Change: will you be a winner or loser in 2023

Change as we head into 2023

It is undoubtedly a cliché that “The only constant in life is change.” 

Cliché or not, it is nonetheless true. But even within that truism, there is an inaccuracy.  Change is constant, but the nature of change is not.  The world has been exposed to accelerating change since long before our time. Most recently, that change has been driven by many unequal factors, such as technological progress and globalisation.  Over the last few years, however, there have been unprecedented changes in addition to the “regular” technological advancement and globalisation at work.  These include political instability, nationalism, BREXIT, Covid, inflation, recession and war.  
The rate of change has accelerated, and it has done so at an accelerating rate!

More importantly and more dangerously, the impacts of these changes are more significant than we have experienced; they are bigger than we have experienced.  That means there will be bigger winners than usual and inevitably there will be bigger losers than usual. For organisations, this could be the most significant opportunity they have ever experienced; for many, it is the biggest existential threat they will face.

Organisations and their fates are complex things. Some organisations will not have the scope required to survive simply because the decisions they have taken in the past mean they no longer have the resources, capability or time to respond successfully to the coming changes.  

Don’t despair!  The reality is that such organisations are scarce.  Most organisations still have the time and ability to embrace the future and have the opportunity to leave that embrace better and more robust than they have ever been before.

For most organisations, the news gets better. Not only is there time to react, but they have the knowledge and skill within their organisation to change successfully.  Many will need more awareness and capability to utilise that knowledge and skill.  The good news in all of this is that it can all be addressed, and every organisation can do so.

To successfully navigate the change journey, every organisation needs to navigate five stages, and each stage is about answering a fundamental question successfully.  The five questions to be answered are:
-    What is the future likely to be like, and what is our position in that future?
-    What do we need to change to get to that future position?
-    What could go wrong during that transition?
-    What additional needs (capabilities) does the organisation need to develop?
-    How are we progressing on that change journey?

Cognition is the tools can tap into the shared knowledge of those who make up the organisation and expose that knowledge to bring clarity to address the questions identified above.  This means, in practice, that the tacit knowledge and experiences are not written down; it is stored in the minds of those in the organisation.  This is very important.  When facing challenges, many organisations will turn to outside experts to “work out” what is wrong today, what the strategy needs to become, and what actions are required.  External experts can be very valuable in the change process; they can introduce new knowledge and techniques.  That said, they have a series of related weaknesses that stem from being outside agents. They have little or no knowledge or understanding of the industry as your organisation understands it. And they have no insight into the true capabilities of your organisation, internal dynamics, or how it operates.  Outside experts are probably best considered like salt and pepper, they are the seasoning that makes the stew taste better, but they are not the beef.
 
The next significant advantage of the cognitive approach is that it can be “complete”.  By saying it is complete, is to say that it can embrace all aspects of the change challenge:  people, technology, external factors, culture and whatever else is pertinent.

The final big difference of a cognitive approach, if executed properly, is that it creates a “safe” environment for the participants because they partake privately and anonymously.  This mitigates the risk of dominant participants of groupthink.  They have a space to think and contribute where they can be free. They can think about the issues without dominant individuals driving or shaping how things are expressed or evaluated.

Between 1999 and 2004 at Cranfield University I developed a repeatable, science-based five-stage management system to answer these questions.  It has been successfully deployed many times since.  And, of course, upgraded.  It is called EXACT, and the five stages are:
1. Envision the future using the Delphi Vision tools set to identify and codify the organisation’s goals
2. eXtract what the organisation needs to do to achieve its goal using the Gap Analysis tool.  
3. Direct and focus management’s Attention and understand the roadblocks on the path to the organisation’s goals using the Management Attention Explorer (MAE) tool to manage those roadblocksks by;
- Dissolving them – Realising they are not real
- Removing them – Find routes to remove them
- Go around them – Find new routes which avoid the roadblocks
4. Cognition: Shaping and supporting the organisation/leadership using the full suite of cognitive tools at our disposal; and
5. Transform the organisation by delivering the necessary change programme using the Integrated Enterprise Investment (IEI) toolkit.  A portfolio approach to project and programme management that allows leaders to evaluate progress across a broad and disparate set of change initiatives.  It enables leaders to understand where their investment of resources is bringing benefit and to understand what components no longer make sense and should be stopped.

Each of these management tools is designed to operate independently of each other or in concert, which allows organisations to deploy them as they need.  Obviously, if you are at the start or forced to restart your change journey, you can attain more significant benefits by working through all the stages.
The first four stages are cognitive tools.  The fifth stage, “Transform”, is a scientific tool to allow management to understand progress simply across a broad portfolio of change and know where to focus as the change is executed.  Organisations with complex change programmes require this approach, whilst those with simpler change agendas can probably rely on more traditional project management techniques.

Change is difficult, expensive, emotional and risky. This EXACT process will significantly tip the balance of success in your favour, reduce time to value and improve performance.  
 

Dr Michael McGrath is an experienced and award-winning leader, author and researcher. He started his career at IBM Research and has worked in financial services for the last 25 years. Today he is the Senior Director for Compliance, Archiving and Digital Risk at Proofpoint, one of the world's leading RegTech and CyberTech firms. He also leads the Seahorse Data Research Programme, an open-source community research project into the nature of data and data interoperability.