You may have seen my interview last year with Henley Business School, talking about how to succeed with corporate change, and the need for organisations to invest enough time upfront to ensure that people are involved in co-developing the solution, and that they can see benefits of the change along the way. This will give you the best chance of the transformation being sustainable.
On Tuesday 21 November 2017, Robert Gabriel Mugabe officially resigned as the President of the Republic of Zimbabwe. After 37 years in power, the man who became his country’s first democratically elected leader in 1980, stepped down in the wake of a military takeover that has sent shockwaves around the world.
Digital evolution is an ongoing journey for every business.
Gone are the days of saying that you have ‘done’ digital after a major technology overhaul. Instead, it is an evolution to transition and optimise your business continually. Even digitally native companies know that they have to innovate and stay ahead of the game because of growing disruption and rapid technological change.
Michael Porter, the famous Harvard Strategy Professor said “If we’re satisfied with vague strengths and weakness lists, we’re not thinking very clearly about strategy”. “There’s a distinction between operational effectiveness and strategic positioning”.
“Should we be on the cloud or have our own servers? That’s an operational effectiveness question. What we understand is that operational effectiveness is not strategy”.
Organisational culture has a clear impact on a business’s ability to meet financial goals and create an impact on their overall market influence. A system of shared values and beliefs will govern how team members behave within your organisation, from how they dress right through to how they perform in their roles.
“Implementing change is the journey, sustaining change is the destination”
As change facilitators and leaders, most of us have seen that it’s helpful to have a change plan, and to follow some kind of framework or change model that reminds us of the essentials that will help us to guide the organisation through the change we’re helping to deliver.
And I know from my own experience, and from discussions with my colleagues, that the framework, no matter which one or how diligently followed, is not a guarantee of successful change.
“Creating and executing the recipe for change”
In this article, I’m going to explore the Stakeholder Preparation stage of my change framework which is primarily all about performing the activities to physically prepare the individual, team or organisation for the changes ahead. Technically performing awareness or education type activities is preparation, however, I like to think of this stage being more of the ‘to do’ list of the business that they need to complete before any change is implemented.
This series of articles is best read in order, so if you haven’t read article 1, article 2.1 or article 2.2 yet, I invite you to head over and do that first.
“Bringing the changes to life”
You’ve managed to get yourself into a good strong position by having defined the change impacts to understand what it means, you’ve built a solid change plan and mapped it to the various stakeholder groups and you’ve built your change networks and established control rooms to regularly measure feedback.