Last week’s post about the death of change management caused quite a stir online.
Okay – I admit, I was being a bit of an agent provocateur in sparking debate and discussion, which I felt was long overdue for our professional community. (Also, if ever there was a week for a Canadian to get a bit feisty, that was certainly it!)
Essentially, I was attempting to make two related points:
- The traditional model of change management is inadequate, and is dangerously simplistic given the nature of change that organizations face today.
- The terminology born from the traditional framework for change management is unhelpful. Language matters, and the label “change management” doesn’t quite fit the quality or shape of challenges faced by leaders today. Despite lots of views to the contrary in the online debate about my post, to me, “managing change” still sounds like yelling at the weather.
Yesterday, I was facilitating an executive workshop for Chief Information Officers on leading change and ran head first into the very challenges I am rumbling with in my head. Like watching a train wreck in slow motion, I pulled out my go-to subway map for change management cards to hand out to the participants. In less than a few seconds, a participant raised his hand and said: “Didn’t you just write a blog post arguing that change management is dead?” TILT! Yup, I did … and I am still working this out and adapting like the rest. Clearly we are all in the messy middle of this change about change.
During the workshop, this tension between old and new, traditional vs evolving unleashed some of the best conversations on leading change I’ve ever had – and to me, that’s progress. The group landed on a collective view that some of the traditional frameworks for change management still apply to planned or programmatic change (such as many IT projects). What’s needed is to have mental models that are grounded in what works but expansive enough to address what doesn’t: specifically, we need approaches that are fit-for-purpose to help guide change that is emergent.
Let’s face it, perfect is not on the menu.
The best we can do right now is to have the humility to recognize what’s not working and the guts to experiment and co-create new approaches that may be more helpful.
In that spirit, I’ve taken a deep dive into the LinkedIn comments on the post to provide a crowdsourced list of potential terms to help build a new vocabulary around change:
| A new taxonomy for change | |
| Change leadership | Guiding change is a core leadership function, so this framing is sound. A nuance is the notion of leading from any chair – change leadership is necessary from executives/sponsors, but can also be provided by change agents/communities. |
| Change piloting | I loved this idea proposed in the LinkedIn comments. To me, it evokes the sense of competently directing in an intentional way that is responsive to the environment. |
| Navigating change | Like the sister concept of piloting change, the notion of navigating offers a strong sense of direction and intentionality. |
| Change facilitation | Providing support to teams in transitioning states is very much an exercise in facilitation. The term gives a sense of constructive contribution without removing agency. |
| Change enablement | Enablement is a constructive and practical concept that’s core to setting teams up for success during change. I like the positive framing of considering what tools/systems/resources/air cover teams need in order to effectively execute in a changing context. |
| Building change readiness | The notion of “readiness” evokes a sense of agency and intentionality. It might include steps like enablement, learning, coaching and has a constructive orientation. |
| Future-proofing | The term implies a sense of constant renewal in being set up to deal with change. The directional use of the term “future” makes it useful in a context of emergence, though the defensive stance of “proofing” may cause friction in building positive engagement. |
| Change mobilization | This framing evokes a sense of esprit de corps, galvanizing a team’s energy, focus and attention in a specific direction. |
| Adaptive management | The idea of adaptation is consistent with what many leaders and teams aim to do. It is more scalable and flexible than the term “agile” which seems to get muddled in debates around the formal Agile methodology and the aim to be more nimble/flexible. |
| Change accompagnement | This is how I describe much of the work I do, which has a bit of a different flavour in French than the English word “accompaniment”. The essence is to walk with, not ahead in providing support through a challenge or change. |
I am a strong believer that conversation is the smallest unit of change. During these topsy-turvy and turbulent times, it is a gift to be able to have online conversations with people from around the world in solidarity toward making positive change. As Seth Godin reminds us, at the end of the day, people want to do work that matters with people who care.
