Blog - How Organizations Prepare Themselves for Continuous Change

A few years ago a publisher, Kogan Page, approached Changefirst to write a book about change management in the 21st Century. This project has evolved into a book that is being launched around the world, this April 2016, called Enterprise Change Management. Kogan Page, like us, saw that the waves of change and disruption in the business environment meant that organizations had to develop the capabilities to manage overlapping and continuous major changes.

Fortune magazine reported in The War On Big Food that due to changing consumer demands the top 25 U.S. food and beverage companies have lost an equivalent of $18 billion in market share since 2009. It’s not just the obvious candidates who are under-going change. Even long standing incumbents in industries which you would think are immune from disruption are facing change.

What Happens When Organizations Can’t Respond

Organizations who can’t respond fast enough and effectively enough in these conditions tend to suffer badly. We identify a “Change Gap” that opens up between what organizations need to implement and what they can actually implement. This can have disastrous consequences for shareholders, customers and employees. For example: organizations can’t keep up with more agile competitors, important public services are delivered late or not at all, employees become fatigued and dis-engaged, business performance deteriorates rapidly and when it does, recovery can be almost impossible.

Closing the Gap
So, what’s to be done? We identified four stages of change maturity and only the two highest, listed below, can give organizations any comfort. These are:

• Organizational Change Management. This requires the ability to deliver individual projects or programs through a consistent and effective change management process, change management toolkit and change management training. This - on its own - is not a simple task for many organizations to achieve. The sheer effort required to build consistent capabilities can be daunting to under-performing enterprises.
• Enterprise Change Management. This takes the organization to a new, higher level. This is needed where the level of change is so disruptive that organizations need to take make change capability building part of their DNA. They need to create one of the key building blocks for agility. They do this by proactively managing their change capacity, building a resilient workforce and developing more adaptive forms of leadership. They are in place where just being great at Organizational Change Management is not good enough. The danger is the organization sinks under the weight of the change.

What will the book tell you?

In the book we review the Change Management Maturity Model (C3M) model in depth. Based on research on change performance from over 300 organizations and insights from one of the world’s biggest change management databases we help you diagnose the root causes of any gaps in organizational change performance, manage the overall demand for change and create the building blocks for successful continuous change in your organization. This book introduces five core capabilities – adaptive leadership; executing single changes effectively; managing the demand for change; developing a resilient workforce and creating the context for successful change. Frameworks, processes and tools help readers assess change capabilities and then create a strategy to close the change gap and improve performance in their organization.

To order your advanced copy go to Amazon or if you want a discussion about the ideas behind the book contact us at info@changefirst.com.