Over the year blog readers have asked me lots of interesting things and I wanted to share some of the best questions and answers with you over the next few days. They might help you if you’re dealing with similar problems.

Here’s the first:

Stuart’s Q: What is the biggest problem you have in your change programme?
A: Getting the decision makers to change the way they think about change programmes and how to deliver them effectively (they tend to be treated as “projects” with a start, middle and end)

Stuart’s Q: How difficult has it been to solve it?
A: Very

Stuart’s Q: What has caused you to want to solve it now?
A: In the current climate with the odds of job losses ever increasing - we cannot afford to embark on expensive, conventional change programmes that may look good on paper but fail to deliver on the ground.

Stuart’s Comments:
There are two strategies you need to solve this problem, the first is around pre-eminence, the second is getting the leaders to recognise the issues for themselves but you can’t get this without pre-eminence.

Here’s what I mean. We both agree (I assume) that you need to get the leaders out into the work so that they can see for themselves that the problem is the design and management of the work and that this can only be changed by different thinking, not a project. 

But trying to get them out into the work for two days is nigh on impossible (and I know we agree on that). So your best bet is to not even try until they ask you. This is about how you position yourself. This is called pre-eminence. 

What you have to do is write a white paper on the subject. You don’t address management treating change as a project directly but you do slip it into the paper. 

And then you write and write and publish and publish, by doing so you make yourself the pre-eminent adviser on the subject. Then when your management team start to see you as the expert your relationship changes and they start to take your advice.

The general premise of a white paper is that you address the areas of your subject that no-one else talks about i.e. the grey areas or the things that go wrong. 

The structure is:

1. A good title: “Why change fails in local authorities”
2. A thesis: ”This paper addresses the main reasons why change fails in local authorities, it concludes that what leaders need is to think of change as an ongoing way of working rather than project based work.”
3. Pose the questions you want to address: How many change programmes have failed in the UK over the past few years?
   1. What are the main reasons for failure?
   2. What leadership attributes are required to run a change programme?
   3. How is this different from what most leaders do?
   4. What are the key stages in running a successful change?
   5. What do leaders need to do to make it stick?
4. You include a resource box to offer a strategy session to avoid programme failure, here is the link to mine so you get the idea

Let me be honest, this won’t solve all of the problems all of the time but you will get treated differently and will have a better chance of getting the leaders to do what they should, spend time in the work. And in doing this your job is to get them to see how that the problems in the work are systemic and cannot be sorted by running a project. Here is the link to my scoping session, feel free to use the text. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 10:47 am and is filed under Change Management . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.