Fearlessly Adapting to Change

As I experience more and more change initiatives of one form or another the more I see that most of the time they’re based on some sort of ‘hit and hope’ strategy. By that I mean they’re often driven by nothing much more than a lofty initial vision and then a lot of hope that that vision will somehow, perhaps magically, translate into a successful implementation.

In my experience these initiatives rarely result in the lasting change they set out to deliver. There’s a bit of brief initial energy and then things start to fizzle out. People don’t really fully understand or buy into the intended change, understand their role in the initiative or how they’ll help contribute to success. Such initiatives, it would seem, are setting out to fail.

Surely a better strategy is to set out to succeed, to take a considered and purposeful approach to change and maximise the chances of a lasting positive impact.

There are many tools that we can use to help with this including various change models and frameworks. One of the most well known in the agile space is the ADAPT model, an amended version of the more widely recognised ADKAR change model. The strength of this model, in my view, lies in its simplicity to understand and its effectiveness in practice. It recognises that lasting change requires a collaborative and motivating approach and sets out clear stages to help shape and realise that change:

Awareness that there is room for improvement

Desire to change

Ability – to work in a new way

Promote early successes to build momentum

Transfer the impact throughout the organisation so that it sticks

These stages help to provide focus to a change initiative by telling us what to focus on. They don’t however tell us much about how to achieve the desired outcome for each of the stages (Mike Cohn does offer some suggestions in his Succeeding with Agile book). It was through reading the Fearless Change and More Fearless Change books by Linda Rising and Mary Lynn Manns that I realised the patterns contained within make an ideal companion for the stages within ADAPT.

Rising and Mann describe their patterns as strategies for enabling change to happen, iteratively through small steps. If we view the stages within ADAPT as the what of enabling change then we can perhaps view the Fearless Change patterns as the how. Each pattern is based on real world observations and experiences, practical to use and theoretically grounded. Rising and Manns present 63 of these patterns in total and are clear about the nature in which they should be used:

“It’s not a recipe book for change. It is a book of patterns – nuggets. It’s up to you to decide if one or another nugget would be helpful in communicating your particular idea campaign within your organization”.

That said, with the sheer amount of information it can become difficult to maintain a considered view of what patterns you might use and when you might think about using them. It struck me that the stages in ADAPT might help bring some shape to this.

This is obviously always going to be a subjective view and some patterns will have a clear relevance to more than one ADAPT stage but here’s my initial view of how the Fearless Change patterns might fit with the stages of ADAPT (click image to view a larger version).

I realise that without the details of each pattern the above can seem a bit meaningless. Even though, perhaps such bringing together of strategy and patterns can help to evolve our understanding of change management more broadly.

In their 2012 paper, Back to the Future, Revisiting Kotter’s 2006 Change model, Appelbaum et al note that:

“Theories and approaches to change management currently available to academics and practitioners are often contradictory, mostly lacking empirical evidence and supported by unchallenged hypothesis.

Studying major change management projects is inherently difficult, due to their sheer complexity. Obstacles include difficulties encountered in evaluating the level of implementation of the steps and the challenge of corroborating implementation level with implementation success level.”

Could an approach of viewing potentially disparate change patterns through a strategy lens such as ADAPT help us to better understand the complexities of change initiatives, how to respond to them, the various steps and actions involved and the effectiveness of any patterns applied?

In other words, could bringing a new perspective to viewing and understanding change patterns help us improve our view and understanding of how to approach change and, in turn, of change itself? At the very least, the combination of ADAPT and the Fearless Change patterns might be a useful tool to help us review, consider and apply the various options available to us when setting out on a new change initiative.