4 Change Management Strategies to Get You Started on the Right Path

By Lucy Rowell, Founder of Impactful Authencitiy

Times of change often feel overwhelming for people. There are so many parts to consider in effectively making change happen and stick, while also maintaining employee engagement and sustained or even increasing business performance. One of the questions we get asked most frequently from people is. We know where we want to go, but we don’t know where to start? 

So if this sounds like you one of the first things we ask is what change path are you taking your team or organisation through? Once this is clear it’s much easier to understand the other moving factors e.g. stakeholder engagement, communication, employee engagement. Without this it’s hard to set the right expectations and context for people to help them come with you on the change journey. 

If you haven’t thought about this yet or are confused about what to do. Here are some helpful insights into four paths we’ve seen used frequently. Each with their own set of risks and opportunities depending on the context. We’ll also share the types of change we’ve seen effectively using each strategy, but the decision is yours, unfortunately there is no set formula. 

1. Quick Wins

For this strategy, the focus is to show success early and then leverage those wins to spread adoption. 

This is great if you’re bringing in a change which you don’t need to have adopted by everyone. As your energy is focused on the early wins and then self adoption afterwards.  For example if you’re bringing in a  new technology you’d look to implement it in areas where you know there is low risk, high chance of success and fast results. Which would then be used to showcase for others the benefits that they could achieve if they used the new technology. This works where change is minor and it’s ok to have different speeds and uptake to adoption. One place we’re seeing this strategy applied at the moment is with openAI tools.     

2. Experiment & Scale

For this strategy, you know the end solution and the focus is learning through experimentation to get the final adoption effective. 

This strategy is frequently used in large scale IT, digital transformations, where you’ve selected the solution you're implementing but you plan to experiment with a small number of teams to work out where things work well and where we need to adjust before wide scale adoption is rolled out. This is a great testing bed for communication, on-boarding etc. This also helps provide clarity to people as they know exactly what’s coming over the phased implementation.  

3. Experiment & Evolve

For this strategy, you know the final outcome, but not necessarily the solution and the focus is learning through experimentation to get to a final solution for adoption. 

This typically works well in situations more around culture, ways of working, new processes where you know the end results you want but it’s not as clear on what are the effective ways to get there. So in this strategy you follow a system which involves more exploration, learning, and adapting fluidly. This works really well when there are big mindset or behavioural changes you’re expecting in how people work as it gives them time to evolve to a final stage versus a sudden jump which can feel overwhelming and confusing. Communication with all the strategies is key, but it’s critical here as there is less clarity about all the points on the journey to get to the end state. So storytelling through-out the process is a must. 

4. All in

For this strategy, we’re high in confidence and we want to move with speed to implement asap. 

This typically represents the highest risk, short-term cost and fastest speed opportunity and if you’re following a path like this you can get a lot of momentum and clarity behind it. As everyone knows they need to be all in on a certain day and that’s it! At the same time it can feel quite unsettling for people not behind the change as they have less time to adapt. A lot of upfront planning is required in this scenario, hence the high short-term costs in making sure everything is ready at scale to go, versus the other approaches which feel more phased to employees. 

CONCLUSION

The beauty with these strategies is that they can also be built on top of each other and you can merge between them, but knowing which path you’re taking at the start will bring much needed focus and clarity not just to those responsible to implementing the change but for all employees part of it, due to clear expectations and people understanding the framework they are working within.