Implementing Big Change Successfully and Sustainably

Introducing and implementing changes successfully and sustainable on organisational level can be quite a challenge. Especially when changes are commanded and forced, the organisation might push back and the change is not sustainable.

Changes are happening all the time in organisations, it’s a constant. There are huge changes that transform the organisation entirely, and there are small changes that affect parts of organisations. It is crucial to understand that change doesn’t happen person by person but through a web of interconnections between people.

„Emergence is the process by which all large-scale change happens on this planet.“

Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze

Considering the quote and the relationships between people, it might be smart to go slow to go fast when it comes to implementing larger changes. Often this is not done with the excuse that there are no resources or no time. At the same time organizations afford a lot of re-work caused by poor change implementation. Let’s look at the following ground conditions for sustainable change and maybe you re-think your next change implementations instead of risking the push back and re-work.

The g following round conditions for sustainable change go back to the work of Margaret Wheatley and the book “System Inspired Leadership” by Frank Uit de Weerd and Marita Fridjhon.

New information must enter the organisation

What is the change? Who is affected or involved? When will the change be implemented.

A sense of shared purpose

The needs to be some sort of purpose or awareness about how the change will be relevant to you or others in the organisation.

Everyone is invited to give input

Everyone can contribute or provide input on how the change will occur. This will vitalize co-creation process and tap collective potential. This is where you can draw creative ideas from, and everyone feels heard and involved. In this process you must ensure to gather input from all people who like to provide such. A challenge might be that a CEO or managers are also people to be people who have a strong opinion or at least would like to be considered. It is important though to defer judgement when listening to people, stay open to influence. Trust the many brains and experience you have in your organization and something good will emerge.

Everyone understands how input will be used in decision making

This is not a commitment to implement all inputs, it’s rather important to bring information from all parts of the organisation to the surface. With that you can make more sustainable and creative decisions.

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These ground conditions are what they pretend to be: ground conditions. Be reminded and stay aware that change is linked to emotions and the change journey is and emotional process.

There are several change models that dive deeper into that but are not subject of this post. Just consider that leaders are usually ahead in the change journey and so in the emotional process. They’ve got and processed information earlier than the other people of the organisation.

The skill of being able to empathise is very useful in that situation. For a sustainable change implementation you must acknowledge that other people are in different emotional states and in different areas of the change journey. Meet people where they are in the change process and working with emotions is an effective way for successful change implementation.

Get in touch in case struggle with change or see a change on the horizon.