BARRIERS TO ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE
Blog: Colin Crofts - Business Process Improvement
The more things change, the more they stay the same
In 1849, French journalist Jean-Baptise Alphonse Karr wrote what was to become a famous epigram: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Or “The more things change, the more they stay the same”. Though Karr penned this with a satirical edge, his quotation holds true in today’s corporations.
The outcome is almost always the same: The more things change, the more they stay the same – because more than 70% of change initiatives fail.
Barriers to organizational change
The brutal fact is that about 70% of all change initiatives fail. But why? In most of the cases organizational-change failures are driven by … negative employee attitudes and unproductive management behavior. The most general lesson to be learned from the many studies is that organizational culture is the most common barriers.
Change management has become much bigger
The reality is that today’s organizations were simply never designed to change proactively and deeply – they were built for discipline and efficiency, enforced through hierarchy and routinization. As a result, there’s a mismatch between the pace of change in the external environment and the fastest possible pace of change at most organizations.
Change management is no longer a term that denotes only operational improvements, cost efficiencies and process re-engineering. Change management has become a much bigger, more interwoven part of the overall business fabric – an embedded leadership requirement that plays into everything.
Build a change platform
Change is the new normal for leadership success and all leaders must accept this fact. Leaders need to build a change platform – one that allows anyone to initiate change, recruit confederates, suggest solutions and launch experiments.
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