Change Management - Revisited!

I tried to keep away from this topic. It's sticky; ambiguous and does no one good. However my fascination to the subject keeps on tugging the ropes.

And I'm back again!

Someone - not so long in the near past asked me the 'A B C of Change'. Well I answered to the best of my understanding. But within an hour, I was tempted to go back and withdraw what I said! Given this choice, I'd have redefined the ABC as "Anything But Change". Strong, isn't it?

I cannot claim to be an expert of change - but I cringe when someone seeks me out for a 'change' role! What I end up doing eventually is "A B C". And I wonder why we carry on the facade of change, if deep down within we do not want anything to change! I am still searching for answers!

Change is challenging; change is painful; change is laborious and expensive. Yet! Change is a MUST. And once we set our (real) intention to it - it is an exhilarating experience in itself.

We experience change in our everyday (out-of-work) life. We are used to it - or at least get used to it fairly soon. But the moment it comes to work (read organisation), the concept of change assumes gigantic proportions! We think of organisational change as something BIG! Something that needs to be handled with extreme care, by specialists. Something that would take months - if not years - to implement and at considerable costs! Large scale changes, enterprise overhaul, enterprise redirection are passe!

Change need not always be out-of-the-world-ish. A simple innovation - if nurtured - can leash enough potential energy to rock an enterprise tectonic plate. But how often their ideas and/or suggestions are given shape? They get lost in the corporate noise or swiftly amputated to preserve the status quo.

I just finished reading the oxymoronically (not sure if there's such a word, but hey, ho! its innovation!) titled book - Borrowing Brilliance by George Carlin. He gives six simple steps to corporate creativity. And to me it makes perfect sense. Here they are:

Step 1: DEFINING: Define the problem you are trying to solve
Step 2: BORROWING: Borrow ideas from places with similar problem
Step 3: COMBINING: Connect and combine these borrowed ideas
Step 4: INCUBATING: Allow the combinations to incubate into a solution
Step 5: JUDGING: Identify the strength and weakness of the solution
Step 6: ENHANCING: Eliminate the weak points while enhancing the strong ones.

While the first five steps are linear and build off each other, the sixth step is more of a haphazard one. It’s more organic, a self-organising process, one in which the process creates itself and is unique to each project. After passing judgment, you return to the problem, reconsider it, perhaps redefine it or decide to solve a completely different one. Your positive/negative judgments will develop your creative intuition and give you greater insight into what to borrow and where.

Once you understand this process, you can then build an innovation program within your organisation to foster this type of thinking. In fact, you can use this process, through collective collaboration, and involve your entire organisation in the creative process.

Corporate Creativity
Never before has the need for innovation and creativity felt more than now. Recession, fledging customer base, tightening regulations, shortest-ever product life cycle and xut-throat competition has led organisations to seek creative solutions to fuel their business growth. New ideas are being market-tested and implemented at more feverish pace than ever. Innovation and creativity now drive the market, replacing scarcity and price as the primary keys to success. It’s a wave that’s just beginning to crest, and you’ll need to ride that wave or else drown in the turbulence of its wake.

Most companies have very formal innovation function. Most often manned by skeletal team and facilitated by outside resources. The great misconceptions that result from formal/assisted innovation sessions are - often - more detrimental to the creative process than anything positive that results from the process itself. The constraints may leave out many important aspects of the creative thinking process. Carlin (again) suggests a simple receipe to incorporate creative thinking process into the daily processes in your organisation: Separate the concept development process into four different meetings, each with a different goal and different set of rules. These are:

1. A problem-definition meeting;
2. A borrowing-ideas meeting;
3. A new-idea meeting; and
4. The judgment of these ideas at a separate time.

The first meeting is essentially a data-dump. You are not interested in the solution, but in the problem itself. The problem needs to be analysed on all dimensions, separate the symptoms from the root cause and arrive at a hierarchy of problems. This step helps you delimit the scope of the problem. Quite often we 'jump' into the problem - only to end up identifying solutions for wrong (at worst) or less important (at best) problems.

Once you have identified your problems, organise them by sorting and grouping them. The next step is to assign different members of your team to different groups and ask them to research competitors, other industries or domains for similarities and the approach they adopted to solve them.

During the second meeting, teams present their research to each other. Essentially, they describe the problem that was assigned to them and explain how the same (or very similar issue) was handled by the competitors, or other companies or companies in other domains.

The third meeting is the idea generation meeting. You evaluate the results from the second meeting into what can work for you and in which way. This is a creative session and invitees should be encouraged to be creative but ready to shoot their ideas. Brainstorming? Yeah! Very close to it. In the initial days, when you are trying to instil the culture of innovation in your company, you are probably better off considering egos, organisation culture etc in mind.

The fourth (and there can be subsequent meetings as well) are about evaluating the shortlist of solutions and prioritising to take them further. You many have more than one good idea which you want to try them. Using a department, small group as a pilot to beta test the idea is always a healthy practice. More important, it wins you some early converts in your change programme.

Change is personal. Each person has a varying degree of adaptability to change. The level of resistance varies with the (perceived) impact on the person experiencing the change process. The 4 steps to corporate creativity helps dispel a lot of fear factor and ensures a wider participation from the organisation. Corporate creativity can work if, and only if, the sponsors understand the nature of creative thought and the process of innovation. Your teams are most effective when you use them to gather materials (remember police asking for citizens' help in search and rescue operation?). However, their search needs to be directed. This requires a leader - someone to coordinate the efforts!

I am a firm believer in the intellectual property residing in an organisation. Unfortunately, we pay outsiders (consultants) to flush them out of our organisation. Most often, once the assignment is over, the outsider walks away with most of the knowledge captured during the process. When have you scanned across the hall to seek a potential consultant in your organisation? What stops you from doing that?