Prosci’s Tim Creasey on Measuring Change

Just under two years ago, I became a Certified Change Practitioner through Prosci, the “world’s most popular change management certification.” Used by 80% of Fortune 100 companies, their framework – ADKAR – can design and implement individual and organizational change programs.

Tim, their Chief Innovation Officer, is one of the most passionate people about OCM I’ve ever met. He loves getting the weeds and getting wonky about change. This podcast interview is no different and is probably best aimed at OCM professionals already doing the work.

That said, there were two concepts he raised that I think are widely applicable. First, he acknowledged that the shift to data-driven decisions is a step in the right direction, but that data without context – and data that doesn’t line up with what we see – is useless.

For example, your data could show that employee engagement is way up, but based on what you and your colleagues are observing, that doesn’t seem to be true. That can be a confusing place to be in. You’re not sure if you’re tripping or the data is wrong. The lack of alignment between what you feel and what’s reported impacts your buy-in to the change program.

The second point that stuck with me was making sure everyone’s working toward the same goal. He said something like, “empowerment without alignment is anarchy.” It had a slightly softer tone, but you get the idea. It’s so frustrating for a team to work hard, only to find out they’re working in different directions.

This was a solid podcast episode. If you’re into change and you’ve got 30 minutes, I think it’s work a listen.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/measuring-success-with-tim-creasey/id1521473989?i=1000541884384

There’s got to be a better way than back-to-back meetings.

I think we’ve all experienced days of back-to-back meetings, proceeded or followed by time when we actually “work.” This feels like the norm, but it doesn’t work.

In a typical workday, I need time to collaborate with groups and individuals; time to plan, monitor, and implement projects; time to reflect; and some time to respond to urgent requests. But I’m talking to dozens of people a day who have their own needs, and it’s hard to get aligned so that we can make the BEST decisions and do our BEST work. I’m not sure if we’re trying to do too much, if we have too few people, or if we don’t know how to use the tools we have (or maybe some mix of all three).

It’s a wicked problem, but I think the teams that figure it out can have more fun at work and will be able to get more done. It’s a win-win for organizations and individuals. I like how Cal Newport thinks about these things. The solutions still need to be designed, and he admits that they’re challenging to implement, but I think his ideas are worth a listen.

How To Improve Your Odds for Change Success

Organizational change management is hard – so hard that you’re likely to fail 70% of the time.

However, by focusing on performance, i.e., “what an enterprise does to deliver improved results for its stakeholders” and health, i.e., “how effectively an organization works together in pursuit of a common goal,” the clients they’ve worked with have more than doubled their odds for successful change (Keller & Schaninger, 2019).

The authors assert that their approach is unequivocally superior to others because of the extensive research and scientific rigor behind their recommendations, the comprehensiveness and pragmatism of the tools, and the approach’s ability to be customized for each client. They close their introductory chapter with a passionate plea for better change management.

I agree that change is hard – but what’s the deal with the high failure rate? It’s hard to contest the need for better change management practices, but a 30% success rate doesn’t offer much hope.

Point 1: Change management has never been more critical.

There are multiple types of change – e.g., organizational, political, social – all of which we desperately need. For example, consider that Americans generally do not have an optimistic view of the future. In a recent study by the Pew Research Center (2019), respondents overwhelmingly believed that America would lose its standing globally, implode under the cost of health care, and have a weakened economy by 2050. In addition, about half surveyed have lost confidence in our representative democracy and don’t believe our political leaders are qualified for their jobs. And 40% are worried about the country’s moral values, the climate crisis, and the quality of public schools for our children.

But it’s not because we haven’t tried. Change has been on the agenda for political leaders, globally, for decades. The authors remind us of the political zeal of leaders like France’s Hollande and Macron, America’s attempt to “make itself great again,” and our Canadian neighbors’ belief of “real change” under the dreamy Trudeau. But the odds are stacked against them (Keller & Schaninger, 2019). There’s only a 30% chance of impacting economic inequality, climate change, and an overcrowding planet. If we don’t have better tools for designing and implementing change, we’re going to be in a pickle.

In addition to social changes, there are also changes to how we work – and not just because of COVID. One of these changes is an increasing shift towards projects and away from operations. In fact, we may need to shift our thinking to look at projects as operations.

As Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, former chairman of the Project Management Institute, writes for the Harvard Business Review, “…projects (which involve the changing of organizations) are increasingly driving both short-term performance and long-term value creation—through more-frequent organizational transformations, faster development of new products, quicker adoption of new technologies…” (Nieto-Rodriguez, 2021). Said differently, soon, we’ll all be project managers. And managing that much change can have severe consequences if we don’t know how to do it right.

Point 2: Our odds of success may be higher than we realize.

The authors tout the infamous 70% failure statistic, but I take issue with that. It’s not that change isn’t hard, but the negativity bias implied with this kind of percentage makes it feel like you are bound to fail. Here’s a personal example.

When I was preparing for the Project Management Professional (PMP) exam, my teacher said that only 30% of test-takers passed it on the first try. Even worse, while I was preparing, the test changed, which allegedly cut that success rate in half. How the heck do you stay motivated when there’s an 85% chance you’ll use most of your free time to study and still fail? Naturally, I was nervous, but I stuck with my study approach, and ultimately, I scored above the target in every area.

Perhaps, there’s some cache around passing what some would consider a difficult test – and maybe to elevate the profession, this sort of reputation is good. But in everyday life, if I told you that you had a 70% chance of failing – even with your most excellent intentions and hard work, how often would you try something new? Probably not all that often.

In a seminal work, “Reengineering the Corporation,” two renowned business authorities shared an eye-popping statistic that caught readers’ attention. “Our unscientific estimate is that as many as 50 percent to 70 percent of the organizations that undertake a reengineering effort do not achieve the dramatic results they intended (Champy & Hamper, 1993).” Note the term “unscientific estimate.” Well, after people latched on to that quote, it’s been reverberating in the change atmosphere ever since. A few years after their book was published, the authors even corrected the public, but it was too late. The looming thought of change failure would haunt business professionals for decades.

If we think we’ll fail, we’ll look for signs that we’re failing and use those as proof that we’re doomed. Unfortunately, research done at the University of Chicago shows “we assume that failure is a more likely outcome than success, and, as a result, we wrongly treat successful outcomes as flukes and bad results as irrefutable proof that change is difficult.” Thankfully, research shows that the opposite is true; if we actively look for signs of success, we’ll build momentum that helps us achieve our goals.

So, what’s the upshot here?

Change is hard – for many reasons I’ll unpack in future posts – but we aren’t doomed to fail. Doesn’t it feel bleak to think that there’s a 70% chance in 2050 you’ll be poorer, our kids will be less bright, your health with be worse, and our country will implode? Thankfully, we have change management principles that can help us significantly improve our odds for success. Moreover, we can use these principles to affect professional and social change. Kelly and Schaninger give us the McKinsey approach; you don’t have to use theirs, but I suggest that you use something.

You should not expect any change to be easy. However, “Every time we feel the impulse to say, “change is hard,” we could make a different claim that is every bit as accurate: Adaptation is the rule of human existence, not the exception. (Tasler, 2017).”

Furthermore, we don’t approach each new change effort like a newbie. Instead, we’ve learned how to manage over time, throughout the multitude of changes thrust upon us. It is, quite literally, how we’ve learned to survive. So, start to see your challenges (and yourself) as a change success story. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, and your perspective determines which future comes to pass.

Citations

Champy, J.A. & Hamper, M. (1993). Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution. Harper Business.

Keller, S. & Schaninger, B. (2019). Beyond Performance 2.0: A Proven Approach to Leading Large-Scale Change. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Nieto-Rodriguez, A. (2021, November/December). The Project Economy Has Arrived: Use these skills and tools to make the most of it. Harvard Business Review, 38-45.

Pew Research Center. (2019). Looking to the Future, Public Sees an America in Decline on Many Fronts.https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/03/21/public-sees-an-america-in-decline-on-many-fronts/

Tasler, N. (2017). Stop Using the Excuse “Organizational Change Is Hard”. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2017/07/stop-using-the-excuse-organizational-change-is-hard

Meet My Alter Ego: Change Management Evangelist

When’s the last time you reflected on why you liked what you like?

I heard that you could increase your job satisfaction by finding a job that meets some deep, personal need. As I’ve described on the blog, I have an incessant need to solve problems. I tend to see things as puzzles, but I’ve often become frustrated that I couldn’t solve them.

Change management (CM) and project management (PM) have given me tools to improve my skills in this area, providing some order to this otherwise chaotic, hyperactive brain. This post will provide some background on how I came to appreciate CM/PM and what you can expect from my CM/PM-focused posts.

I spent some time thinking about how I became such an evangelist for change management, and I had to go back through my career. Corporate training was the first job I really liked, and I was good at it. I’d become successful by using my public speaking skills and intuition as a facilitator. But not having an organized, repeatable, and reliable approach to developing courses put me at a disadvantage.

One day, I learned about an instructional design framework called ADDIE (Naji, 2016) – Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation – and it’s hard to describe how much this helped me as a trainer. ADDIE offered a systematic way to solve my training problems, and the best part was that I didn’t lose my creativity. In fact, it allowed my imagination to blossom even more. As a result, I became a much better trainer.

After I moved out of training & development and into organizational effectiveness, I again had the issue of not having proven approaches to make improvements. I could see where my team was and where I wanted it to go, but I didn’t have a good plan to get there. In fact, I didn’t even know what the plan was. I’d look at my inputs – me and all my skill sets, the team and their skillsets, the culture, our morale, what I was learning in school, what other managers were doing, etc. – but I couldn’t get to the other side of making meaningful results. I managed to get on well enough, but it was hard, and I felt like a fraud next to my colleagues.

So, imagine my excitement when I learned about organizational change management (OCM)!. There are dozens of frameworks that all consist of helping to change human behavior with the hope of moving as many people as possible from point A to point B. And after I learned about project management (PM) – the practical tools to move from point A to point B – I felt even more equipped.

OCM helped me with the “what”; PM helped me with the “how.”

I have not solved the world’s biggest problems with my instructional design, change management, or project management skills, but these concepts have given me the tools to approach life with greater confidence. I’ve applied these principles with great success, whether at work or at home. I’ve wanted to share what I’ve learned with the community out of gratitude. In addition, I wanted to share how one could integrate CM and PM into one strategy. I haven’t seen a lot of people tackle these issues together. Probably because it’s damn hard, though, not impossible.

That’s the primary reason I was excited about Beyond Performance 2.0 (Keller & Schaninger, 2019). The authors don’t use the terms the same way I do, but it’s the best and most recent work I’ve read that tries to integrate the concepts of “what” and “how.” I started reading the book some time ago – and with a lot of enthusiasm – but gradually, I took longer breaks in between sessions and ended up losing momentum and forgetting most of what I read. So, I plan to share the highlights of the text on this blog to rekindle the change management flame and crystallize my learnings from the book.

The terms “change management” and “project management” can feel cold and dry. They can feel so corporate. That said, the guidance and tools they offer have contributed to significant positive changes for me, personally and professionally. My goal is to find a way to share CM/PM info that doesn’t put you (or me) to sleep, which helps me test my hypothesis. I believe that change/project management principles are practical at work and can also be applied to improve the quality of your life.

Citations

Naji, C. (2021, November 16). Addie Training Model: Steps, examples, and outdated myths. RSS. Retrieved January 14, 2022, from https://www.eduflow.com/blog/addie-training-model-steps-examples-and-outdated-myths 

Keller, S. & Schaninger, B. (2019) Beyond Performance 2.0: A Proven Approach to Leading Large-Scale Change. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Terrible Tuesday

Today was challenging.

It was a long day, and I ran out of energy a couple hours before I was done with my work. I’m not sure what’s the cause, but my colleagues sound burned out. I think we need better skills in collaborating with a dispersed workforce. I can’t speak for them, but it seems as if information is already outdated by the time I get it. It can be hard to keep up.

Organizations, i.e., people, have to adapt – sometimes abruptly. And I also know that change is the only constant. But at what point does the amount of change feel dysfunctional? I guess at the point where one’s capacity for managing change has been exceeded. But, of course, we all have different levels of change capacity, and even that capacity is dependent on the context of the situation.

It does feel like we try to do too much at once. But, again, I’m not sure if I should be more agile or if my point is objectively viable. Doing the back-to-back to meetings on different topics gives my brain whiplash. By the end of the day, if I’m not careful, I would have spent a lot of time doing “stuff” but never making progress on what’s most important.

I’d define the Scrum framework as one where the goal is to create an environment where change can be effectively managed while making progress towards a specific goal. But one of the guideposts is that the entire team agrees to what they plan to accomplish. We control for known distractions and practice discipline with just the right touch of flexibility. We set ourselves up for success in the sprint planning session. There are three guiding questions: (1) Why is this sprint valuable? (2) What can be done in this sprint? (3) How will the chosen work get done?

Note: I got these questions from The Scrum Guide: The definitive guide to Scrum: The rules of the game, by Ken Schwaber & Jeff Sutherland.

At work, when there’s a sense of urgency with almost every task, it gets challenging to prioritize. The Scrum framework accounts for this in the Daily Scrum meeting. This is not your typical meeting – usually, it’s held with everyone standing up and limited to 15 minutes. The only goal is to get aligned on the most critical work that has to be done that day and resolve impediments to getting said work done. At the end of the sprint, there’s a sprint review to inspect the work that was done, and at the very end of the sprint, there’s a retrospective to evaluate how we did it.

I like this process because you determine what you’re going to do upfront. Then, every day, you talk about your progress towards that specific goal and nothing else. Then, you evaluate what you did and how well you did it at a predetermined time. And then you do it all over again. It breaks complicated projects down into more manageable pieces. What I miss in my current role is the connection back to what we agreed upon.

On the one hand, I get to make my own metrics and plan my own day. I really like the autonomy of my job. But on the other, it feels a bit every-man-for-himself.

Introducing: Flux

Oop – almost did it again! I had an idea to start a new blog. But, unfortunately, I spent more time looking at website templates than I spent writing. I keep wanting a fresh start, but it sort of feels like I’m running away from what’s in front of me to chase something else that looks newer. I can stop that pattern now and work from where I am.

In life, you don’t get many chances to start over. But when you do, you make the change in your head first. Then you reframe the past to support your new vision for the future. One of my goals is not to run away from my past but to appreciate what it taught me and use those lessons to create the future with greater intention and wisdom.

I’m reading a book titled “Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change”. The author, April Rinne, opens by explaining what the book is about. It’s not another book on change management, “rather, it is about reorienting one’s attitude towards uncertainty and the unknown, and learning to see every change as an opportunity, not a threat…”.

I have studied change management, and, broadly, I enjoy the discipline. I’m well-versed in change management theories; I’m even a certified change practitioner through Prosci. But I need a new way to look at change. The way I’ve been approaching it isn’t working. I need a new paradigm, and I think this book will offer it.

I just completed “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey. His text focuses on establishing tried-and-true principles that don’t change even though everything else around you might. It’s early, but I think April’s text shows you one path to developing said principles. I can’t remember how I learned about this book, but I’m glad I did.

In the book’s introduction, she recounts a life-changing experience: one year away from college graduation, she learns that her parents died in a car accident the day before. She writes,

“In that moment, time stood still: the future was going to be wildly different than I’d imagined, or that my parents imagined, or than it had looked a year earlier, or even an hour earlier.”
– April Rinne

I was a few years younger when I had a similarly traumatic experience, and I had a similar reaction. I didn’t know what to do, and I felt I didn’t have anywhere to turn for support. I didn’t have the wisdom I do now that could help me reframe the experience into something meaningful. I’d just assumed my best years – at 18, of all ages – were behind me.

This earth-shattering type of change, though, happens to people every day. It’s not always death or an illness; sometimes, it’s related to a job, friendship, or something else. But change is always happening. I get tired of hearing it, but it’s true – change is the only constant. And you’d think we’d be better with change since it happens so often, but I don’t think we are. Rinne asserts that:

“The pace of change has never been as fast as it today, and yet, it is likely to never again be this slow.
– April Rinne

That’s freaking terrifying.

She goes on to say:

“The future is not more stable; the future is more uncertain.”
– April Rinne

Geez, lady. That’s depressing and unsettling. If that’s true, my current unsuccessful approach to managing change will be completely unsustainable. And I think it’s true. So, if this amount of change is happening, whether I want it to or not, I need to get better at managing it.