Cranfield School of Management
Interview: Professor Mike Bourne
Change Management in a Week
SM
Mike, I would like to start off by asking you, with all the books and
there are thousands on change management, what in particular
does Change Management in a Week offer?
MB
Well, it is very daunting seeing all those books and trying to write a
book on change management, especially in week. I suppose two
things that we particularly picked out in this book which are different
– one is a lot of the books either focus on the hard side of change
project management and things like that, and the other thing is that
a lot of books then focus on the other side, which is the soft side –
the people issues. And in most change projects it is a mixture of
the two that you have got together and getting those together is not
easy, and what we tried to do in Change Management in a Week is
to focus on both sides of those change practices. The second
thing which I think is important in there, is that we have got a
specific change assessment tool which allows you to talk to
managers about the change and actually allows you to predict to a
certain level whether the change is going to be successful or not.
SM
The book has been out a few years now, what has been the
reaction from managers who have read the book?
MB
I think that most of the managers I have spoken to find it a valuable
check-list of things that they should be doing and things that they
should be looking at when managing a change project. But coming
back to that self assessment tool, people find it very valuable.
What the self assessment tool does is ask people to prioritise
projects that they have got on and you can ask a whole series of
managers to prioritise their projects and what that enables them to
do is to actually start to talk about whether projects are high,
medium or low priority, rather than to say, yes we are going to
support a change, or no they are not. And by using that tool you
can then suss out whether people are supporting the change, or
against it, you can also suss out how important they feel the change
is to them in their part of the organisation or not, and you can also
find out what the chances are of the change of having success
because you can see this project up against all the other competing
projects – change projects – which organisations have.
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Cranfield School of Management
Professor Mike Bourne
Now, most people when they talk about change, talk about single
changes – my experience or organisations is that they are never in
that situation. They have got multiple change projects going on.
They may have one big one, but often they have got hundreds and
most change projects fail, in my opinion, because companies are
just trying to do too many things and they just get overtaken by
events.
SM
You have chosen a hypothetical week to progressively build up a
change strategy and implement it successfully – are there any
stages which experience tells you managers tend to skimp on?
MB
I think they kind of skimp on them all. I think a lot of organisations
think that change is quite easy to do and its not. It takes a lot of
time, a lot of resource. It usually takes longer than you expect and
you have just got to keep going to do it. One of the problems is
management loses attention. What I find quite often is managers
come in and they make a strategic decision, say yes, we are going
to do this, and then they want to move onto the next strategic
decision. Now the problem in most cases is those strategies then
don’t get implemented and most of the changes don’t happen, don’t
get moving through the organisation. What do managers have to
do to do that?
Well they have really got to build a coalition of people who are
committed to this change over the long run and that can be many
years in fact to actually get some of these things to happen and
managers quite often are not in that situation to commit to that, but
they have actually created a coalition so that when people move on
the project continues as well. And that sense of urgency too, at the
beginning of the change, is often missing. You know, why does this
change need to happen? Especially if your organisation is
performing well, why on earth should you change today and if
people can’t convince people that change should happen, then
quite often they slip back into just doing what they know well, rather
than preparing for the next things.
The other end of change is, I think, managers declare success or
victory too early, I think this is something that really happens – that
they get the change in and then they celebrate it and what is
happening is that it is not necessarily rooted into the culture or the
systems or the way of doing things around here, and that is a real,
real problem for change because it starts to slip back again and
unravel and getting it rooted in, getting the systems change, getting
the performance measures changed, getting the organisation to
work in the new ways is really important. Just a quick story, and it
may sound depressing to some people, through our Round Tables
we work with a lot of organisations and one of my colleagues who
has been a member of the Round Table for seven or eight years now,
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Professor Mike Bourne
has been working on a single change project and we have joked
about when it is going to go live – it’s a computer implemented
measurement system. He said June and we said which June and
we have all laughed about it, but it has gone on and on. But the
one thing that I really admire about that individual in that
organisation is that they have really stuck at it and they have stuck
through it and they have got benefits during the way, but the benefit
they are going to get from actually sticking to this is just going to
help the whole organisation overall. It has taken many years, but
the organisation has stuck with it and it is starting to have an impact
now.
SM
Is there any particular day or stage that you would like to emphasise
as the most important in the change management process?
MB
I think the assessment day, Thursday, I think is probably is the most
important day. We use conventional tools like talking about force
field analysis, the forces for the change and the forces against the
change and people can think about what pressures are there for the
change in the organisation and what resistance are you going to
get. We also use the tool for actually categorising people and
saying well where will those individuals, those managers, or key
players in the organisation fit in terms of whether the change is
beneficial or not for them, and whether they are going to react
positively or negatively to it. But the bit for me that is really
important is just assessing how many change projects an
organisation has got on because most organisations I go into have
got lots of change projects and those change projects are
competing with each other and so it is not whether change
succeeds and fails, but which of those change projects succeeds
and fails and which doesn’t because the ones that don’t usually
don’t have the priority, don’t have the resources put into them.
SM
If you were to pick out some key points for managers, things that
are really important for managers to take on board, what would they
be?
MB
I think its getting things finished. What happens in a lot of
organisations is projects start and then they tend to fizzle out rather
than actually finish or then be transformed into something else and
some of the most interesting work I have seen was coming out of an
organisation called Thomas Group who broke projects down into
manageable chunks so that people could actually work through
them – start, beginning and finish – at the end of it you had got
something that was finished, something that had changed and
some tangible benefit from it. And if you have got a big project,
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Professor Mike Bourne
breaking it down in that way is important – partly because some of
these projects will change things over time so you have got to
adjust it as you are going along, but partly too so that things move
forward. But the other bit really is how we build on projects. The
last thing an organisation should really do is let a project fizzle out
because it really says that management have tried this and it hasn’t
worked and they have just buried it under the carpet and swept it
away and we have forgotten about it. What is probably better is to
say OK we have got this far, no let's take what we have learnt and
build something on it. The classic example I have had is an
organisation that did strategy and when I came along to do the
performance measurement they didn’t say look the strategy has
gone, finished. They said no, what we are going to do is put
measures behind that strategy and build on it. When we did the
measurement they came back and said hang on a minute that is
very interesting, but we have got our appraisal system now, and we
build our appraisals and so each time they built on what went
before. And organisations I find, they keep wanting to sweep away
what they have done before and if we do that we forget it and we
don’t learn from it, but if we can build on it, then we engage the
people – they know that it is going to be there for the future and we
keep building our capability to do new things.
SM
Now from your research and your consultancy have you noticed
trends which are affecting change management today and in the
future?
MB
I think the world is getting a faster moving place and I think we have
all said that – and so change becomes more and more important.
The concern I have got is a lot of organisations kind of focus
currently on efficiency and effectiveness of today, and are not
thinking about change and moving into the future. One of things
you need to have for change is you need to have free resource to
allow the change to happen. And what I find with many
organisations is they are focussing on today, they are optimising
today, there is a measurement and a management focus on
delivering efficiency and effectiveness today, but if you do that, who
is thinking about the future? Who is actually re-crafting the
organisation to create a new future? Where are the resources that
we need to move about to enable us to do that and in particular, if
nobody is looking to the future, we suddenly get a shock and when
you get a shock you suddenly get into change which has got to be
very quick and very reactive and that is very difficult to do and very
expensive for the organisation. So, change is moving on, the world
is getting more difficult, but we need to plan change all the way
through the organisation, all the time.
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Professor Mike Bourne
SM
So if you were to bring out a follow up edition, it's been out a number
of years now – your first edition – what would you include now?
MB
I think I would include more on the anticipation of change and more
on the allocation of resources and giving people free resources.
Organisations that change just need that free resource to enable
them to break through because if everybody is focussing on today,
where does tomorrow come from? And so, how do we spot the
new trends, because if we can spot them early then the
organisation has the time to adapt rather than just reacting – and
then how do we create an efficient organisation now, but some
measures that would enable us to actually think about the future
and enable us to measure our development towards that future?
SM
Mike Bourne, thank you.
Transcript prepared by Learning Services for the Knowledge Interchange
www.cranfield.ac.uk/som
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Cranfield School of Management
Produced by the Learning Services Team
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© Cranfield University 2007