Change

In all our roles from trainee to senior executive we have learned the hard way how change works.

CHALLENGES

The pace of change has never been higher. Rising consumer expectations and the speed of technological innovation means that companies need to adapt and evolve continuously to maintain their competitiveness. Even a successful strategy will have a brief lifespan before change is needed.
Work is filled with routines, change means replacing some with a new set of activities with unknown outcomes. Frightening because it feels like losing control. Successful change starts with understanding and addressing these barriers.
Despite the enormous amount of research on change, corporate transformations continue to have a miserable success rate. Studies consistently report that about three-quarters of change efforts don’t succeed; either they fail to deliver anticipated benefits or they are abandoned entirely.

For change to gain speed desired behavior and early wins need to be celebrated. Highly visible success enables people to overcome scepticism and get on board, growing the change coalition, increasing momentum.
No matter the urgency for change, the clarity of the plan or the detail of the KPI’s outlining success, resistance will remain. Wrapping change in a compelling story enables people to believe that change is both essential and possible.
Mike Tyson once famously said “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face”; you can only prepare to a certain extent for the unexpected. Guiding principles have a higher success rate than detailed plans because agility and resilience are essential elements for successful implementation.
Successfully delivering change is extremely demanding and requires serious leadership on many dimensions: intelligence and acumen to decide on the right strategy, courage to take difficult decisions, empathy to motivate large numbers of people, perspective to maintain focus on what really matters and perseverance to keep going. All of this whilst continuing to run the company effectively. Reinforcing your team with experienced support to get all this done simultaneously is the smart thing to do.*