Author and consultant Tim Clark saw change go awry too many times. "What compelled me to write the book is that I was witnessing so many instances of large initiatives failing, and when we would do the post-mortem on the initiative, it was clear that the initiative did not fail on strategy [or operations]. So we would come back to the conclusion that the organization and its leaders were failing to engage people and have them stay with it." His new book, EPIC Change, which looks at the leadership issues around change initiatives, is now in stores. He recently spoke to Consulting about the EPIC (evaluate, prepare, implement and consolidate) model the book explores. Consulting: How did you conceive the EPIC model?
Clark: I was studying these 53 cases of large-scale change. What I tried to do is pull out patterns from the successful cases, and what I realized is that the successful patterns showed leaders who were able to create and then replenish energy in their organizations to keep their organizations going through the change process. And what I noticed through this process, they went through these stages of evaluating—[stage one is evaluating]—your internal performance and your external environment. [When you] say, "OK, we've got a change imperative; we've got to do something," that shifts you into stage two, which is to prepare. So now your activity rate goes up. You're budgeting; you're planning; you're testing ideas; you're piloting things.
During evaluation, the incremental energy requirement for the organization was very small. But when you got to prepare (stage two), then you would actually feel that things were different. Stage two represented your break with system equilibrium. Then I noticed that when an organization began implementing in earnest what it was trying to do, the energy requirements went way up. And that was the time that you were pushing your organization at the highest level of exertion. I noticed was this empirical pattern in the way that organizations consume energy as they move through a change initiative.
It became very evident that if a leader could understand this journey ahead of time and understand that he or she is responsible to create and replenish energy through the process, you would really have an advantage. So many leaders, they'll embark on a large-scale change initiative, and they really do not have a well-developed theory about what they're going to do, how the organization's going to respond and what's going to be required over time, so that's where the EPIC methodology came from—evaluate, prepare, implement and then consolidate.
Consulting: Why do you think people are so adverse to change?
Clark: Why are they? Because change makes demands of them. Two in particular. One of the conceptual distinctions that we make is between performance change and compliance-based change. Compliance-based change usually refers to changes in things like policy where when the change happens, the employee doesn't really have to meet a higher standard of performance, but just has to comply with something, whereas a performance-based change requires that a person does things differently so that will require a difference in skill set and in performance in order to work at a higher level or standard. So the two fundamental requirements of change are almost always additional work, so there there's a work requirement and an additional stress-load requirement. Always.
So organizations are configured to stabilize, reach equilibrium and then brace against anything that challenges that. And so that dynamic carries down to the individual where unless you're conditioned with agility, your natural instinct is going to be resistance.
So from a consulting perspective when you go into a new organization, if you represent doing things differently, you become predatory, you become threatening to the organization, and unless you can figure out a way to enlist the people who you're working with and engage their discretionary effort, you're going to have a very difficult time.
Consulting: As principal of your own consultancy, where does change management rank in priority for companies?
Clark: I think that is as big as anything else. What we find are incremental changes within the strategy cycle to stay competitive, but then the strategy cycles are shorter, and so organizations are called upon to go through major change more often. So then if you break that down further, what we're seeing is that a very small percentage of those change initiatives fail on strategy—about 10 percent. And then we're seeing about 20 percent that are failing on operations. And then a whole 70 percent are failing on people. So the single biggest problem that we're seeing is people failure, where leaders inside organizations and consultants from the outside are unable to engage and mobilize the people and get them to put forward their discretionary effort to make it happen.
Consulting: Why do you think that is?
Clark: I think it's because of the environment that we're living in. It's just so turbulent and so unforgiving now. And it's accelerated; it's hyper-competitive.
Consulting: Is the problem usually a communication disconnect or a failure from leadership to communicate at all?
Clark: Well I think it's a combination. When you begin a large-scale change initiative—if you look for example at the data from Towers Perrin on the Global Engagement Survey—we find that only 21 percent of the typical average employee base is engaged at any given time. So what you're dealing with then is that when you begin a large-scale change initiative, you only have one out of five who are on board at that moment.
Consulting: What leadership skill is most lacking among CEOs today?
Clark: Well, I bring this up in my book. If there is any stylistic demand of any leader in the global age, it is approachability. And the reason that I say that is because when you are in a leadership role, you are already getting highly filtered information by virtue of your position. So if you have a disposition, a demeanor and a style that not only allows but invites people to provide input and feedback and actually challenge you, you're going to have a better data set for making decisions and you're going to be able to exercise better judgment when you make those decisions. So I would cite that fundamental approachability as an absolutely vital characteristic these days.
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