DailyKaizen

Over the last month I have engaged in some colorful and constructive debates with a group of my colleagues about strategies and approaches to change management. For any change there is a hard (Process) and soft side (People) that needs to be effectively understood and managed. Many believe that focusing on the soft side upfront is the best approach and promote practices such as staff focus groups and conflict management training. I believe that leading with the process or the hard side of change is the best approach and when soft issues arise you have countermeasures well thought out and ready.

So what is the difference? In my view by focusing on the soft side we often build in a lot of waste, slow our efforts down and in the worst cases actually create more issues then would have been encountered without these efforts. I have often watched consulting groups and internal experts conduct studies on areas such as how effective is the communication process or how prepared is the frontline managers to handle change. Of course, each one of these studies comes back with the same results: the organization is not ready and we need to do a whole bunch of upfront work to get prepared. When ever you go looking for a problem you are going to find one and as a result we end up investing time and resource in soft interventions and trainings. Line managers that were often ready for change find themselves starting to question if they should be worried.
Our approach is to understand the current process and then working with the right people design the vision for the future process. We then decide the best implementation plan for the process, which includes countermeasures for potential people and process issues. When problems arise we deal with them, we don’t treat exceptions as the norm, but we are prepared when they come up. We are open and transparent with our communications. When managers start to struggle we support them. Whether it is a hard or soft problem we deal with it in a scientific way through PDCA.
I wonder what approach other consultants favor?

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