Making Change Work: Practical Tools for Overcoming Human Resistance to Change

By Brien Palmer

As organizations strive to remain ahead of the competition, there will inevitably and often come the need for change. All successful organizations regularly use change to improve processes and increase performance. While these times of change can be a great opportunity for an organization, it also can be a time of stress and angst for all involved. Not all organizations are in a position to make these changes effectively and efficiently, and for many their efforts often fall short of the intended goals.
Making Change Work: Practical Tools for Overcoming Human Resistance to Change was written to help organizations prepare for and successfully implement change. The price of a failed change effort can be steep, both monetarily and in a loss of credibility. Making Change Work will first provide tools to measure your organization’s readiness to change, helping make sure that the efforts will not be doomed to fail from the beginning. The book then provides many tools to apply sequentially and logically in order to gain acceptance of the change throughout the organization. In helping your organization make change successfully, Making Change Work addresses buy-in, acceptance, motivation, anticipation, fear, uncertainty, and all the other messy human considerations that cause change to fail in the real world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ASQ Quality Press
• Release date: Jul 3, 2003
• ISBN: 9781636941042

Book preview

Preface

Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better.

—King Whitney Jr.

This book was written for people trying to improve their organizations, such as executives, managers, project sponsors, project leaders, team leaders, and team members. All improvement requires change, and all change causes a predictable resistance by those people who are affected by the change. Unfortunately, this tendency—the lack of acceptance of the change—often causes a project to fail, even if the desired change is perfectly logical and necessary.

This book will help change leaders, particularly technical managers, understand and deal with the human aspect of change. The ability to deal with the human elements can mean the difference between the success or failure of a project—or a career!

WHAT THIS BOOK PROVIDES

This book will help you in several ways. First, it provides tools to measure your organization’s readiness to change. Do not attempt a change until you have demonstrated your organization’s readiness. The price of a failed change is a widespread loss of credibility of the noble objective that you were trying to achieve. That price is too high.

It also provides an easily understood model for making sure that your change project will be accepted by the organization (see Figure 1). This model is not academic—it provides a framework for hands-on actions designed to gain the organization’s acceptance of the change you are trying to make. It also provides your team with a way to work together effectively on this project.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, this book provides many practical tools to apply sequentially and logically at specific stages of your project. The tools are illustrated with actual examples from real companies. The layout of the model and the tools in the book mimics the structure of a well-designed project. This structure will appeal to technical and project-oriented people and provide practical structure to an area (human behavior) often viewed as soft or nebulous.

These tools and principles work best if they are shared openly with all members of your core team. They should comprise an integral part of the project plan. Encourage open and frank communication about change management issues throughout your project. If you have internal opposition, lack of management support, or other obstacles, name them. Use the tools to quantify them and take appropriate action. The use of candid communication and shared leadership will encourage personal growth and help develop a stronger team.

CHANGE HAPPENS

Some change will always happen, but not necessarily the change you want. It is far better to plan for and manage change systematically, rather than simply react to events as they occur. This book will help you do just that. Best of luck to you and your team!

Introduction

Change comes in all sizes, from one person simply doing something slightly different to major programs involving thousands of people. This book applies best to any change that requires a project: a group of people with dedicated resources working towards a defined end. Examples of projects might include:

Installing a new software system such as an inventory control system

Developing a new administrative process such as a 360° performance evaluation

Implementing an organizational change such as a restructuring

Introducing new technology such as voice recognition software

Moving to a new location or opening a new facility

Creating a new product or service

WHY CHANGE FAILS

An incredibly high percentage of changes introduced in business organizations do not reach their full potential—that is, do not reach full implementation or do not produce the benefits envisioned by their sponsors.

Changes that fail usually do not fail because of technical reasons— something inherently flawed about the change itself. They usually fail because of human reasons—the promoters of the change did not attend to the healthy, real, and predictable reactions of normal people to disturbances in their routines (see Figure 2).

These failures create large losses of time, productivity, and morale. They also undercut the legitimate business objectives that the change was meant to engender. For example, one manufacturer attempted to replace several disjointed software systems with one integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Because of poor project management, the user community was insufficiently involved in the planning stages, and the project failed dramatically. Opponents then said, Told you, we just can’t do an ERP in our business. In fact, having an ERP was a great idea. The project failed because of poor change management practices, and it took years for the organization to recover and install an ERP successfully.

This human tendency to want consistency—to resist change—is actually healthy, in the balance. Without consistency, life would fall out of control and into chaos. We would be unable to predict people’s behaviors or establish our own routines and positive behavioral patterns. Thank goodness for the steadying force of our own behavioral inertia.

However, this same steadying force can work against us when we try to introduce a change. People tend not to want to deviate from behaviors that work for them.

Why do they not want to change when the need for change is so clear to you? It is precisely because the need for change is not clear

Reviews for Making Change Work

[mohammedkb · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“Making Change Work” walks exactly what the title talks. I found the tools explained in this book really practical in putting change to work in any project. Unlike most other books, the book puts a practical methodology, in sequence and with supporting tools, to overcome human resistance to change. The rest is left to the reader on how to use his or her interpersonal skills to make this methodology a way of managing real life projects.Brien Palmer successfully guides the reader to make change work through following a 7-step methodology supported by tools and examples. Starting with Leading Change to gain management commitment to change, and ending with Anchoring the Change to seamlessly integrate the change with the existing systems the reader can really make any project succeed if the steps are followed rigorously and effectively.Once you finish reading the book you will not be able to resist the temptation to put what you have read into a flowchart of the steps with the recommended tools and to hang it in your office for use in any project until it is instilled in your, and more importantly in your company’s, culture.I recommend this book for any change agent and project manager who believe in the natural tendency of human resistance to change. This books is worth more than its price, indeed.