AND THIS REALLY WORKS?
Recently I met an energetic lady at tennis. Our daughters were playing against each other. Judith is my age, she has started her career with the other leading consulting company, has been working with the other big utility and we’ve got mutual acquaintances. “What are you working on?”, Judith asked. “I am a change manager”, I replied. Pause. I felt some explanation was needed. “So basically, I support people to change their behaviour, to increase the company performance.” I saw her face puzzling. “And this really works?” she said.
We are used to those reactions. Many rational managers have a profound scepticism on Change Management. Unfortunately, often there is little to learn on the subject at university – apart from Change Management equals Change Communication. So, what can I do? Maybe I can read one or two bestselling books on the topic – giving me recipes for changing organisations from stable state A to stable state B. Maybe I can follow some inspirational speeches by change gurus at company events. Unfortunately, many of the knowledge I will then get is just theory. Practice is different. In practice I might have gone through multiple complex change events by myself – mergers, re-organisations, downsizing – badly executed and most of the time destroying more value than creating value. There is never a stable state achieved but permanent instability. As a result, what shall I do except for regarding Change Management as something esoteric with little practical use?
Our view is very different. We learned that Change Management can work, what it takes to make it work and that it delivers huge value.
However, to make it work, we needed to develop the right mental model – i.e., our view on how companies and company change works: To us, companies are not machines, but systems.
COMPANY MACHINE OR COMPANY SYSTEM?
The industrial revolution brought along new technologies and with it new forms of human collaboration in large corporations. With this, new thinking about organisations arose. Leading minds of the time – Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915), Henry Ford (1863-1947), Henri Fayol (1841-1925) or Max Weber (1864-1920) – created a worldview which is still deeply ingrained into how most of today's managers look at their organisation and themselves. More than a century later, many managers still view organisations as machines and themselves as the operators, steering the machine from their control room. They use analogies like the ship in the stormy sea and themselves as the captain at the wheel.1
When I was a young consultant, my view of companies tended to be similar. I led multiple reorganisations and was pretty good at it. When managers were operators, then I was the engineer. My projects always followed the same approach: Develop options for a new structure, let leaders select one, detail out the new structure, define new processes, define job profiles, let leaders select the best person for each job, announce it, go live – done. As a trained engineer, I was designing new and better machines for the operators. People were the replaceable components of the machine. When one component was not functioning as required, the component had to be changed.
Those reorganisations usually resulted in some temporary cost savings, but the sustainable performance improvement was more than questionable. No wonder. Why should people change their behaviour because they got assigned to a new box in the organisation chart?
Illustration 1: Company Machine
It took me yea
