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Statistics differ on how many change programmes fail. Percentages from 40 to 70% are still cited regularly by reputable sources. Whatever the real numbers are, there’s a very good case to be made for retiring the “old rules” of change management.

Behavioural science and neuroscience have advanced, as has scientific thinking. Alternative theories are starting to replace the view of the organisation as a structure based on lines-and-boxes with something rather messier.

Furthermore, the idea of a two-year long transformation programme followed by a return to “business as usual” seems completely anachronistic in a world that, even before the unprecedented events of 2020, had started to see change itself as business as usual.

If organisations today need to constantly adapt to, and even pre-empt, developments in their environment, change management can no longer be the preserve of change management specialists, consultants or HR. Managing change is now a part of every manager’s day job, and organisations need skills, systems and processes that allow individuals, teams and the organisation itself not just to respond to and thrive in change, but to become active changemakers.

Managers need to be as savvy about anticipating and mobilising behavioural change as they do about budgets or balanced scorecards. And that, perhaps, is the biggest change of all.

Read the full article: What’s changed about change? – Openside