CHANGE IS GOOD..........BUT YOU MUST GET TO KNOW THE RULES.

With Corporate Change Every Day Counts - 4 Techniques For Rapid Transformation .............

By Laura Wilcox

If you believe that the market will move so dramatically that you can double your stock portfolio every 90 days, how long will you wait to invest? If you need to purchase a home and knew interest rates are going to be at a low for the next 30 days, how long will you wait to go house hunting? If you know there is a way to transform your organization in 90 days, how long will you wait to move forward?
As individuals we make personal decisions rapidly, but as managers and executives when it comes to corporate change initiatives we take months simply to create a plan. During the time we spend planning to change our competition moves forward, our performance stays flat and our time to ROI increases with every passing day.
Corporate change can be risky business. With industry wide success rates for change initiatives at their historical low of 15%, no wonder we use caution. And with the potential for project failure at an all time high of 85-95%, there seems to be no reason to rush into things.
Change experts have started to look beyond traditional business models to find better ways to change organizations. Their focus is on the new Science of Change which utilizes principles from the hard sciences to speed up the way organizations change. They have discovered that organizations have natural processes they use to change and evolve. They say that when you understand how your organization processes change, what type of changes work best, and how fast your organization can adopt change, you can transform your company rapidly with higher than average success rates.
Here are four techniques your teams can use to rapidly transform your organization and deliver business value. The first step is to acknowledge that you cannot mandate change. It hasn’t worked for the last generation of children and doesn’t work for this generation of employees.
The second step is to recognize that every department in your company has its own culture and its own culture drivers. To change employees, you must determine who and what drives their behavior. Change can be implemented fast when you put employees into situations where they are receptive to change and encouraged to modify their behavior to deliver better business results.
The third step is to identify the culture keepers of each department effected by change. Working with those individuals you can create a solution that allows employees to feel that their culture, the stability of their team, their ability to be recognized, and their personal methods for achieving success are safe.
Traditional Big Bang change, where change agents try to solve multiple problems at the same time, creates Big Time change resistance. So the final step is to break mandated change up into small chunks that can be accomplished in weeks rather than months. This “one piece at a time” approach accomplishes two things. It makes changes at a pace that the human brain is designed to master. Secondly, it allows you to adjust your program when one piece of change doesn’t deliver the results you are looking for.
These four simple techniques can transform your organization in as little as 90 business days. Knowing that change is finally possible, isn’t it time you stopped planning to change and got busy making changes?

Laura Wilcox is Vice President for Change Delivery Group, http://www.changeperfect.com Their proven products deliver rapid business value without culture change resistance by incorporating the new Science of Change. Laura can be contacted at laurawilcox@changeperfect.com