“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” – W. Edwards Deming
As leaders we spent a lot of time talking about how much we work on change, how change is really hard, why change is important, what we hope to gain by change, etc. One key change success factor that people quite often don’t talk about is the process you use to change.
When you have a change project to undertake, how do you go about it? Too many organizations really can’t answer that – and that’s a problem. Think about how much change you deal with on a regular basis. These days, change is constant. Wouldn’t it make sense that if you’re going to have to do something over and over and over that you’d have a clearly defined process for doing it?
Think about whatever your organization produces & sells. Now think about how you do it – almost without exception, organizations have clearly defined processes for how they do what they do. Not only that, but many organizations have clearly defined processes for administrative things too – budgeting, performance management, etc. So why don’t you have a change process?
Why wouldn’t you have a consistent methodology & approach to change? Why wouldn’t you teach your people to speak the same language when it comes to change? Why wouldn’t you provide them with a common set of tools to use when they’re working on change projects? Especially given that these days change projects seem to be most of what they’re working on!
Think about your organization. How do you change? What process do you use? Do you have a consistent repeatable, proven methodology? Or do you reinvent the wheel every time you make change? Having a proven, reliable change process is a key factor in change success – make sure you know what you’re doing.
