How to Bring Change to an Organization

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Change management is the process of planning, implementing, and evaluating changes in an organization. It involves managing people and processes to achieve a desired outcome.

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Change is hard. We resist it in our personal lives because it requires energy and effort. Some changes require adjusting how we think. Others require creating new behaviors and habits. However, most fundamental changes require a new way of thinking and new behaviors or habits.

It’s much easier to sustain our current thinking and behavioral patterns because they are constantly reinforced with repetition. To conserve energy, our brain falls into a default habitual mode. The neural networks are formed and become stronger as we repeatedly practice a particular behavior or way of thinking. That’s why creating new habits is so tricky. The brain has to build new neural pathways that, over time, can override the existing pathways responsible for our current habits.

All of us have made an effort to change ourselves. Our long-term success, health, and happiness are directly related to how well we adapt, evolve, and change ourselves through new thinking and behavioral patterns. Yet still, with the stakes so high, we often fail in our efforts.

Bringing changes to an organization is even more challenging. If you think it’s difficult to change your behavior, imagine how hard it is to change the behaviors and habits of many people in an organization. Strategies and processes have been formed and repeated over time, involving multiple people and departments. Companies have their habitual ways of doing things.

Often, companies hire people from outside the organization to be agents of change. The hope is that new hires because they are not part of the current processes, can more clearly see the company’s deficiencies and limitations. Having a fresh perspective is crucial in identifying the necessary changes.

While working as a consultant, I realized that my primary goal is to bring change to an organization. If it’s done correctly, positive outcomes will follow. The outcomes are always a byproduct of the process. At one point, I decided to take a hard and honest look back at my work to understand why specific projects were successful while others failed. I wanted to learn how to improve my work and identify the criteria I should use to decide what projects to take on.

Who drives the change?

Every successful engagement in my consulting had four elements: ability, motivation, authority, and resources.

• ABILITY refers to the skills needed to make changes or achieve goals. Every challenge and every project requires a unique set of skills and experiences to understand what needs to be done and, more importantly, how to make it happen. It's about your area of expertise, skills, knowledge, and related experience.
• MOTIVATION refers to the desire to take on a challenge or a project. Motivation is important because it drives energy and enthusiasm and enables you to enhance the skills needed to make the change successful. If you have a skills gap and are motivated, you will expand your skills to ensure you put everything behind reaching the outcomes you desire. But if you have all the necessary skills to complete a project but no motivation to take it on, you are unlikely to succeed for whatever reason.
• AUTHORITY refers to the ability to make decisions or have a substantial voice in decision-making. You can’t bring change and provide positive outcomes if you can’t influence important decisions. For example, if the company founders or C-level executives aren’t involved in creating strategic messaging or a brand story, there’s no way to make it work. You can spend an enormous amount of time and effort developing new messaging only to encounter resistance from executives. For the most part, the outcome of strategic messaging and story creation is not the framework or exact wording but a body of exercises and conversations. As you follow the process of creating messaging or a story, you understand the outcome. If you are only presented with messaging without the context of the process, you won’t completely understand why the messaging looks the way it does or why it’s essential.
• RESOURCES refer to all the investments required to achieve a particular outcome. Even if you know what to do, have the skills, are motivated, and have the authority to make decisions, you still need the resources to make it happen. Resources include people with the right skills, capital, and tools. You need people to help you, financial capital, and tools to get you there.

You can control and evaluate your ability and motivation, but you can’t control your authority and resources. Forces outside your direct control mainly determine those last two (authority and resources).

• Ability: Do I know what needs to be done and how to do it?
• Motivation: Do I feel excited about the project?