By Liz DeVito
Business leaders have an arsenal of management tools at their disposal ready to deploy for almost any business need, from boosting revenues to increasing efficiencies and managing risk.
In this era of economic turbulence and technological disruption, however, change management has become the tool most likely to be deployed for leading a business and its workforce through the chaos to a desired future state. But change management is more than a tool. It's a framework, a methodology, a process, and for some, an overarching philosophy that takes the fear out of responding to chaos.
The science of change management has come a long way from the 1940s when physicist and social scientist Kurt Lewin introduced his model, Unfreeze–Change–Refreeze, based on changing the shape of a block of ice.
It's an interesting and somewhat useful analogy for understanding the overall framework of change management, but it's just a start. Advances in organizational development and behavioral psychology have evolved change management to a model with multiple dimensions addressing the tangible and intangible aspects of change. And now, data and analytics are transforming it into a more exacting, precise science.
Yet, change management remains one of the most challenging programs to execute in an organization. There is a body of research that points to failure rates ranging from 40 percent to 95 percent, depending on samples and methodology. How, in this day and age of constant measuring and monitoring the ROI of everything, can this possibly be?
There are as many answers to this question as there are cases, but an emerging theory worth considering is a leader's ability to anticipate change. Take a look at the challenges facing Hewlett-Packard's Meg Whitman and it becomes all too clear.
When Whitman was named to the head office of Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2011, she followed a series of CEOs who had applied industrial-era turnaround strategies to reviving HP. While her predecessors were focused on cost cutting and manufacturing, the worlds of design, distribution, and information were being transformed by Apple, Amazon, and Google.
As a result, Whitman inherited a company experiencing headwinds in virtually every product category, a workforce demoralized by a revolving door of leadership and layoffs, and a balance sheet that no longer has the flexibility for transformative acquisitions.
You could say that HP suffered from a lack of visionary leadership, but this implies you need to be a Steve Jobs or a Jeff Bezos to succeed, which would be missing the point. What HP's example illustrates is that leaders must be open-minded about market signals and face the inevitable when their business model is not adapting to a new world order. As the best consultants and leaders know, this is the first step in learning how to anticipate change.
In her recently announced strategy to turn HP around, Whitman braved the critics with a long-term plan that aims to recapture the culture of innovation that was once the hallmark of HP.
While there is no underestimating the enormity of the change challenge, it's pretty clear that Whitman is ready for whatever comes her way.
Liz DeVito is Associate Director, HR Consulting for Kennedy Consulting & Research Advisory.
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