Adopting Analytics Culture: 2. Is Change Management Effective? (2 of 7)

PART 2 OF 7 IN A SERIES ON ADOPTING ANALYTICS CULTURE

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2.  Is change management effective?

When organizational change initiatives are undertaken, there is a common assumption that, after some struggling, the firm will improve.  With reorganizations there is often an assumption that the resulting structure will be progressive, or otherwise more efficient, ‘aligned’, or generally improved. This progressive bias assumes that when groups set-out purposefully to re-invent, beneficial adaptations and improvements naturally result. However, from the perspective of broader human history, many revolutions and political transitions result in steps backwards to states of greater disorganization, confusion, and waste.  Likewise, change management can easily result in less effective organizations.

Change Management

Change management, although seemingly omnipresent in modern organizational life, has a checkered track record.  A recent Bain & Company study on 57 corporate reorganizations “found that fewer than one-third produced any meaningful improvements in performance.  Most had no effect, and some actually destroyed value” (Blenko et al, 2010).  In the book Cracking the Code of Change, it is asserted that 70% of all change initiatives fail.

To complicate matters, indications are that today’s workers are fatigued by, skeptical of, and, often, ‘reflexively passively-resistant’ towards corporate change initiatives.  In Managing Change, it is observed that “by now, the troops have been through so many of these programs that they’re skeptical.  Companies today are full of ‘change survivors,’ cynical people who’ve learned how to live through change programs without really changing at all”.

Change management, though maturing, is, despite its central role in modern organizational life, still largely an emerging, imperfect discipline.  The practice has the potential for facilitating great improvements within institutions.  However, based on current assessments, there are even odds for value destruction. The discipline, having a disappointing success rate, needs to improve its ability to drive change, especially when faced with challenging change programs such as adopting analytics maturity/culture and structured decision making practices.

Having established the need for change management (see article 1) to orchestrate the adoption of ‘analytics culture’, how can the pitfalls of change management best be avoided? In the next article we will take a deeper, closer look at why many change initiatives fail.  From there, subsequent articles will propose a specific method for using social network analysis (SNA), a type of analytics for understanding social interactions in organizations, to structure and improve change initiatives.

REFERENCES

Beer, M. & Nohria, N. (May 2000). Cracking the code of change. Harvard Business Review. May – June 2000.

Blenko, M. W., Mankins, M. C., & Rogers, P. (June 2010). The decision-driven organization. Harvard Business Review, June 2010, p 54 – 62. Last retrieved May 5^th, 2013 from http://hbr.org/2010/06/the-decision-driven-organization

Duck, J. D. (1993). Managing change: the art of balancing. Harvard Business Review. November – December 1993.

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