Why Change Management Doesn’t Change Anything

Is it time to get rid of the language of ‘change management’?

I really enjoyed this conversation between Celine Schillinger and Jen Frahm, which helped me order my thoughts about something that’s been bugging me for a while.

The problems with traditional change management are manifest:

It presumes a small clique know the change that needs to happen.

It casts the individual in a passive role of needing to change. (Good luck with that — has anyone ever managed to ‘change’ the behaviour of a partner or family member?)

It presumes change can be ‘managed’ — surely a fantasy that only exists on PowerPoint.

It largely assumes change, both its implementation and acceptance, is linear. You would be forgiven for laughing out loud at diagrams like the one below that seems to presume people will automatically bend the knee to having their change ‘approved or denied’.

Traditional change management is too often built upon the way people should act rather than how they actually do.

Change strategies have a number of false assumptions about the predictive nature of the organisation and the people within it.

Isn’t it time for approaching change in a messy and unpredictable way that is more reflective of how people really behave?

We’ll only genuinely solve real world problems when we start understanding that people are predictably irrational. Building systems that are flexible enough to cope with unpredictable behaviour has to start with a better focus on the individual.

Let’s build change around how humans actually are, not what we’d wish them to be.