Top Three Tips for Organisational Change

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Here are my top three tips for succeeding in organisational change — what are yours?

ONE
If it’s transformational change — and it likely is (more often than people realise), you need a balance:
- one shot of ‘top-down’ clarity (top-line requirements, commitment, organisation and coordination capacity, governance, ‘must haves’ and ‘red lines’)
- with two shots of ‘bottom-up’ involvement: engagement with the people who are actually doing the work that needs to change, who are creating the outcomes at the moment and need to create the desired outcomes in the future. ‘The person who sweeps the floor should choose the broom’.

This is how you engage #innovation and #creativity

Top-down doesn’t mean ‘Highest Paid Person’s Opinion’ — governance should really involve customers, citizens, residents, suppliers, partners — depending on your context, as week as #management.

And for the bottom-up engagement, remember that the outcomes probably depend on customers, citizens, residents, suppliers, and partners too.

TWO
The top-down should set clear boundaries, and give over control within those boundaries to those involved with the work. Minimise wishy-washy ‘consultation’, maximise clarity (this probably means you have to be a little tougher and more honest with the real requirements than you are comfortable with).

THREE
Do a pre-mortem — ‘if we’re back here again at the end of this #change effort, and it’s all gone wrong — why has it gone wrong?’

My ‘breaking the shell’ exercise is an example of this. Identify the barriers to success, categorise them to realign expectations, and plan accordingly.

BONUS tip
People give their commitment and support to organisations based on their emotional, gut reaction to four things:
o the way things work
o the behaviour they see in leaders
o the use of symbolism they experience in the organisation
AND the stories they hear from other about organisational systems, behaviours, and symbolism

Every change effort is a massive mobilisation of culture-impacting activity.
So remember that if you to change engagement and motivation (again, management AND employees AND citizens, tenants, residents, suppliers, partners), then you need to change people’s experiences…. consistently and persistently over time.

I developed and shared these for the TPAS Collaborate programme on tenant influence on boards and governance in #housing — reporting coming soon. But they are principles that stretch across not only #publicservices, but way beyond.

What do you think — what would your top three tips be?