Miki Stricker-Talbot, Intrapreneur and public servant with the City of Edmonton, Canada, isn’t a fan of the term “change management”. “It makes it seem like a predictable and linear process,” she said.
“Change, to me, is much more than systems or machines — it’s more like cultivating a garden or allowing for a forest to thrive. Change is about the attunement to, the acknowledgement of, and the co-creation with and within an ecosystem.”
Creating, shaping and delivering change is no easy ask, and creating an ecosystem where change can thrive is at the heart of the discipline of change management. As such, theoretical models of change management are not there to be adopted blindly, but to be adapted, shaped or even ignored.
Here Apolitical outlines what change management means and what some of those models look like, before we move on to learn more about how public servants are applying the process in practice.
What is change management?
The Northern Irish finance department puts it nicely. Sometimes working with change means dealing with fluctuations. Other times, it might mean leading the charge.
Change management can be reactive, anticipatory or proactive — you can respond to change, try to see it coming from far off, or drive it yourself.
Change can either be transformational — thinking about a new way something functions, putting in place new structures. Or it might be incremental — making improvements to what already exists.
Abe Greenspoon, a free agent for the Canadian government, and government innovation expert Thea Snow refer to this distinction as Type A changes (superficial tweaks) and Type B changes (deep, sustained reforms).
And it works on a personal level: some of the people you will meet in this microcourse are drivers of change. Others are thinking about how to respond to it.
The state government of Western Australia writes that change could be emergent — appearing as if from nowhere — or planned, as a result of a deliberate strategy.
There are numerous models and theories about change management. But the Australian article also warns us that no single approach suits all planned change — a model won’t always fit your problem or your context.
What might change look like as a model?
There are lots of different change management models. Here, Apolitical outlines four different ones — but it’s not an exhaustive list.
John Kotter’s eight steps
John Kotter is a Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School, and is known for his “eight steps” for leading change. They’re often held up as a key change management model, referenced by Greenspoon and Snow as “the most influential work in this field”.
His steps are:
- Create a sense of urgency — time pressure can bring people together quickly
- Build a coalition of people to guide you — Kotter calls this the “nerve centre” of the change process. He recommends bringing people together, crossing different hierarchies within the organisation
- Form a strategic vision — this must be easy for others to understand and then promote on your behalf
- Enlist a “volunteer army” — building a feeling that one “must” contribute rather than one “has to” take part
- Remove barriers to progress — these might include a pressure to hit numbers or complacency
- Generate short-term wins — these should be unambiguous and adaptable so that others can copy them
- Sustain your approach — revisit the urgency of step one to ensure that change continues to be driven through the organisation
- Generate change — by making the process stick and grafting new processes onto old ones, removing the dead wood
If you want to know more, you can read about his steps here.
Kotter’s thinking has its critics. Greenspoon and Snow situate his work as “part of the world of top-down transformation managed with Gantt charts and dashboards”, and note that this kind of change takes years to see through.
The time taken to transform is something vital to consider when choosing a model to adapt or follow. Greenspoon and Snow warn, of the eight steps, that “by the time these transformations are complete, the 'new way' will likely be the 'old way' and we’re back to square one.”
Agile
Agile is a project management framework that prioritises short, deliverable iterations of tasks. Beginning as a software development tool, some public servants are also applying the technique to change management programs.
The short, two-week timescales involved in Agile working allow room for experimentation and failure. “If you’re doing a two-week sprint, the most you can do is fail on something in two weeks,” said Colin McIntosh, an Agile Coach at Inland Revenue New Zealand when speaking to Apolitical. “That's a fast fail, it’s actually learning, not failing or a problem.”
These two-week sprints are punctuated by daily standups (team meetings). But despite the jargon, the Agile manifesto prioritises people over processes: face to face conversations and regular reflections are at the heart of agile working.
Fundamentally, Agile is designed to be adaptable. “Don’t be afraid to do something that’s different, and if it doesn’t work, don’t be afraid to change it,” McIntosh continued.
ADKAR
Created by entrepreneur and author Jeff Hiatt, ADKAR is an acronym representing the five milestones he believes are required to realise change: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement.
The milestones must be achieved in order and this process is sometimes referred to as a “waterfall”, describing the cascading flow of progress as change is achieved.
So a waterfall might take place like this:
- Awareness for the need for change — an outcome of early communication of the change
- Desire to engage and participate in the change from participants
- Knowledge about how to change, coming from training
- Ability to realise the change and implement certain practices
- Reinforcement by adopting measures and course correcting, making sure that the change sticks
Lean
Originally developed in the private sector to speed up manufacturing processes, Lean has more recently been applied to government. The Lean method is made up of a set of principles set to eliminate as much waste as possible by creating efficiencies in existing processes.
Timothy Francis, project manager at Veterans Affairs Canada, wrote for Apolitical emphasising that “the target of Lean is not the people, it’s waste in the processes – more specifically, defects and variation that causes overwhelm and backlogs, and inhibits value creation.”
Central to Lean is a framework called “Plan-Do-Check-Act”, conceptualised by American engineer Dr W. Edwards Deming, which includes eight steps:
- Clarify the problem
- Describe current conditions
- Set improvement targets
- Determine root cause
- Develop countermeasures
- Enact countermeasures
- Measure and evaluate results
- Standardise, sustain and share success
The steps are designed to overlap one another, and be constantly working in a circle as employees continually improve their practices.
Do I need to pick a model?
No — but they’re worth considering and sometimes adapting.
Later in this boot camp, you’ll meet Brian Elms, a former US public servant and founder of Denver’s “Peak Academy” change management program. He adapted the Lean method and the A3 model, used by Toyota in its manufacturing, and added his own spin, to create the program he rolled out across the city.
It’s also worth saying up top that sometimes no methodology works best. You’ll also meet the team behind the Wigan Deal — an informal agreement between a UK council and its residents, designed to help them work together to create a better place to live. Rather than using a change management methodology, they used a more instinctive approach.
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(Picture credit: Unsplash)
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