Book of Change

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Change Management: It’s an Insular, Introspective, Biased View

 

One of the revelations I had in writing the Book of Change, is that each of us has a built-in, bias about what change management is. I don’t know why I didn’t get this, but I didn’t. My first hint was that I kept coming across job recruitments for IT change management jobs. At first, I thought nothing of it. Why not? Information technology or IT is a growing field and it needs change management people too. But then it dawned on me that there was an entire discipline called ITSM, to control ITI, using a resource ITIL with the generalized field of IT. As this point, there is a millennial software engineering reading this thinking “This guy is so out of touch.” I have news for her or him. They are out of touch.

      Change manage is understood through the lens of your profession or discipline. The fact is you work in an organization and that fact determines how you think about change management. Let’s put your thinking through the sieve of your organizational position. (1) The 10,000 foot (or meter) question is are you in a private-sector business? Or is it a public-sector government or nonprofit? (2) Next, what is your particular type of organization? Your choices are: business (e.g., retail, service, manufacturing), government (e.g., city, county, state, federal), or nonprofit (e.g., education, charity, utility). Then, what is your field or discipline with that type of organization (e.g., technology, human resource, budget)? I think you get the idea.

      Change management’s success starts with the decision of the highest-level, decision-maker, but it ends with the implementation by the lowest-level customer service person.

      So change management is a concept best understood by the person in the organization according to their organization’s type, sub-type, field/discipline, and then job description. The point of this is that change management, in order for it to be successful, must be understood for the perspective of the one person in an organization impacted by the change. It is a fundamental shift in thinking that is bottom up and not top down. If you want to implement a successful change management program, then you must implement it from the personnel perspective of the lowest level person being impacted and not the high-level decision-maker.

navigate the organizational change management process successfully. So good luck!

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