Tēnā koutou katoa. Welcome to Alan and Clark's webinar on Mastering Business Change, Approaches to Navigating Change and Thriving. My name is Griff and it's a pleasure to have you join us today.
Interestingly enough, about 20% of you, this is the first time joining us. So just to give you a little bit of background about Alan and Clark, we're an Australasian consulting company based in Australia, Aotearoa and the Pacific. And we have particular expertise in change management, strategy, programme delivery, evaluation and research and policy, just to name a few.
As an organisation, we give a damn about empowering our clients to tackle those big societal issues, which is why we regularly provide these free webinars, case studies, free desk guides and other information as much as we can. Today's topic, change, is a really big one and no doubt you'll have plenty of questions to ask. We'll try and answer those as they come up, but we have also made some time from the end of the session for a general Q&A.
So please, if you have any questions, pop them in the chat and we will do our very best to get to them. We'll also record some responses to those that we don't get to, so you can get some feedback. Before we get underway, let's do some quick introductions.
Charlene, would you like to kick us off? Thanks, Griff. Kia ora koutou, I'm Charlene Harvey. And what fascinates me about change management is the way that so many organisations get it wrong.
So they usually underestimate the impact of it or the stress that it causes people. So I'm really quite passionate about working with clients and working with organisations to make sure it's effectively planned and it's done in quite a deliberate and thorough way. Anton.
Thanks, Charlene. My background is in strategy and business planning. I have a particular passion around operating model design, particularly collaborative operating models where community work with government, business, hapu and iwi to address the challenges that they commonly share.
Kia ora, Anton. And my actual name is Craig Griffiths, and my background experience is in design thinking, and I lead the design thinking programme of work here at Allan and Clark. And as a sideline today, I'll be facilitating today's session.
So why is mastering change important? Well, we all know because change is an increasingly prominent factor impacting our working environments nowadays. In fact, the changes are real constant and the cadence of that change is really increasing. And the good news is that can bring some both challenges and opportunities, but to survive and thrive in that environment, it's really important not only to identify the factors that are driving that change, but also effectively respond to them.
Before we get into some of those details, there are lots of definitions of change. And Anton, I wonder if you could just take us through for the purposes of today's conversation, what do we actually mean by change? Yeah, thanks, Craig. For the purposes today, when we're talking about change, we're largely focussing on organisational change.
That is how an organisation responds to the drivers of change or other influencing factors in the environment. Organisational change refers to the approach in which an organisation alters a component of its focus or its operations, such as its services or its culture, or sometimes the underlying capabilities, tools, technologies that it uses. Organisational change can be adaptive, which means it occurs in small increments of change over time, or it can be transformative, which is normally used to describe change which is larger in scale and scope and often involves significant shifts.
Change is too broad of a topic and too complex for us to attempt to traverse in a single webinar. So to allow us to frame some of the issues commonly encountered and provide some practical advice in respect of a few of those issues, we've broken down the discipline of managing organisational change into four key stages. Understand the drivers of change, envisaging and designing the future, planning to bring that future to life, and then implementation.
So hopefully no matter what stage of the change journey you and your organisation are at, we'll cover off some topics today and provide some practical insights that are of relevance and of use to you. Great, thanks, Anton. Charlene, I know you spend a lot of time thinking about the understanding stage of change.
Do you want to take us a little bit through how you manage it and how you go about it? Thanks, Griff. So in this understanding stage, we've all heard about companies that have not effectively kept up with the changing times and have become obsolete. In the private sector, not keeping up with the changing environment tends to get felt on the balance sheet and it actually determines whether a company will remain viable.
If you think about, for example, the introduction of Netflix and all the streaming channels, how it's impacted the film and the TV industries, and then you can start to see the flow-on effects into the business models of advertising, journalism and news. Now if you're part of the public sector or a non-profit, the impact of changing environments can be felt in terms of, you know, I can put pressure on your delivery models, you can have disconnect with your customers, potentially you've got lost opportunities for efficiencies, and in the worst case, it can actually start to erode your social licence or your mandate, your regulatory mandate. And so when we think about this understanding stage, there are three parts to it.
So sense, analysis and triage, and respond. So the first step, sensing. So this is all about the capability within your business group or your organisation that scans and senses the environment for what's changing.
And we all know that everyone is busy every day and focused on the now and fighting fires, so unless the sensing is done on a regular and systemic way, it doesn't tend to get done within the organisation, and usually if your strategic planning maturity is high, it'll get done as part of the strategic planning activities. In the second step, analysis and triage, once you've identified all the change drivers that are present, now this could be internal or external, you want to assess and understand, you know, what is driving them, who is impacted and how, and lastly, what does that mean for your business. Now, this impact could be an opportunity, so it could represent an opportunity for the business, or it could represent an issue, something that you actually need to explore a lot further.
Now this step is meant to be like an initial triage, to get a sense of what is material for you to take forward and explore. It is quite valid that you don't instigate any change from this activity, either the change drivers are not material, or the business is willing to take the risk that any implications from those change drivers might not manifest. But the key is that you're making a deliberate decision as an organisation not to do anything about it, and you've been really thorough in scanning the environment externally and internally.
And then when we go to the last step, which is respond, so you've figured out what you're going to address, so what are the change drivers you want to explore, you want to figure out at a high level how you want to respond, so how does the organisation respond to that. And you do this so that you can get the right capability and capacity for the next step, which Anton will talk through. You know, it doesn't require a small tweak to a current product or service, or are we thinking that it's something bigger, like a new strategy or operating model.
Now this isn't about coming up with solutions, you actually want to be agnostic to the solutions, it's more around defining the opportunity and challenges that need to be further explored. Now as Anton mentioned in the beginning, the type and size of change that you're thinking about instigating is really important, so it can range from small through to large transformational change. And the capabilities that you need to design, plan and lead are different for the different types of change.
And I've seen change programmes fail when they've tried to apply the same capability to a larger or more transformational change as they would small change. So it's really important at this stage to get a sense of it so you can put it in place for the next steps. Yeah, absolutely.
Thanks Charlene, that's great. Actually you and I recently worked on a great example of the importance of understanding the shifting context and environments, you want to talk a little bit about that one? Yeah, so Craig and I were approached by a client to review a contract, and the contract was around the provision of technology services on behalf of their customers. But when we started digging around and exploring what was happening in the environment, there was a large disruptor in the market, which completely changed or was changing, going to change how the services were used.
So Griff and I worked with the client and we completely reimagined how they could use the technology to deliver the best outcomes for their customers. And this is a great segue to the next stage, which Anton will talk through, because as you're scanning the environment and asking yourself what does it mean for you as a business, you want to work through and be quite deliberate in terms of is it impacting your end stage, so your end goals, your strategic direction, your mandate, or is it more around the products and services that you're delivering? Are they not appropriate or do they need to change? And then that last bit was, or is it more around how you're delivering, so your delivery model? So in the example that we talked about, the client hadn't appreciated the impact of the changing environment. So what on face value looked like a simple contract renewal and we just needed to figure out was it the right size and scope, actually what we ended up doing and what was needed was actually something quite different.
So to sum it up, by the end of this understand stage, you want to have a high level sense of the changing environment, internally, externally, what it means for the business and a sense of what you're going to do about it. If you're a decision maker, you want to have confidence that you're staying abreast of the changing environment and what it means for the business. You want to know that you've got the right information in order to progress to the next stage, because it is going to take time, effort, money and resources to do it.
So you want to know that you've got the right information to make those decisions. And as a staff member, you want to be confident that the business or the business group is actually keeping abreast of the environment so that the organisation can be sustainable and viable moving forward. Great, thanks mate.
Anton, so now that we know what the challenges are and a good understanding and sense of those, and what's driving that change, what's the next step? Where do you go from there? Yeah, so the next phase in the process is once you've established the need and the merit in making change in the first place, you can shift your attention to visualising what the change will look like. There are numerous aspects to this phase, but the four I'm going to touch on are around imagining, exploring options, concept designs and change narratives. So in effect what we're doing in this stage is imagining the future and answering the question, what could good look like? Strategic planning invariably is required to respond to different change drivers and often starts with the environmental scans and the contextual analysis that Charlene was sort of describing in the previous stage.
But it also commonly includes the development of vision statements, of success statements that accompany those visions, of future outcomes that are going to be achieved. So there's an envisaging process within the normal strategic planning process. There are other envisaging techniques and design techniques that you can harness.
For example, there are multiple product development methodologies for instance that you could use. Human centred design provides other opportunities to design solutions that leverage the lived experience of people. They can intentionally create a customer, citizen or staff experience.
And human centred design has methodologies that target innovation and they also target rapid prototyping and they can be particularly useful when you're developing solutions to overcome either budget or time constraints and you require a bit of innovation. So I'm not going to go into any more detail on human centred design now, but if that is an area of interest to you, we have undertaken or produced a webinar previously which you can access on our website or you can reach out to Griff for a quarter or if you'd like to know more. But no matter what the envisaging techniques are that you're using or the approach that you adopt, one of the most important things I've learned and I think it's a really important tip that I have to offer is that where you have the opportunity for blue sky thinking, you want to embrace that opportunity whenever it presents.
It's much easier to chunk up a big idea into small and more deliverable components or rein it back than it is to scale up what's essentially a small idea. The next element in this phase that I wanted to talk to you is around creating options. So one of the other important tips or lessons is that you don't necessarily want to settle on either the first vision of the future that you come up with or even to settle on one in of its own right.
When you're asking the question about what the future could look like, it can actually be really useful to think more broadly and that means exploring the potential outcomes and then considering which of those outcomes is going to deliver the best results. That's a nice one actually Anton. I've got a little story around a design tip or a kind of practical thing that we do in design.
So often when we're looking at both the problem definition and or the ideation stage, I often talk to the people taking part and say the first idea or first problem or suggestion that pops into your head, write it down and then actually take on a and then tuck that post-it note in your pocket or in the back of your book or wherever it goes and kind of get it out of the way because it helps free up your thinking processes, like you almost trap your brain into saying okay I got that one out of the way, what else could we do and that's quite a useful technique. Yeah nice, nice. In actual fact there are other methodologies as well that target or are very specific around intentionally trying to create multiple pictures of the future.
Scenario planning for instance is a management tool or approach that essentially creates multiple possible futures and supports the development of strategies specific or that respond to each of those different scenarios. Unlike traditional forecasting methods, scenario planning doesn't always try and predict the single definitive future but instead looks to try and explore a range of possibilities. The next element in this phase I'd like to talk about is around concept designs.
Developing concept designs of the future state or the target state, so where you want to get through through this change journey, are really important and you can use some of the concept designs commonly referred to are things like target operating models or target regulatory operating models. So these are high level conceptual designs or blueprints of the future. They're very illustrative, they highlight or demonstrate the different elements of the solution that you're proposing but also do it in a way where you can see how those elements integrate together and work cohesively.
So they effectively become blueprints of the future and they're things or tools over which you can engage stakeholders including staff. You can get people's input into the designs to further iterate them or you can encourage people to scrutinise the solution designs from multiple perspectives and that means as you're going through this process you're testing their feasibility. So concept designs are a really important and useful tool.
The next element that I wanted to cover off which relate to the concept designs is around change narratives. Concept designs can be really powerful tools for supporting the development of change narratives. Now a change narrative often combines the outcomes of the analysis stage, so the understanding stage that Charlene spoke about earlier, with elements of the solution and what you're doing when you combine these elements is trying to create a compelling story or narrative of the solution and help take people on what we refer to as their change journey.
So this is a great way for engaging people and I highly recommend you invest in this idea or notion of storytelling. My experience has been it's a great way to energise people, to mobilise them and galvanise them behind a change initiative. Anton I recall actually you recently worked on a project for a client that was a really good example of some of that engagement.
Can you tell us a little bit about that one? Yeah so Griff I think you're referring to the piece of work that we did with the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency in Australia a few years ago now, but that was a piece of work where the client was looking to establish a new climate change regulator and merge it with two existing regulators. They'd recently been through a gateway review which is the reason why we were appointed and the review had found there was a lack of cohesion and focus and importantly a lack of alignment across the different people involved in the different plans that they were developing. That confusion was compounded by the environment that they were working within which was highly ambiguous and uncertain.
For instance they were developing an organisation that still didn't have the legislation to create it passed, it was still in draft. But using a collaborative blueprinting technique we were able to develop a highly intuitive target operating model. And then we developed a really simple narrative that we incorporated with the blueprint and the leadership of the organisation used that blueprint and that narrative to engage across the organisation and with external stakeholders.
So when the gateway panel returned for their follow-up review they commented actually on the vastly improved alignment and cohesion across both the establishment group but also across all of their plans and artefacts that they were producing. And they actually made a specific comment about the fact that all of the people that they interviewed as part of the review process were now using the single common narrative. So it was a really powerful tool in that situation.
Awesome. Just on that there was a question that came in from Jasmine about how do you deal with an organisation culture that doesn't want to change? I think there's some pretty cool tools in there guys and some explanations around storytelling. But Jasmine if that hasn't answered your question perhaps if you want to give us some more detail about the issue that you're particularly dealing with we might be able to cover that off in the Q&A at the end.
Thanks for the question though. So Anton once you've gone all through this and you've done all these aspects of the stage, what does success look like from the envisaging stage? How do you know that it's worked? What does it kind of turn up like? Yeah I think there's a few indicators that you can commonly see but I think where you see examples of innovative thinking that have been used to overcome resource constraints I think that's a great success indicator. Where the organisation has looked at multiple options, they've developed those up and considered them to identify which of those options are actually feasible and that they might pursue.
And I think where you develop concept designs that are intuitive that people readily can engage with, pick it up and understand and where those designs support the development of that compelling change narrative. I think those are really powerful indicators. In terms of decision makers what success might look like for them at the end of the stage I think having the confidence in the change solution that's been put forward to approve it and make a determination to progress that particular option to the planning stage.
I think for staff keeping people abreast of the idea, the solution, the case for change and engaging them with the narrative that underpins it. Those are all things that are really important. Thanks mate, that's awesome.
Now I know Charlene you're starting to get quite excited about the next stage because the next stage is Charlene's kind of happy place of operation. Charlene do you want to take us through the key activities and the plan stage? Thanks Griff. So yeah planning makes me happy and there's nothing better than a good plan.
But in terms of this webinar when we think about change management traditionally it tends to refer to these last two stages. So the planning and implementation stage. So this is where we are bringing the vision or the idea to life and we are planning out what you need to wrap around it to make it successful.
So two parts, planning out the change initiative, so describing the steps that are required to bring the concept or the initiative into reality and then the plan to support the change. The most important part, a change management plan. Now I call it a plan but it's actually a series of activities that you then document in a plan.
So you want to have a change vision and objectives and Anton's talked about how important it is to have the end state articulated and the narrative around where is the end state, what's the rationale for it and what's the expected changes that you're going to be seeing along the way. And you want to be quite specific around that. You then want to make sure you're doing a stakeholder analysis, so which stakeholders have an influence and interest in a change.
You want to be really mindful around that. And then you want to have a change impact analysis, so who is being impacted and how, and I'll talk a little bit more about that later. You also want to make sure that you're doing a readiness analysis and planning around what is the series of steps and check-in points that you're going to put in place to ensure that those impacted by change are ready, so that you can measure yourself.
You want to know that by the time the change is launched, that all the key impacted are ready. You'll also want to articulate what are the communications and the engagement that's going to be required, both pre the change going live or post. And then of course you'll work through what is the training and support required for those that are impacted and what's required.
So if I go back to change impact, when you're considering a change impact, you want to understand the impact of change, but you also want to understand the consolidated view of what else is happening in the business. So this helps understand whether there's enough organisational capacity to absorb change. Now this can be undercooked, and when it's undercooked, it can cause stress and angst amongst those that are implementing the change, and it can also compromise the success of the change.
So change research says that for every change, there's on average about a 14% productivity drop. Now that's on average across all kinds of change, and of course it's going to be specific to the change that you're anticipating. In practise, I've seen up to a 40% productivity drop for large scale organisational structural changes.
And this can be down to training, getting used to new ways of working, getting used to new tools, a series of meetings or whatever's involved usually in the engagement on the comms plan with getting up to speed. So I always recommend that people work through the scenarios of change impact and what this could mean in terms of performance, what does it mean in terms of the work programme and the trade-offs, so that you're going to need to stop doing something. You're going to need to create capacity for people to absorb change, otherwise this causes stress and angst and people are having to absorb it on top of their day jobs.
So yes, I'm biassed around planning, but this stage is really important. All change impacts people, so what could be good for the company or the organisation might not always be good for the people. And effectively designing a change management plan which ensures that people are supported and ready is often underscoped.
It's either underscoped or in cases, I've seen business cases where they've completely forgotten anything around change management, or even worse, because I think it does more harm, where they just compress a change management plan just down to comms. Thanks Sharlene. Some of the questions that came through earlier when we had the registration process, the ones that came through, people were referring to the point about capacity for change.
Do you want to add a little bit of a chat about that? Yeah, so it kind of echoes what I was saying before, that when you're going through change, if you're a decision maker, you want to be really clear on what the priorities for the work programme are. You want to make sure that embedding the change is a priority, that launching the change is a priority, and so therefore you're being really deliberate around what are you going to turn off? Or alternatively, what's the additional capacity you're going to bring in to help out? But it's clear around being a priority. I suppose the key point is all change has an impact, and don't expect it not to.
Yeah, absolutely. Anton, you talked before about the fact that engaging people is key to good change outcomes. Are there some tools or tips and tricks that you've used in the past that you think will be really useful? Yeah, well I think there's maybe three tips off the top of my head.
I think the first one is, as much as you can, involve people in the change management activity. So make the planning processes as inclusive as possible, for instance. That has the benefit of keeping people or getting their levels of awareness about the change up, but also can promote buy-in to solutions because they've been a part of those solutions, which have ideally been grounded in the different operational perspectives.
So that can be a really important tool. The second tip I'd suggest is that we've found that what we call strategic logics to be a really powerful tool. You'll hear other terms or other methodologies, theories of change, intervention logics.
They're actually really useful for helping people to go on that change journey. The ones that are more intuitive, where people can see the sequence of steps involved and understand the underpinning logic, they're also really powerful for helping engage people in the change. And then the third tip I'd have is, I'd go back to the previous envisaging phase and again highlight the storytelling piece.
I think storytelling is really important. So yeah, that would be the other part. I think maybe there's an example we, last year, developed a long-term strategy for the Bank of Papua New Guinea.
We supported them and worked with them to develop their strategy up to 2050. Now when you're dealing with a strategy which is so long-term, and this one had an incredible amount of ambition in it, one of the challenges that staff within that organisation were grappling with is very difficult to visualise how they were going to get from present day to that 2050 vision. So we utilised a technique or a methodology called moon theory, which starts at the vision and then reverse engineers.
So we started at vision 2050 and then said, okay, in 2045, where would we need to be in order to achieve the 2050 vision? And then we repeated that over five-year intervals to get us back to the present day. That created a pathway, a logic pathway on the way forward for the realisation of their strategy. And then for the storytelling, through part of our whakawhanaungatanga activities, we learnt that there is a double-hulled waka in PNG called the Lakatoi, and it's similar to our waka haurua here in Aotearoa.
So we used that icon as a metaphor to talk about the change journey that they were going to go on. And we had feedback from staff across the bank how powerful or useful that narrative was. Awesome.
There's a question that's come in, Anton, I'm going to put you on the spot here, but there's a question that's come in which I thought is quite relevant to this particular piece. It's from Nadia and it talks about, the question is, how would you manage the situation where change is thrust upon a team, an organisation? We've talked about a lot of the engagement tools, but do they change or is there an emphasis change if it's just thrust upon an organisation that comes out of the blue? Yeah, so that can be incredibly challenging, and I think that the fundamentals of the process that we've described don't change, but you're working in much more condensed or narrower timeframes. So I think the importance of making sure that there's a full understanding about the drivers behind it and the reason for the change, understanding the nature of the change, Charlene's point about getting your head around what the impacts of that are, because some impacts can be mitigated, and that's where some of the change management techniques and so forth come to play.
The engagement piece becomes incredibly important. Most organisations have a culture where somewhere within it there'll be a value that relates to respect or looking after people and you've got to bring those kind of cultural values to the fore in the way that you deal with things. I think one of the things, just to jump in, is change feels uncomfortable because of the surprise element and it's the fact that you feel out of control with it.
So if you're part of a team or if you're leading a team where you haven't had a choice about the change and it's just happening to you, I'd be recommending working with your team around what can you take control or how do you give your team a sense of control, so how are you finding out the information that you need to do to understand what are the next steps, how are you seeking support. Now in theory it'll be part of the change management plan, but I think as leaders your role is to help provide a sense of certainty for your team because it'll start to mitigate that angst around the reaction part. So just bringing back to close out the plan stage Charlene, so if you then get to the end of the plan stage, what does success look like, how do you know it's worked? So by the end of the plan stage you want to make sure that the envisioned future, so whatever the idea is, has a tangible set of steps to bring it to life.
You want to make sure that the impact of the change is really well understood and you're really clear around what does it mean and the trade-offs and how you're going to absorb it. You also want to make sure that there is a really robust plan that is going to engage people and support people and stakeholders through the change. And again if you're a decision maker and you're part of the change you want to be confident that the full impact of the change is understood and that you've made the appropriate choices that can ensure that the organisation can manage both implementing the change and BAU, so nothing's going to be put at risk.
And you also want to make sure that you've got the right capability and capacity available to implement the change. Okay, so now just a quick recap, we now know what our challenge is and we have a plan of attack. Anton, what are some of the components in taking that plan of attack and successfully implementing it? Thanks Griff, yeah in the implementation phase we're executing and delivering the change solution as set out in the change plan.
So the key activities that we're looking to undertake involve establishing the requirements, so whatever infrastructure resources you need to have in place to implement the plan, building, testing, launching and then those implementation activities. But then finally we want to be embedding the change so that it's sustainable. And I'll just talk about each of those elements in a bit more detail.
So in terms of establishing the requirements to support the change effectively, we need to put in place resources, capability, structures and processes that will enable that. In some cases around incremental change, you know the smaller simple forms of change, that can be as easy as allocating clear responsibility for particular change tasks to individuals. But in other more substantive change initiatives, that can mean establishing more significant and more formal infrastructure.
So for example organisations embarking on a substantial change initiative or those that undertake lots of frequent change might establish what we call a change management office. So an office that has specialist expertise in the space of the different elements to do with change. For those taking on systems level change or collective change initiatives, it might be appropriate to establish or designate a backbone organisation.
Now a backbone organisation is one that is responsible for coordinating and driving the collective effort. They often support the governance of the change programme and support and facilitate effective decision making. The key here is about establishing the approach and the infrastructure that's commensurate with the scale, the complexity and the risk return of the change initiative.
One of the key lessons or tips that I have to offer around this, and just picking up on a point that Charlene was talking around, talking about around the capacity and expertise, is you do need to make sure, and this applies across each of the four stages of change, you do need to make sure that you've got the requisite expertise and capacity in place. And the one element of the capability I really like to call out is that responsible for leading, organising and coordinating the change. Leadership through change is absolutely paramount.
The next element I'll talk about is the launching the change. So there are a range of activities that underpin this from building new capability, managing the release of new capability into the environment, training people in approaches and use of tools so that they can now master the aircraft. That requires effective communication, involvement of operational staff and solution design, build and release activities, user training, the development of guidance and support tools and other resources.
But again, I keep on coming back to this idea, it also requires clever scheduling and coordination. An element within change management that's quite often underdone is around evaluating the change. So this involves the monitoring and measurement and the review of changes that are made to assess whether the target efficiencies or the performance improvements that you're after, whether they're being achieved.
Are you getting the expected results and benefits? And that's really important. And I think the other thing that comes from the evaluation is the opportunity to learn the lessons that are available, to be able to reflect on progress and make adjustments where you need to make adjustments. And then do other things which might seem small, but they're actually really important like celebrating successes in the change journey and the progress that you make.
So those are all elements I think that contribute to managing change well. And then I mentioned the idea of embedding the change. So this means integrating and embedding the change into the processes of the organisation, the systems, policies and culture.
And culture is important because it underpins all the organisational behaviours which is central to effective change management. Finally, there's the managing the people side of change. And Charlene's touched on a lot of this.
What I wanted to comment on here is that change management is the technical term given to the people side of change. It's a specialist area and I would argue that it's a webinar kaupapa in its own right. Change management expertise is invaluable.
As not investing in it, but underpowering it by treating it as a comms only capability or introducing it too late in the change process. So effective change management can help you respond effectively to a number of different issues. If change management is something that's of interest to you, there's a range of websites and resources that you can check out.
One I'd recommend is the Change Management Institute who produce the change management body of knowledge which is an incredibly useful resource. And then finally, delivery assurance. So it's important to have the commensurate level of oversight in delivery assurance measures in place.
So you want to make sure that you've got the right level of transparency and oversight across any of the change initiatives. One to monitor progress but also you want to be able to detect any issues as early as possible so you can respond to them in a timely fashion. I love that point Anton.
I think people underestimate the role of delivery and assurance mechanisms and I remember back so I was lucky enough to be part of Inland Revenue's transformation programme and one of the key work streams was the large technology deployments. These were high risk if you think about Inland Revenue. If one of those deployments at any stage could involve millions of customers or a large amount of Crown revenue and usually they're impacting about 3,000 staff at a time so these are really high risk.
So what we put in place to support the changes was for each technology release we had dedicated oversight and support that was launched for a set period of time and for the very large releases it was about six months so for about half the year we were in what we called early life support. And so this was a whole lot of dedicated resources so it was dedicated resources around training support, answering questions from staff around the new technology so they're on site every day around staff, IT resources, managing any technology fixes so there was an extra one of them and every day we were tracking through a series of lenses so what was happening with the technology, what was happening in terms of the business impact so workflows, performance, what would that look like, what was the customer experience, how were they engaging with the technology, how were they finding it and then what was the staff experience and this was wrapped up and discussed with the executive every day, every day at five o'clock we'd take this through to the exec and then it was all rolled up in a series of comms for all leaders within the new revenue about 600 leaders getting these daily comms and it meant that everyone was on the same page around what was happening and there was full transparency around the effectiveness of each of the technology launches and that was appropriate for the kind of release, the kind of change and the size and the risk associated with it. I know you talked about this you know being a really tight tightly run project but I guess all the planning in the world doesn't necessarily negate the risk of something going splat so what happens when something goes wrong? So no matter how well you plan and design a change something is going to go wrong, it always does, it always will and I think the key is how fast can you pick it up so how are you monitoring the environment to figure out what's off track and then how fast can you effectively respond.
If I think about the IR example, yeah things went wrong but as part of the planning we actually prior to each release we would run through various scenarios so black hat scenarios so everyone was on the same page around how we'd respond, what their roles were and so we expected, we planned for things to go wrong to the point where there was additional capability kind of on standby to help manage everything and it was also a clear priority for the organisation that the change had to be done well so everyone was on the same page. So Anton if we wrap up implementation, what does good implementation results look like, you know how does that turn out, what would you hear and see? Yeah pretty simple and in some cases quite obvious so I think change is delivered in accordance with the plan, change initiatives are communicated and coordinated effectively, progress is monitored and lessons are learned. For decision makers, decision makers are comfortable with the progress made and take confidence from the benefits that are being realised and they also have enough information to be confident to make adjustments as required.
Staff want to be informed I think and so that's a good success indicator, are people informed across the different changes in the programme, are they confident in their roles to implement the change and are they mastering the new tools and new ways of working, so those are the keys. Awesome, thanks Anton. Team, I'm conscious we've got a few minutes left so I hope you've enjoyed our high level overview of managing change.
Before we get into the Q&A, there's just a couple of things that we'd like to run through. In a couple of weeks we're running a deep dive into strategic planning processes with Charlene and she'll discuss some of the key elements to consider when you're designing and getting involved in planning processes including things like common pitfalls and options for optimising planning etc. So if you're interested in that, there's a button appearing now you'd like to click that.
Next thing is that we are very interested to hear your thoughts about what you'd like to hear a little bit more about. Obviously we said this is a bit of a high level, we're thinking that there might be some opportunity or interest in some deep dives into either one of the stages that we've talked about or perhaps one of the topics. So if you're interested in hearing more about one of the stages or in fact all of them in a deeper way, please make a selection on the poll that's coming up now and also if you're interested in some of the subjects we've talked about, things like change narrative or the people aspects of change, perhaps you could pop the subject of those into the chat because that will help us shape what we focus on for the upcoming webinars.
Okay, so we're starting to see a few questions coming through now. Just so you know that if we run out of time, we'll record some responses to a number of these questions. There's some fantastic ones coming through that we definitely won't get through them all today.
But Charlene, there's one that's a little bit around operating model, so I might kind of go to, what would be a good time to start the process to evaluate the change and or assess the effectiveness of a new operating model? There's actually no wrong time. No wrong time. So if you get a sense that the environment has changed enough that it might be putting pressure on your operating model, actually do an assessment.
Sometimes it's not about a full reset of the operating model, it might be a tweak or a refresh of certain elements. I suppose the key point there is if your spidey senses are saying that there's something up with the environment, yeah, test. Test.
Is it working? Is it not? What's really going on? Yeah. Anton, there's one here from Bo, it's about how can we tackle the resistance to change, like a new workflow or something, from middle management and other employees. But I guess the whole resistance to change thing, got any suggestions about how you can approach that? Yeah.
So I think resistance to change can have its origins in a number of different sources. So whether people understand why things have been changed and whether there's a compelling enough narrative to make a change, go back to the point that Charlene talked about earlier on in terms of people's capacity to change. So if people are already flat stick with their nine to five jobs in BAU and we're foisting additional change with all the requirements on top of that, it's very hard to immerse yourself in the requirements of the change and be able to derive the benefits from it that we want.
So those are a couple of problems that once you recognise them, you can come up with ways to navigate them. Awesome, thanks mate. Question from Tony is, we have seen media suffer with change, how might media organisations adopt your process? Yeah, nice.
Interesting, because I've been reflecting on this quite a bit, as I've seen kind of the demise of News Hub and stuff like that. And when you think about it, journalism and news and all that, they're meant to be across scanning the world and what's really happening. But this is where I see they're so busy in the doing, I don't think they kept tabs on what was happening externally.
And this is where you'd want to be testing. Online streaming channels have been around for ages. We've known that the business models for TV and especially news is getting creaky anyway.
And so I'm not surprised what's happening in the media industry. I think there are higher order kind of discussions that need to be had around what is the role of journalism in society, which is a bigger kettle of fish. But if they were to adopt our process, it would be, and I'd recommend this for everyone, where you need to be constantly testing your business model around the changing environment and be really clear on the risks of what it might do.
There was a question from Pip, and I'll leave it up to one of you to answer this one, because I'm sure you could both do it. But Pip asks, the use of personas seems to be commonly used for future narrative stories. How effective are they from your view? Well, I might jump in on that one.
Thanks, Griff. Personas are an incredibly powerful and useful tool. So the great thing about them, and we use them in a number of different ways, but it allows you the opportunity to consider in a change context the impacts of change on different stakeholders.
By developing and creating personas for those stakeholders, you can use them as a tool to guide you through the understanding change, the development of narratives, the design and development of solutions. As I mentioned earlier on, the ability to engage different stakeholders through the envisaging phase, for instance, is a really powerful and important tool. But it's not always practical to have each of the personas that you're dealing with in the room talking to you face-to-face.
So the creation and the use of personas become a way of overcoming that challenge and that barrier. I think the opportunity to capture and reflect the different perspectives and the different experiences for people, particularly if you use them in a journey context, so over time you understand what the impacts are at various stages or how they might experience things through the different stages of change. Again, really powerful, and I think for designers, a great way to create empathy for those with responsibility for designing, for decision makers, great way to create empathy with the decision makers for the impacts or the experiences that those personas are intended to represent.
I think as a tool, especially when you're getting into the more transformational change elements, anything that can make the end state really tangible, and I think you talked about the use of personas to help get stakeholders along the journey. So I know it's been used, personas in terms of business cases, to start to make some kind of what could be theory business models, or this is the vision, it actually starts to add that granularity about what it could mean. So I actually find them a real powerful tool, really powerful.
Yeah, we use them a lot in design and for different approaches, but I think one of the cautions I've got around personas is to make sure that the starting, your kind of stakeholder mapping or matricing of who you need to speak to is really thorough, because there is a risk that if you don't do that, go for that broad at the start, that you end up with a set of personas which are too narrow and not reflective of your customer, or your client, or your patients, or whatever the case may be. So really starting broad and then using the empathy stage to refine those groups or the personas. That's right, personas are not a list of assumptions about what you think, it's based in reality.
Yeah, they're noted observations in reality. Yeah, cool. The next question comes from Martin, and it was, do you have any tips on how decision makers and staff can engage more in making sure that requirements captured are detailed enough to make a positive change? Well, I think there's definitely benefit and merit in designing and creating the infrastructures and the mechanisms you need to have in place to enable the change.
We talked about that in particular under the implement phase, but if you come back through the earlier stages, equally as applicable then. I talked about the idea of having inclusive design processes, and that is intended to create forums where decision makers, operational staff, customers are actually part of the same conversation. And so the stakeholders are getting the benefit of the different perspectives in the room.
So incorporating those inclusive design processes, establishing forums to go through right back at the early stage, actually, at the understand stage. I think this is really important, that in mature organisations, you'll quite often see they'll have a team or a function set up with responsibility for the scanning and the contextual analysis. And when they design something that they think is significant, they then share that observation or that trigger with the relevant business owner or stakeholders within the organisation.
And that facilitates a conversation to understand what the significance of that emerging factor or influencing factor is for the organisation. And that's the first opportunity for multiple people to start building the organisation's awareness and sensitivity. And then, like I said, if you can manage that through the design phase and through each of the subsequent phases, where inclusive processes are happening.
For instance, we've used design groups before quite extensively. And we endeavour to get cross representation from across the organisation, so the different functional levels. But we also try to go down the vertical.
So we have people at different points in the hierarchy across an organisation. So very senior people, those people at the coalface, to get the range and breadth of perspectives that you need, so that when you are addressing requirements, you've got a really comprehensive understanding of them. I think that's a great answer to another question that is in here too, which is how could employees deal with management jumping on the latest fad, or trying to implement solutions looking for a problem, which is one of my favourite lines.
But yeah, any thoughts on that? Again, I think maturity of the organisation. So it comes back, I think, to the earlier stages of the process and understanding the drivers for change, and doing enough to legitimise or not, which of the drivers that you're going to respond to and which you're not going to. So a couple of important things for the organisation is to have mechanisms where you can prioritise what the organisation is currently doing, and then any emerging issues that might crop up.
So be able to understand how that issue is positioned in the context of those things. And then, again, having the rigour around the solutions that you consider as part of the next phase, and doing that feasibility testing that we talked about. If you incorporate those steps into the process and you apply the rigour around the feasibility side of things, then business cases need to get prosecuted.
It's not always easy to be the voice of reason or challenge, particularly if it's someone more senior to yourself. But I think mature organisations create environments where people can have robust discussions, where they're interested in the best outcome for the organisation. And that's the sort of thing you're trying to create.
And I think you mentioned in the early stages around rapid prototyping and testing, and a suggestion I would make is that the prototyping tool was a really great way to test value. Initially you're coming up with an idea, because an idea is not a solution, they're very different things. So taking a potential solution and prototyping and actually testing within users about whether it's delivering value can actually be a really fantastic way in order to, I guess, shine a light on people's bias or their thoughts about what's the right way to go.
Because often that can be on the basis of bias or experience and stuff which is specific to them, as opposed to what's actually in the interests of the person that they're turning up for. One other element of that that I like, and I know that you do this a lot in the human-centred design approaches, is spending enough time on understanding the problem. And that idea of framing and reframing the problem to make sure you articulate that challenge or that opportunity appropriately, so it leads you to a solution that's not just a fad, but it's fit for purpose.
I think that's another really important step in the process. Cool. The next question is an interesting one, and it says, it's from Debbie, and it says, is there any evidence to show that organisations with flat management structures implement change better than those that are very hierarchical? I'm just trying to, I'm quickly running through the change literature and research in my head.
I don't think so, because it comes down to what's the capability that's implementing the change. So I'm sure everyone can give examples of where they've been through change or had change implemented. I think if the capability and the capacity, and there isn't good planning in there, if it's bad, it's bad.
And I think what you have in the two types of structures, so yes, a flat structure, you've got less layers, but it might have other downfalls in terms of the blurring of roles between leaders and staff, which might have an implication, especially if there's harder change involved, or there might be a blurring of roles, which actually makes the implementation of potentially structural change hard. Hierarchical structures don't necessarily mean that change is slower. If you're effectively planning it out, there are ways that you can effectively have the change communications, the effective engagement, just as well as the perception of a flat structure.
So no, I think it always takes time, effort, and effective planning. Just to throw in something else into that mix, I spent a number of years earlier in my career in crisis management space, and one of the things we found in response to crisis situations is that there are certain conditions that once they're met, decision-making doesn't have to flow through each of the tiers that it would maybe in a BAU situation. So there are ways of managing change in a similar, or in a parallel, I guess, a way that parallels that so that you can streamline decision-making.
It doesn't necessarily have to go through the tiers. On paper, though, I agree that flat structures look like they might create a level of agility. I think that that doesn't mean that hierarchical organisations can't be agile as well.
The agility, though, is one of the important traits that in the modern world we're trying to develop and mature in our organisations. Yeah. There's a nice kind of alignment with this next question from Jenny, which is, and I know we covered this off a little bit in terms of the components, but any tips on the governance of change? Well, just to reiterate first what we mentioned in the webinar earlier on, that I think it's appropriate and ideal to have the level of governance commensurate with the scale of the change, the complexity of the change, the risk-reward, risk-return ratios, those kind of things.
So it becomes incredibly important. I mentioned that, you know, and Charlene spoke to, I think, the 10 years griff was what happens when things go splat, and I think invariably there is a risk that things will go splat in the change process. So having governance across a change programme, having the transparency that you need so that you're identifying those issues as they emerge, you're responsive to the solutions or the mitigations you need to put in place, you are directing, or as an organisation, you're able to direct recalibration where required, but you're ensuring that the things that you're investing and the change you're trying to bring about is creating the benefit that you anticipated it would.
That requires active oversight. So a really important part of change, and that supports leadership of the organisation. Because I think we want to say that, you know, it needs to be owned by someone.
You know, it's quite often that we see change initiatives where the accountability is given to someone as part of their day job, and that actually becomes really hard to implement. So, you know, recognising that leadership capability and capacity to lead the change is important, and also we're in the organisation, to Anton's point, that accountability sits given the type of change, the risk associated with the change to make a difference. Essentially, it's how you get your clarity of roles and responsibilities, it's how you get your coordination, all of those different elements that come from having robust governance arrangements in place.
Nice. Okay, the final question we have is from Tony, and it's a topic that we haven't covered in great depth, but what are the key measurement tools for business assessing the effectiveness of a change plan? So I'd be breaking up the change plan, so I mentioned the different components. So you'd have different metrics, and usually it manifests all in the readiness, but you'd be having the metrics around change engagement, readiness, impact.
So depending on the different parts of the change plan, you'd have metrics associated with it in terms of the pre-launch. So, for example, when I talk about the readiness metrics and the stage gates, you'd be asking questions. So, for example, you're going to do a medium-sized change with staff, for example, you'd have a series of stage gates prior to the launch, and you'd have indicators against those stage gates around, given this is two months to launch, where would we have expected them to get to in terms of readiness? So how comfortable are they with the content? Has a certain amount of engagement happened or a certain amount of training happened? So those readiness assessments are the primary metrics prior, and then post, you'd have the post-launch set of metrics, and that's how you know if it's effective.
And have you got any examples of those post measures? So the post measures, again, given the size of the change, you'd be looking at business impact, customer impact, staff impact, and you'd have a sense because you'd be, in theory, really realistic around, given the impact, what would be customer satisfaction, what do we think the staff experience will be, and you'd be assessing yourself after that. You'd also start to think about kind of complaints, satisfaction measures, other things that would give you a sense of how is the change going. So some of your existing measures that you kind of recalibrate on the basis of the change or the size of the change you're undertaking.
Yeah, you're also wanting to make sure that you're relying it to the change objectives, so this is where the benefits realisation comes in and being really clear on what are the benefits, and you'd be throwing them into the mix as well. Thanks very much, Dean, that was fantastic. Listen, unfortunately, Dean, we've run out of time to answer all the rest of the questions, but if you do have anything that you subsequently think of that you'd like to know more about or any questions you'd like to ask us, please reach out.
Our contact details are at the end of the webinar. We said at the start that we regularly run webinars as part of our give back to the business community, and the next one coming up is with Charlene on strategic planning and optimising the planning process. Well, that's us for today.
Thank you very much for joining us, ki te mihi for joining, and we look forward to seeing you at the next webinar.
