A recent survey by McKingsey & Company of over 5000 projects highlighted the high failure rate of change projects, with over half providing less value than expected and almost 1 in 5 failing so badly that the companies very survival was at risk! With such poor track records on delivering successful outcomes, its’ not wonder executives and change sponsors approach change with fear and trepidation. Yet they are ways to ensure your change project doesn’t end up as yet another change failure statistic.
The truth is every change project fails to some degree at a “micro” level. That doesn’t mean the project as a whole is a failure as it could be delivered on time, under budget and with better than expected outcomes. But it may fail during its implementation. Failure can come in many forms such as poor communication leading to higher than necessary resistance, poor planning leading to unintended consequences that required extra resource and time to rectify or failure to build awareness and desire in those impacted by the change resulting in poor utilization of provided training. And that’s just to name a couple of the many ways change can fail at the micro level.
The one key to avoid change failure leading to change failure Click To Tweet
The key to ensuring these micro failures don’t add up to the entire project failing is a simple one. And that is to learn from your past mistakes and failures and determine to do things differently next time. It sounds simple, when something goes wrong, you investigate, determine what caused it to go wrong and then rectify it so it wont happen again. Yet all too often when change projects are completed people move on to the next fire or flavor of the month and never review the project. As a result key lessons on what made the project successful as well as would could have been done differently are never identified, and then the same thing happens on the next project and the next. And the poor people being impacted by change are experiencing a ground hog day of change whereby they experience the same dysfunctional change implementation over and over again. No wonder they experience change fatigue and resist when they hear there’s yet another change project that its being rolled out.
Truth is failure doesn’t mean failure, unless we fail to learn from it. Failure is really a learning experience in identifying what doesn’t work or could be done differently next time. The critical step though is ensuring that the past failures aren’t repeated by acting differently next time. Change leaders shouldn’t be afraid of constructive negative feedback, in fact its their friend. One bit of feedback on where failures occurred in the change rollout from those impacted by the change could result in the next change initiative being rolled out with far greater engagement and buy-in if acted upon.
Q: Do you ensure that a lessons learnt is always completed and then acted on after a change initiative is completed or key milestone is achieved? If not, why not? Leave your comments below. Subscribe for regular updates and insights.
Leave a Reply