Speaker 1: Organizational change management is the key to transformation success in 2021, but the world has changed significantly in the last year. Change management looks a bit differently than it has in the past as well. And in today's video, I want to talk about how to ensure that your change management strategies are keeping up with the current times and are helping enable an effective transformation in 2021. My name is Eric Kimberling. I'm the CEO of Third Stage Consulting, and we're an independent consulting firm that helps clients through their digital and business transformation journeys. And as I mentioned, change management has always been the key to transformation success, but never has it been more true than in 2021. And if you think back over the last year and all the things that have changed with the pandemic, current events, a lot of different things have happened over the last several months and year that has put a lot of strain on organizations and people in general. And so organizational change management has to keep up with the times and needs to evolve to help us manage change better than we have in the past. And it was always a challenge to begin with, and it's even more true today that change management is challenging. So what I want to talk about today are five things that are most important for you to ensure that you have an effective change strategy headed into 2021 and beyond. So just to set the backdrop for what organizations and their people are going through right now, is they're going through a lot of change, and there's a certain amount of change fatigue that people are suffering from right now within organizations. As I mentioned, they're dealing with not only pandemic and health concerns, they're dealing with economic issues in many cases. They're dealing with a lot of uncertainty at the organizational level and at the personal level. And there's just been a lot of change imposed on people that they may or may not be happy with or comfortable with. So whether you like it or not, your people have already gone through a great, huge amount of change. And if you throw a business or digital transformation on top of that, now all of a sudden you're talking about potentially reaching a breaking point where people just simply aren't able to keep up with magnitude of change in the world. So this is a concept that's commonly known as change fatigue. And when we've talked about change fatigue in the past, or when we've talked about change fatigue with clients in the past, typically it's been in the context of when we're trying to change our business or improve our business, if we do it too quickly or we impose too much change at once, that can create change fatigue. And that still is a risk with organizations going through transformations. But today we have to worry about the change fatigue that may already exist before we've even started our digital or business transformation. And for many of the reasons I mentioned, those changes have been imposed on people leading up until now. So when we create our change strategies, we really have to do a good job of getting a pulse on where people's heads are and their level of comfort with change in general and their overall stress level and morale level. That's very important to really understand as a baseline where people's heads are and how open to change they may be or how resistant to change they may be because they've potentially simply had enough. So understanding this whole concept of change fatigue and really looking at change readiness and assessing the readiness of your organization to handle even more change is something that's very important and a sort of prerequisite to defining an effective change strategy in today's day and age. Just as people have been affected, not necessarily by choice, by a bunch of external factors, organizations themselves have also been affected by external factors. Many of you may work in organizations that were affected by the pandemic and the resulting economic impact. It could have been an increase in demand for your product or service that your organization provides. For some organizations, they were negatively impacted by the world events. But whatever the impact, we have to understand that there's been some external impact to our organizations and to our culture as an organization. So we really have to look at and understand what our culture is today, how our culture has been affected by external events, and what it is we really want our culture to be in the future. And change management is a great opportunity for us to more deliberately focus on how we want to improve our culture and how we want to continue to improve that culture to better align with our overall goals and objectives as an organization. So one of the first steps to effective change management, especially in today's day and age, is to look at what our culture is today, what kind of culture we need to enable whatever goals and objectives and external factors we think we're going to be facing to ensure that we are getting ahead of the curve and bending the culture the way we want to. So doing a cultural assessment and having a cultural change strategy is a very important part of any sort of effective change strategy in today's day and age. Now at the same time that people are changing or feeling change, at the same time cultures are being impacted or feeling change from external factors, you also have your own operations and technological change that we have to figure out how to tie it all together. So in other words, we need to figure out as part of our change strategy, how do we align our people, our processes, and our technologies, and organizational change management is typically the glue that holds that all together. So when we look to the future of where we're headed as an organization, and now that we're starting to get used to the way the world is today and the way it's evolving, for better or for worse, we need to understand how we can use change management to ensure that we are furthering the organization, improving the organization from an operational perspective, technological perspective, and ultimately a people perspective as well. And change management, like I said, is really the glue that holds that all together. So think of your change strategy as a way to tie together those three pieces to really align with the future of where you're headed as an organization. Once we have a handle on people processing technology and how we're going to bend our culture, how we're going to address change fatigue, now we need to define what our change strategy is, and we need to define an effective change management strategy that will best align with who we are as an organization and where we're headed as an organization. And what's important here is that change management typically is most effective when you take your overarching strategy, your goals and objectives at a corporate level, and you translate that into specific transformation and change strategies that are aligned with that bigger picture strategy. So in other words, instead of coming in and saying, we're going to define a change strategy and an overall transformation strategy, and doing that in a vacuum, not in the context of your overall strategy, goals and objectives, that's going to create a certain amount of misalignment that can create a lot of problems later on in your transformation. So one of the first things we want to do is defining a clear change strategy that takes your strategy, goals and objectives and translate that into meaningful change strategies and tactics, as well as overarching transformation strategies and tactics that ensure that we have that level of alignment with the overall direction of the organization. Change Strategy Now just as we want our change strategy to be well aligned with our overall corporate strategy, we also want to make sure that our executives and internal stakeholders are all aligned as well. So once we've defined this change strategy and what it is we're going to do to better align our people, process and technologies and affect our culture and bend our culture the way we want to, now we need to look at ways that we ensure that our executives are aligned and our stakeholders are aligned in what that change means to the organization. And this is really a way to continue to unpack and to continue to cascade those change strategies down throughout different parts of the organization. And we want to make sure we're all rowing in the same direction and all the different parts of the organization are going the same direction. And so making sure we're all aligned and that we have the same vision and definition of what this project means or what this transformation means to us in our part of the organization is something that's very important. And the larger and more complex and more diverse your organization is, the more likely it is that you're going to be misaligned as a team. And then when you throw curveballs on top of that, such as macroeconomic or pandemic type of factors that are external to the organization, that creates even more misalignment. So alignment and looking at executive and stakeholder alignment is more important than ever given all the changes that are happening in the world today. So we want to make sure we have a clear alignment strategy for how to get our stakeholders aligned. And I've included a link below to a video on my YouTube channel that covers the concept of alignment in more detail and will hopefully give you some ideas on how to enable better alignment throughout your organization. Now in this video, I've just started to scratch the surface of how to create an effective change management strategy for your transformation. For more information, I have also included a link to our guide to effective organizational change management, which is a very detailed analytical report on some of the best practices and lessons learned we've seen from organizations and their transformations over the years. And it really focuses on the people side of organizational change management. So I encourage you to download that report via the link below. And I hope you find that information useful. I also encourage you to provide comments below. If there's anything you found to be particularly effective or mistakes you may have made with defining your change strategies in today's day and age, I'd love to hear your feedback. So please provide comments below. I hope you found this information useful and hope you have a great day.