Modeling Change Management

Against The OddsAn archestra notebook

©2013 Malcolm Ryder / archestra

Why to Change

An interesting fact of current management is the difficulty of keeping up with the acceleration of changes in demand. Most managers are experiencing that the problem has gone from being a special one during exceptional periods, to being a typical one during normal periods.

Grappling with risks to performance, these decision makers must deal with how to deliver high-quality outputs with high variety at higher frequency. The immediately apparent solutions often pose a threat – bringing interruptions to many of the very things that had formerly been critical success factors, such as: economies of scale, optimization of procedures, clear divisions of resources, and continuous improvement.

However, learning from markets and engineering, analysts and managers recognize some new architectures that help to fit the bill when facing ongoing volatility in the diversity of incoming demand.

How to Change

In these newer architectures, independent but loosely “coupled” services, having standardized interfaces, collaborate on composing and performing the processing needed to meet a request.

Their interactions are not spontaneous; but they are individually responsive to sudden demand without having to alter their own configuration, and their interactions are highly regular.

Groups of such services provide a virtual network for processing, and in that network, different demands get routed in real time through the simplest available path that works with accountable effectiveness. As a result, depending on the speed of throughput, the network has the agility to keep up with volatile demand.

For this to work, the fulfillment of a demand must be decomposed into available procedural segments, which are orchestrated to produce and provide the response. The interactions of services are orchestrated for the production. Service interactions run at a scale allowing incremental outputs, which are then combined by other services to generate additional or more “final” result.

What to Change

Systems engineers build this “network” so that agility can be readily orchestrated. The modularity of functions, and the sizing of requests for processing, are both designed for co-operation without the rigidity of “hard-wired” integration.

The systematic purpose-driven behavior available from that architecture makes its design a compelling example of how to organize for performance under the priority of agility.

As a result, it points out that in the big picture (as at right), changing the system is where most of the difference is made in restructuring for performance against demand.

The market for Change ManagementAn enterprise is a goal-oriented organization functioning as a system. The goal of the organization is the purpose of the system.

Organizations rely on the stability of the system to provide predictability to the use of competencies. But this stability is a behavior. If the behavior of the system diverges from the goal of the organization, the organization can fail.

Increasingly, the organization’s prospects for achieving its goal are affected by external pressures that change in source, intensity and duration.

That environment of operation increases the complexity of leveraging systemic abilities and conditions.

The complexity consists of variability in the availability and control of the abilities and conditions when faced with ongoing changes in demand and in the impact of events.

To manage complexity, managing variability is the essential problem to solve.

Managing responses to variability is the required proof of success. The probability of successful response should be targeted, to set the feasible scope of change.

Organizations rely on analysts to determine whether there is a need to change, and on managers to enact it. What remains elusive is certainty that, in a frequently morphing environment, the change will be sufficient to generate enough value to justify its adoption.

Change Definition

The difference between the organization and the system is the same as the difference between goal and purpose. Goals qualify purposes. Purpose supports goal-seeking.

The organization has the goal. However, a system has two outstanding characteristics that distinguish it by type; a system has a purpose and a behavior.

Structure is an element of both purpose and of behavior. The role of structure is to provide persistent support.

• The support is for the conditions making up sustainable purpose and sustainable behavior.

• Purpose is made up of resolve, priority and awareness. It is reflected in logic and decisions.

• Behavior is made up of technique, intensity, and activity. It is reflected in constraints and methods.

Managed change is a restructuring of the system.

Structure subject to Change

Persistence in the support for purpose and behavior is vital to two main issues: planning and action.

A plan is characterized mainly by how it prescribes constraints and logic.

Action is characterized mainly by how it coordinates decisions and methods.

The tables above show the conditions making up behavior and purpose. Given the factors identified above for planning and action, support has an agenda to provide, maintain, and synchronize them. Persistence means that there are mechanisms in place to continually assure that provision, maintenance and synchronization.

As part of support, the correspondence of the system (behavior) to the organization (purpose) needs to be at minimum discoverable and at best designed. Behavior supports purpose when it aligns with the logic of the purpose.

(PURPOSE) LOGIC DECISIONS

Resolve Advantage Objective

Priority Importance Requirement

Awareness Validity Urgency

(BEHAVIOR) CONSTRAINTS METHODS

Technique Propriety Standards

Intensity Risk Scale

Activity Permission Skill

PLAN DO PLAN DO

©2013 Malcolm Ryder / archestra

Benefit of the Structure

The basis of persistence in the support for purpose and behavior consists of cultureand intelligence.

• Culture is represented by the prevalent values that exert influence on the direction and approval of actions and events.

• Intelligence is represented by the communications that exert influence on the retention and perspectives of information.

Modifications in culture and/or intelligence can be catalysts for changes that may affect the relationship of the system (behavior) to the organization (goal). Management works to make these affects mainly intentional.

The general label for the relationship of the behavior to the goal is “performance” –however, because of that term’s usual emphasis on final outcomes, it is more precise to say that the relationship is the performance potential.

Culture of Behaviors and Purpose

Culture is represented by the prevalent values that exert influence on the direction and approval of actions and events. Here are those influential values:

(BEHAVIOR) CONSTRAINTS METHODS

Provide Policies Rules

Maintain Thresholds Responsibility

Synchronize Processes Qualifications

(PURPOSE) LOGIC DECISIONS

Provide Strategy Mission

Maintain Accounting Authority

Synchronize Models Schedule

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Intelligence of Behaviors and Purpose

Intelligence is represented by the prevalent communications that exert influence on the retention and circulation of information. Here are those influential communications:

(BEHAVIOR) CONSTRAINTS METHODS

Provide Governance Roles

Maintain Audits Services

Synchronize Assignments Training

(PURPOSE) LOGIC DECISIONS

Provide Marketing Targets

Maintain Reporting Measurement

Synchronize Surveys Alerts

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The Challenge of Change Adoption

When change is being considered, it is easy to hold the presumption that new information will provoke action to generate the desired events. The linearity of that ideal causality is attractive.

But typically, what actually happens is that information is generated, distributed and interpreted in many different ways that can cause less predictable, and far less linear, adoption of the argument for change.

Another issue in promoting change is the disparity that may exist regarding the readiness of different identified stakeholders to tolerate the discussion. The timing of proposed changes can cause the proposal to compete against significant progress already being made and defended under circumstances already accepted.

A third issue is uncertainty amongst both decision-makers and their affected parties about how the short-term cost/benefit ratio found locally for themselves drives an overall “global” cost/benefit ratio for the organization, and whether that overall outcome will translate into local parties getting credit.

These kinds of issues reflect that the complexity of change is due to variability of several kinds. Although any given occasion of change may have more or less variability involved, managing change is inherently about managing complexity.

Restructuring: Types of Change to Manage

Managing change is inherently about managing complexity, which stems from variability.

Managed responsiveness to variability must include Agility, Flexibility, and Resilience.

Agility is the ability to productively change attention and action from one problem or opportunity to another, with timeliness and without discontinuity.

Flexibility is the ability to reorganize the commitment of resources and capabilities to address the current priority and stress, without disintegration.

Resilience is the ability to recover a previous condition (such as a position, state or arrangement) when a necessary diversion has been brought under control.

Change Impacts versus PerformanceMost managers have well-honed radar about trade-offsthat may become evident in proposed changes.

The usual trade-offs – involving risks, costs and priorities– can independently become negotiating points as quickly as they had become “features” in the proposed path to the value of the change.

But more importantly, they are ones that can associate different aspects of variability, making the goal of the proposed change somewhat dependent on other management efforts.

Another important and even profound difference in the point of view on these trade-offs is based on how “Performance” is defined and how it is the focal point of change.

Because of environmental pressures, Change Management increasingly focuses on enabling the opportunity for future kinds of performance, not on optimizing the current modes of performance.

©2013 Malcolm Ryder / archestra

What Change Accomplishes

In the volatile business environment today, the most important challenge for change management is to bring order and competency to how agility links organization and performance potential.

• An organization operates as a system. Change Management is a restructuring of the system.

• System is interpreted in terms of purpose and behavior, which normally means having a function of a form.

• Performance potential is interpreted in terms of effectiveness, which normally means causing certain effects within prescribed timeframes.

Agility is:

• the capability to deploy and use …

• the form needed for ….

• the function that will be effective,

• at a high frequency given the pace of change in demand.

This means that the alignment recognized as Agility is a structure that dynamically resolves complexity.

Restructuring: Elements of Change to Manage

Recap:

• By design, agility dynamically resolves complexity, which aligns the organization to its performance potential.

• Variability in values (culture) and communications (intelligence) readily fuels complexity.

• Because of that, preparing for change management means assessing the consistencies present or lacking in those areas, and addressing the matter of providing persistent support for key behaviors and purposes.

• As found by an assessment, variability may be an inhibitor or an enhancer of the goal of the prospective change.

• Management responses to the assessment may introduce trade-offs to stakeholders.

• Local effects and global effects may not be the same, but they must be complementary in the perspective of the goal of the change.

• The timing and scope of change can largely predetermine whether complementary effects can be achieved.