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Martin Leith: Managing Director, The Centre for Large Group Interventions, London, UK
The six major weaknesses
Seventy per cent or more of all organization-wide change programmes - even some of the best designed ones - fail to produce the desired results[1]. What is going wrong? It may be because the conventional approach to organizational change has six major structural weaknesses.
Change is imposed
Most organizational change programmes are designed by experts and top management who assume that people will be against the proposed changes, and will therefore need to be told to make them happen, or be persuaded of their benefits. The vehicle for this telling and selling is generally the cascade session. Here, employees may buy into the changes, only later to experience "buyer's remorse" which gets expressed as resistance or even sabotage. The designers - often with the best of intentions - demand that people implement their design without modifcation, whereas the implementers usually want to adapt the design to fit their individual situations. This can lead to an escalating pattern where the more the designers seek compliance, the more the implementers do their own thing, or do nothing, ultimately resulting in the failure of the programme.
Stakeholder involvement is narrow
Designers of conventional change programmes generally exclude the vast majority of internal stakeholders from the planning process. Also, they tend to ignore important external stakeholder groups such as suppliers, customers and the local community. The opportunity to create a more widely-shared vision of the future is therefore lost, and key stakeholders may fail to provide vitally-needed support.
Appreciation of current reality is limited
As a consequence of failing to involve from the outset everyone who will be affected by the change, an incomplete picture of current reality is created. Wise strategic decisions are unlikely to be made when informed by such a limited database.
Problem solving is the prevailing mindset
Many models of organizational change are based on an elaboration of the problem-solving model[2], the shortcomings of which have been documented at length by Fritz[3]. Results, if any, tend to be incremental improvements rather than "order of magnitude" changes. Behavioural scientist Ron Lippett discovered that when groups focus on solving problems they become depressed, but when they formulate plans by working backwards...