Organisational change
Change that sticks
The programme ends. The PMO disbands. What decides whether anything is still different a year later?
Organisations are generally quite good at starting change. There is usually a clear explanation of why something needs to be different, senior sponsors are appointed, workstreams are established and people begin reporting progress against an agreed set of milestones.
Depending on the scale of the transformation, there may also be consultants, project managers, new systems, communications programmes and significant investment. For a period of time the change receives considerable organisational attention and there is a structure around it that keeps activity moving.
Eventually, however, the programme reaches its conclusion. The project team moves on, governance meetings become less frequent or disappear altogether, and the organisation's attention shifts towards whatever comes next.
It is at this point that one of the most useful measures of successful transformation begins to emerge. If we returned twelve months later, what would actually be different about the way the organisation operates?
That question tells us considerably more than whether the original programme delivered all of its milestones on time.
Programmes can finish before organisations have changed
Projects and organisations operate in quite different ways. A project usually has defined objectives, resources, governance arrangements and timescales, all of which are designed to deliver a particular outcome.
Organisations are less tidy. They contain established relationships, informal ways of working, competing priorities and habits that have developed over many years. People learn how to get things done within that environment and will often continue doing what has worked previously unless there is a compelling and practical reason to behave differently.
A transformation programme can introduce a new system or redesign a process relatively quickly, while changing the behaviour surrounding it can take considerably longer. This is one reason organisations sometimes discover that an apparently successful transformation has gradually drifted back towards the old way of working.
The programme may have delivered what it was asked to deliver, but the organisation has not yet absorbed the change sufficiently for it to become normal.
Ownership eventually has to become part of everyday management
During a transformation programme, responsibility for maintaining momentum often sits naturally with the programme itself. There may be a transformation director, programme manager, steering group or PMO responsible for tracking progress and making sure actions happen.
That structure is useful while the programme is running, but it can unintentionally create the impression that the change belongs to the transformation team rather than to the managers who will eventually have to make it work.
The transition from programme ownership to operational ownership therefore deserves much more attention than it sometimes receives. Managers need to understand what has changed, why it matters and what they are now expected to do differently as a result.
If that transfer has not happened by the time the programme infrastructure disappears, the organisation can quickly lose the mechanism that was holding the change together. The issue is not usually that people deliberately reject what has been introduced. More often, operational priorities begin to take precedence and familiar ways of working gradually return.
Managers have an enormous influence on whether change becomes normal
Senior sponsorship is clearly important, particularly when significant decisions or investment are required. The everyday experience of organisational change, however, is often shaped much more directly by managers throughout the business.
Employees look to their managers to understand what a change means in practice. Managers answer questions, interpret broad organisational messages, deal with concerns and decide how new expectations fit alongside existing operational priorities.
If managers are not sufficiently equipped to do those things, employees can receive mixed signals. The organisation may communicate one set of expectations while everyday management behaviour continues reinforcing another.
For that reason, we believe management capability should form part of transformation planning from the beginning rather than being treated as a training requirement that can be addressed once everything else has been designed. Where a transformation depends on people behaving or working differently, managers need to understand those expectations and be capable of leading them.
Organisational systems can either reinforce or undermine the change
Another reason old behaviours return is that organisations sometimes change what they say they want without changing the environment in which people work.
An organisation may encourage greater collaboration while continuing to measure each function almost entirely against departmental targets. It may ask managers to spend more time coaching their people while rewarding them predominantly for short-term operational performance. New responsibilities may be introduced without changing decision rights, reporting relationships or the processes that supported the previous way of working.
People tend to respond quite rationally to the systems around them. If a new behaviour creates additional difficulty while the old behaviour continues to be recognised or rewarded, it should not be surprising when people eventually revert to what worked before.
Transformation is more likely to endure when organisational systems, leadership behaviour and performance expectations all point broadly in the same direction.
Understanding the change is not the same as being capable of delivering it
This distinction is particularly important when transformation requires people to do something they have not previously needed to do.
A manager may understand the new strategy perfectly well but still need support to lead their team differently. A salesperson may understand a new commercial proposition but lack the experience required to have a different kind of conversation with customers. An operational leader may understand a redesigned process without yet having developed the judgement required to make decisions confidently within it.
This is why capability deserves more attention within transformation programmes. Leaders need to understand what people will need to be able to do differently, how confident the organisation is that those capabilities exist and what support will be required where gaps emerge.
Those questions are sometimes described as learning and development issues. In reality, where the successful delivery of the transformation depends upon them, they are transformation issues.
Measuring activity does not always tell us whether anything has changed
Transformation programmes naturally generate measures. Organisations track milestones, workshop attendance, systems migrated, processes redesigned and actions completed because these things provide useful information about whether the programme is progressing.
The difficulty is that activity measures describe what the programme has done rather than necessarily showing what has changed within the organisation.
Once implementation is under way, it becomes useful to look at different evidence. Are decisions now being made differently? Are the behaviours the organisation wanted becoming normal? Can managers explain what is expected of them? Are customers or employees experiencing an improvement? Have the old workarounds disappeared, or have people simply found new ways of maintaining them?
These questions can produce less comfortable answers than a project dashboard, but they provide a much clearer indication of whether the intended change is becoming embedded.
Lasting change requires continued attention
Transformation programmes need end dates because resources and governance structures cannot continue indefinitely. The organisational changes they introduce rarely fit quite so neatly into the same timetable.
New ways of working need reinforcement until they become familiar. Managers may need continued support, leaders need to remain consistent in what they ask for and performance systems need to reflect the expectations introduced through the change. Organisations also need to notice when old habits begin returning and understand why.
Over time, if those things are sustained, the language of transformation begins to disappear because the new approach has simply become the way the organisation works.
In our experience, this is what distinguishes change that lasts from change that looked successful while the programme was still running. The organisations that achieve it are not necessarily those with the largest transformation budgets or the most sophisticated programme structures. They are usually the ones that pay enough attention to leadership, management, capability and organisational behaviour to make sure the change survives after the machinery of transformation has gone.