across all parts of the organisation.

As we say to leaders: around the time that you are sick of saying it is around the time that it has just started to sink in. Fail to embrace this fact, and prepare to embrace failure. People cannot get behind what they do not understand.

Problem #4. Outsourcing your change process to consultants

“Some men here / they know the full extent of your distress / they kneel and pray and they say / long may it last” (Morrissey, Why Don’t You Find Out For Yourself)

So it is with change management – a lucrative and self-perpetuating revenue stream for many consultancies, who will issue dire warnings about ‘boiling the ocean’ while quietly setting their heaters to do precisely that, at your expense.

Outsourcing change management to third parties doesn’t just lead to colossal inefficiencies, it also predicts an ill-fitting process. No-one understands your business as well as the people working in it. No external consultancy can have as good a feel for your culture, or insight into what your people need. And third parties will never care about your success as much as you do. (That doesn’t mean they don’t care about you at all, but it can be helpful to examine their values.)

So, by all means hire some support, but have it be more akin to change coaching. Its primary orientation should be to enable your internal team to lead for themselves. The work should be structured in such a way as to help you develop the capacity and muscle memory to run future projects without recourse to external help.

Problem #5. Doing change to your people, not with them

Almost all organisational change involves some form of imposition. Redundancies, new leadership, or mergers are just three examples of this. The uncomfortable reality is that not everyone is going to like or accept these changes.

But there is a difference between taking potentially unpopular decisions and forcing people into circumstances where they feel no sense of power or agency. In almost all situations, your people can play a useful role in helping the organisation to accommodate your desired changes. To do this, they need to understand the reasoning behind the change, and be given an opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to supporting the business through it.

Sadly, organisations tend to bypass this in favour of doing change ‘to’ their people. While there will be lots of talk about ‘taking people on the journey’, the lack of right to reply tells a different story. People don’t tend to vote for life in a dictatorship. They particularly don’t like it when dictatorships pretend to be democracies.

These problems are often self-evident in retrospect. But that doesn’t stop organisations from falling prey to them over and over again. There are many reasons for this, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Meanwhile, wherever you are in your change planning, it will be worth asking yourself one question:

To what extent are we prone to each of these five problems?

If you want a discussion about how to avoid or address them, get in touch.

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