Work it through: Leading a Change Programme
Change lands person by person or it does not land at all. Diagnose the culture underneath, respect the physics of unfreeze and refreeze, run the programme in the right order, and check where each individual has actually got stuck.
Seven steps, in the order the playbook gives them. Your work stays in this browser until you save it to a file.
Your ducks
Start with what the people believe, what the paperwork says and what actually happens. The issues where your ducks disagree are the ones to carry into the homework.
You have not filled in the ducks sheet yet.
The homework
What has to be found before any of the four frameworks is worth running. Put a name and a date against each one, and tick it when you have it in your hands.
The ducks
For Schein's Three Levels of Culture
For Lewin's Three-Step Model
For Kotter's 8-Step Change Model
For ADKAR Model
Step 1 of 4: Schein's Three Levels of Culture
Before designing any programme, find out what the organisation actually believes, as opposed to what the posters in reception claim. Schein's three levels give you the method: inventory the visible artefacts, record the espoused values, then hunt the contradictions between them, because the contradictions point to the underlying assumptions your change will really be negotiating with. My spreadsheet counter-revolution was a contradiction of exactly this kind. The firm espoused efficiency; the assumption underneath was that your own numbers were the only numbers you could trust.
Watch forDo not stop at the artefact level; a diagnosis that lists the visible symptoms and calls them culture will design a change that bounces straight off.
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What comes out, and how to read it
A layered cultural diagnosis: an artifact inventory, the espoused record, the contradictions between them, and a short list of named underlying assumptions assessed as helping or hindering the presenting problem, with implications for how change should be designed.
- The contradictions are the findings. Where all three levels align, culture is working as designed; where they diverge, the assumption underneath the contradiction is what any change effort will actually meet.
- Judge assumptions against the task rather than against virtue. An assumption that hinders digitisation may be the same one that built the firm's service reputation.
- Expect the deepest level to change last and only through lived success. A new value statement is an artifact, whatever it says.
Step 2 of 4: Lewin's Three-Step Model
Lewin supplies the physics every later model descends from: unfreeze the current pattern, move to the new one, refreeze so the group does not snap back. Before planning anything, weigh the force field. List what pushes towards the change and what holds the old pattern in place, and be honest about the strongest restraining force, because if your design leaves it untouched, your plan is a polite request. Most failed changes were never properly unfrozen, and the ones that reverse, like my spreadsheets, were never refrozen.
Watch forThe trap is declaring victory at go-live; the refreeze is the part everyone is too tired to do, and it decides whether the change holds.
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What comes out, and how to read it
A staged plan for a bounded change: a force field diagnosis, a deliberate destabilisation of the current pattern, a participative transition, and an explicit anchoring phase with a measure of whether the new behaviour is holding.
- The model is read as a discipline of sequence: if the change is failing, locate which step was skipped. Most failed changes were never unfrozen, and most reversed ones were never refrozen.
- Weigh the force field before the plan. If the strongest restraining force is untouched by your design, the plan is a request, and the equilibrium will decline it.
- Treat the three steps as a lens over a change, never as the plan itself. The model tells you what phase you are in and what that phase demands; the operational content must come from somewhere else.
Step 3 of 4: Kotter's 8-Step Change Model
For a programme of real scale, Kotter gives you the operating sequence: urgency, coalition, vision, communication, empowerment, short-term wins, consolidation, anchoring. Two uses. As a plan it stops you skipping the unglamorous early steps, and as a diagnostic it tells you where a stalling programme actually broke, since a communication problem at step four is usually a vision problem from step three wearing a disguise. Schedule the short-term wins deliberately. Eighteen months is a long time to run on faith.
Watch forProgress at any step is capped by the weakest step before it, so resist the executive urge to start at step four because the first three feel soft.
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What comes out, and how to read it
A staged change programme: an evidence-based case for urgency, a named coalition, a communicable vision, a barrier-removal plan, scheduled short-term wins, and an explicit path from early gains to cultural anchoring, plus a diagnosis of which failure mode most threatens this particular effort.
- Progress at any step is capped by the weakest step before it. A communication problem at step four is usually a vision problem from step three wearing a disguise.
- Treat the model as a diagnostic as much as a plan. When a live change effort stalls, walk backwards through the steps until you find the one that was skipped or faked.
- If the organisation faces continuous rather than episodic change, read the steps through the 2014 Accelerate lens: concurrent accelerators run by a volunteer network alongside the hierarchy, not a one-way sequence.
Step 4 of 4: ADKAR Model
Programmes move organisations on paper; ADKAR is where you check the change is landing in actual human beings. Five outcomes in sequence for each person: awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, reinforcement. Find each group's weakest element and treat that barrier first, because effort spent further down the line is wasted until it clears. Sending a third all-staff email to people whose problem is desire achieves nothing except a quieter inbox for you and a fuller one for them.
Watch forExpect different groups to stall at different points, front-line desire problems alongside management reinforcement problems, and do not prescribe one group's cure for everyone.
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What comes out, and how to read it
An ADKAR profile per affected group or person, five scores and an identified barrier point, plus a targeted action plan matching interventions to stalled elements, revisited as the change progresses.
- Read left to right and stop at the first weak element; that is the barrier point, and effort spent on later elements is wasted until it clears.
- Different groups stall differently: expect front-line Desire problems and management Reinforcement problems in the same programme.
- Low scores late in the sequence after go-live, particularly Reinforcement, predict quiet reversion even where the launch looked successful.
The review date
Set the date you will come back and ask whether it worked. Put it in your diary; this site will not remind you.
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