Situation viability

One of your goals at this stage of the life-cycle model will be to focus on the viability of the situation. You need to ask if you really can deliver a successful outcome within the given limitations. In many cases, the viability of the change may only be determined if the forces that surround the problem are understood. So rather than worrying about the content of the problem, you might need to understand some of the meta-processes that surround it. Two of the specific factors addressed in this section are the driving force matrix and phase mapping.

Driving force

In any change situation, you must ask two questions:

• From where is the drive for the change coming (forced or chosen)?

• What is the dominant type of change (hard or soft)?

You need to understand where the decision to go for change originated. Did your client decide on it (chosen) or was it the result of external pressure (forced)?

And what about the type of change? "Hard" change is where the client requires a tangible and visible output such as a new computer system, global strategy or quality system. These are structural elements that are independent of the people that drive and operate the business. When people go home at night, the effect of the change will stay with the business. For "soft" change, the primary focus in on dealing with people issues — culture change, empowerment, leadership, facilitating a team's development, etc. With this type of change, when the people go home at night, so will the impact of the change.

In talking about the types of change, I have used the terms hard and soft with some trepidation. Clearly, hard change projects are implicitly dependent upon the soft issues and soft change must deliver a tangible benefit. Unless people are motivated to use a new computer system, then the business benefits will be slowly eroded. Conversely, simply making people more motivated and empowered will be of little use unless there is a clear improvement in business performance, i.e. a hard and tangible outcome. However, I have used the classification because the type of change that the client is looking for will significantly affect the approach you take in later stages of the engagement. These parameters are combined in a simple matrix in Fig. 6.3.

Examples of projects in the Chosen-Hard quadrant are a software upgrade, process modification or office relocation scheme. Your client has taken the decision to make a change and already has a clear and tangible outcome in mind. Your role is as a delivery agent, taking the situation in hand and managing it through to a successful conclusion. Although soft issues will be encountered along the way, the client's primary goal is the delivery of a hard and tangible outcome. Any people factors that emerge along the way will be of secondary interest, only to be considered if they affect the end goal.

On the Chosen-Soft path, your client has decided that some of the softer issues need to be addressed. This might involve dealing with morale, introducing a new competency development programme or improving the senior team's ability to take critical feedback from line managers. One interesting question you might choose to ask is, why has the client chosen to address soft issues? Do they have prior experience, which proves that a soft change can work or have they read an article that suggests that the proposed outcome will offer certain benefits? If the client's need emerges from a deep belief about such ideas, then you are in the role of delivery agent. If the client's motivation for adopting such an approach is driven by hearsay or fad following, then it is critical that you check out and challenge what the client really wants to achieve. The key here is to manage the client's expectation as well as the consultancy process. Many change initiatives promise fantastic benefits but in reality deliver only limited improvement.

With the Forced-Hard option, the client has been pushed into a position where a change must be made. This might be a team manager who has to implement new quality procedures; a plant director who has to re-locate a division; or a marketing manager under pressure to adopt a new segmentation strategy. In this case, you will possibly be dealing with a client who has little personal motivation to deliver a success. This is a potential minefield since the client often has a hidden agenda to ensure that the change process fails and blame is apportioned to you. It will pay to think carefully about accepting this type of contract. Only if you are certain that you will be able to muster sufficient leverage (political, financial, etc.) should you accept the contract. The forces that will act against you are likely to come primarily from the client and this is an insidious position to be in.

The Forced-Soft quadrant is one of the most difficult and frustrating. Imagine a manager who has been told she is not performing and must attend a motivation course; a team manager who has been told that his team should attend a values definition workshop; or an engineering director who has been forced to allocate scarce funds to a new corporate culture change project. All of these projects will be difficult because you are trying to impose a transition at a deep and personal level, something that the majority of people will fiercely resist. This is like trying to enforce a no-smoking regime in a company where cigarettes have been commonly used. It is imposing a change at habit level, something that takes time, energy and desire to achieve. It cannot simply be mandated. This is possibly the biggest minefield of all the situations that you will face since people have the choice to either make a real change or just deliver a pseudo-transformation.

To ensure that change in this quadrant is effective, you need to spend energy on developing a close sense of rapport with your client rather than focusing on the content. Only when you have a decent level of trust and rapport will you be able to gauge the chances of success. Unless you are able to get a deep level of intimacy with your client then you will be undertaking a potentially fruitless assignment — one that proves frustrating for your client and yourself.

The message is quite apparent: unless you are very clear about where the drive is coming from and what type of change is being used, costly mistakes are likely to be made.

Phase mapping

The second point to consider is how the different components within the system relate to each other. Most engagements act on sub-systems of other systems, such as teams within a unit, a unit with a division, a division within a business and so on. As such there will always be external factors that can suddenly affect the engagement. These might include inward investment, changing personnel policies, corporate expansion schemes, downsizing, etc.

Imagine a product development team that needs to recruit new people to complete a market review. Unfortunately, the division that it sits in has budget constraints from head office resulting in headcount restrictions. Additionally, at a group level, there may be plans for downsizing. The decisions taken at each level make sense in isolation but when taken as a whole, result in discontinuities across the organization.

It can help to view these variations at each level as waveforms with differing amplitudes and frequency. There will be times when the waves complement each other and times when they are in conflict. You need to be able to map these energy waves and determine if the change is timely, taking into account any wave conflicts.

For example, at times investment will be green-flagged and capital will be readily available. At other times capital might be rationed and teams will struggle to fund their projects. Given the complex structures that exist within many organizations, this change in state will not always be common or clear to everyone. Thus different levels of the organization will have opposite views as to the availability of capital.

In Fig. 6.4 the consulting window suggests that the team is about to progress with a capital investment programme that is tacitly supported at divisional level. However, once the business case reaches organization level it is likely to be rescinded as they are on a downward cycle. Although the organization has advance knowledge of the impending scarcity of capital at an industry level, this is invisible to the team.

The danger is that if that if you are unaware of this phase mis-alignment, then time and money can be spent developing a proposal that is rejected once it reaches another part of the system. Although the investment project might make sense to the team based on its local view of the world, if it is unable to appreciate how the world looks to the other systems then it will be frustrated in its change process.

One way to avoid this trap is by networking. If you consider the client system in isolation there is a risk that phase problems will occur. Obviously you must focus on your project area but it is also important to cultivate relationships across other systems within the organization, both vertically and laterally. Only by creating a network of "informants" will you be able to understand the total picture. For example, a police detective will not focus on the criminal in isolation. The shrewd one will draw upon his or her entire network of informants and contacts to understand what is happening in other parts of the criminal world. By doing this, they are able to manage both the immediate crime investigation and the bigger picture.

Once you have a clear view of the problem, the nature of the change and the viability for success, you must identify those people with power over any proposed changes. Although your client is often the person that has the power to take decisions on the progress of the project, in the majority of cases many of the real decision makers only come out of the woodwork once the project has progressed beyond the contracting stage.

Back pocket question Can the issue be successfully resolved and is the timing right for a change?