Change Management: Craft or Science?

The difference between these paradigms has significant implications for leadership. When leadership thinks of change management as a craft profession, it assumes that all change is driven by individual skills operating in an essentially intuitive ad hoc way - i.e. as though each manager and consultant is a crafts person creating a unique product. This increases the uncertainty and complexity of change initiatives, making them significantly more problematic.

Conversely when leadership views change management as a scientific process, change management, including individual responses to change, become highly systematic and predictable and can be managed much as organizations now manage standard production processes. Confidence and willingness to tackle more significant changes therefore increase because it is under direct management control.

The difference is hoping that an organization will achieve high performance versus knowing exactly when and how desirable performance improvements will be achieved.

Change Management as Craft

Wikipedia defines a craft as a "family of artistic practices that traditionally are defined by their relationship to functional or utilitarian

Why has change management been like a craft industry?

Change management has consisted of a group of essentially "artistic" practices such as assessments, workshops, training, coaching, executive presentations and similar processes that are designed to the drive a variety of changes in the organization. These are artistic because each practice is developed and deployed by essentially independent practitioners such as managers, trainers, and/or consultants who work mostly independently or in small groups in highly idiosyncratic (i.e. artistic) ways.

Consequently, the effectiveness of most change management work is more a result of the artists' individual capabilities than of a predictable process. Sometimes these artists produce extraordinary results. Sometimes the results are dismal. In all cases, the results are unpredictable, which makes for significant management challenges.

How can a management team confidently lead a change when the process of making the change is so uncertain? As a Vice-President of a Biotechnology firm put it: "When I kick off a performance improvement initiative, I have no clue what is ultimately going to happen, and I really don't like that feeling."

The Science of Change Management

Until just recently, there wasn't really any reason to think about a distinction between a craft view of change and a scientific model of change. Change management had for so long consisted of a set of conventional "craft" wisdoms that few questioned the approach, even if the accepted wisdoms were minimally effective.

Now, recent advances in four areas of research and the emergence of a new technology are changing this perspective. By combining work on positive deviance, fair process, neuroscience and mass customization into a single change model, and delivering change guidance through persuasive technology, it is possible to ensure that 98% of personnel in an organization embrace a change initiative.

Here is the model that has evolved from the science:

Set-the-Bar

In order to manage change effectively, the organization has to develop a compelling image of the desired end result of the change. Research on positive deviance tells us that the people who consistently and systematically outperform others (the organization's "positive deviants"):

• Always have these compelling images

• Are easily identified

• Exist in all job categories in all organizations

• Can be interviewed using simple, reliable techniques that gather their "wisdom" quickly and effectively

The science on positive deviant is extremely consistent. By leveraging their positive deviants, all organizations can always, and easily develop the powerful images required to drive change.

Motivate Change

People must be motivated to change. The science of fair process and the neuroscience of positive visualization make motivation highly predictable too. More specifically, by presenting the positive deviant's powerful images of success in a way that generates a sense of respect and dignity in the organization (fair process), people tend to embrace the change. In fact, they feel deeply honored that the organization so completely believes in their ability. In turn, when people visualize themselves as functioning at the same levels of positive deviants, neuroscience research has shown that there is a release of neurotransmitters that drive a consistent increase in willingness and ability to learn something new.

Motivation, that has long been more an art form that a predictable process, is now highly predictable. By creating the right conditions, almost all participants show significantly increased motivation.

Sustain Change

The craft of change management is particularly ineffective at sustaining a performance improvement. Because so much of craft change management is about personal relationships, when the person is no longer present, change efforts consistently falter.

In contrast, the neuroscience principle of "neurons that fire together wire together" and the emergence of persuasive technology provide capabilities that consistently and systematically sustain a change effort. The key to getting neurons to permanently wire together in support of a new business capability is intensive, repetitive practice. The positive deviants tell us the nature and frequency of this practice. Persuasive technology ensures that people actually practice.

Persuasive technology, which is defined as technology that "changes what people and do," is specifically designed to provide people with the prompts and support required to achieve the levels of practice required for complete internalization of a change. Features like weekly prompts, continuous status reporting to management and other standard features in persuasive technology drive participants to practice enough to achieve the positive deviant level of performance.

Thus, sustainability of a change is now grounded in science and technology and is completely predictable.

Scaling Change

The craft of change management problems with sustainability become significantly more acute when hundreds or thousands of people must change to improve performance. How can a crafts person possibly touch these large numbers since change is all due to the individual contact?

Here too recent scientific advances solve the scaling problem. In particular, the integration of the principles of mass customization into persuasive technology provides a scientific methodology for touching many more people, more efficiently than previously thought possible. Mass customization is an organizing system that enables a central organization to mass produce the energy and materials for a change, while treating everyone uniquely, thereby increasing personal motivation.

When embedded in persuasive technology, mass customization guides large numbers of users to consistently and systematically embrace the positive deviant images of extraordinary performance.

Comfort with the Craft

If the science of change management is so advanced, why are so few companies using it? The obvious answer is that the people responsible for change management either don't know about the scientific advances or are themselves practitioners of the craft and are hesitant to acknowledge that their methods are no longer viable. In either case, organizations are put at competitive risk because they are not keeping up with some of the capabilities others are beginning to use.

Every executive we know talks about their changing world, that change is a constant, and how their organization needs to continuously improve performance to succeed. Until now, the processes were, at best, ad hoc undermining leadership's confidence in the ability to change. Now, leadership can quickly, predictably and cost-effectively make these changes happen every time empowering executives to tackle more complex and sweeping change to meet increasingly intense competitive demands.