What is Change Management?

After taking a deep breath I said something along the lines of “for me change management is essentially about taking intentional actions aimed at engaging people’s minds and hearts with a business change so that people are motivated to make the change happen”.

But then I realised that change management involved more than this so I started to unpack my sentence. So, drawing on the work of William Bridges I then went on to say that in particular this is about:

·         helping people to understand the Purpose of the change;

·         giving them a Picture of what the new world looks like;

·         developing a Plan that will deliver that future

·         showing people the Part they will each Play in that future.

My client liked this.

Yet I felt there was more to say as change management isn’t like a managerial version of ‘painting by numbers’. There are many tried and tested tools and techniques that can be used to support the different phases change programmes typically go through (the science). But there is more – dealing the emergent stuff we don’t know will happen, integrating change across all the parts of the organisational system, helping individuals work through change and transition issues (the art of change) ... So I said a bit more and talked about my approach to change:  that change management:

·         takes a whole organisational perspective (seeing the organisation as a system) – with change management expertise addressing areas such as change leadership, stakeholder engagement and communications, training, structural change, people transitions and organisational culture.

·         works through change as a process so that emergent issues are dealt with, resistance and conflict are addressed, people are engaged and involved and that ownership and commitment are built along the way

·         helps individuals work out what the change means for them personally.

This was clearly now rather more than a sentence, but my client told me it had really helped them to shape their thinking as they were encountering a wide range a views within their organisation.

Afterwards, I thought more about the challenge I was initially set. So I set myself my own challenge: to describe change management in no more than the length of a Twitter tweet (140 characters).

This is my effort. Change management means:

What do you think?