3 Cornerstone Issues of Change Management

Change to survive or change to perish... this has been a dilemma of this subject for centuries. In history we see big empires vanishing from map of earth as they could not keep pace with the changing conditions. Some managed to survive only through changing their positions and acquiring new status. Same is true for companies, organizations, institutes as well as the people who make all these. Inefficient entity has minimum chances of survival. Whether its organization level or personal level, change management needs careful planning, implementation and followup along with modifications done on time on the route. Following are the three issues I call corner stones of Change Management.

First of all and logically you need to know ‘why you need a certain change?’. For organizations it could be change in external as well internal factors. Internal factor may include change in strategy, change in top level decision making staff etc. Strategy is the single most important issue regarding internal change. Michael Porter, the renowned and well respected scholar from Harvard puts five forces theory behind any strategical shift for organizations. I invite persons to apply it to their personal lives also, its equally good!. Coming back to the first issue, the real hard question is why any need is required? The alternatives could be, ‘can we survive without this change, for how long and in what state?’. This is silver bullet!

The second  we can say as golden rule of change management is to ask yourself or your organization ‘what will be changed?’. and changed for good and bad both. There must be side effects of any change plan so one should be aware of them as much as possible. Whether this change will bring efficiency or chaos, it would be good or bad in short, medium and long term? This can be asked at organizational as well as at personal level.

Lastly the third and platinum rule of change management is to consider an organization (or all aspects of life for a person) as a whole or to consider whole organization (or all aspects of life for a person)... Confused? let me describe through examples. 

Lets say that an organization intends to make a change in its marketing strategy. It has several departments like production, finances, HR, PR etc. The two questions would be whether the change should be made by considering organization as a whole or the whole organization. The second approach is most commonly used and its the root cause of failure of most of such efforts. In this approach (which is quite unsuccessful) people heading every department are asked to streamline their individual departments which at the end does not correlate to the planned or required change for the whole company. The right approach would be to consider company as a whole and change in one direction is applied to it.

Similar would be the case for personal change management. When people try to improve certain aspects of their life - lets say physical enhancement, they concentrate on physical exercise only. One needs to apply any change management plan to himself/herself as a whole. All aspects of his/her life should improve towards some common goal!.