Essay
Lilyb660
Week7.pptxSession 6
Change management
Learning outcomes
Understand change management
Critically appreciate of resistance to change
Critically understand how to foster a sustainable transformation culture.
6.1The need for change
It is vitally important that organizations continually seek to improve and innovate. This means that they must continually undergo change. However, they should also strive to establish constancy and stability. Organizations are thus tasked with striking a delicate balance between being change-oriented and constant.
Organizations must plan for the present and the future while also taking account of their past. The point, in this regard, is not to engage in change for its own sake. Rather it is essential for managers to innovate with a purpose – to understand where their strengths and weaknesses are and where they have room to grow and positively develop.
6.1The need for change Box 1: To radically redesign healthcare, start with one unit
The road map starts with creating an environment for frontline workers to imagine innovative new ways of delivering care. It involves several steps:
1- Begin with one unit. Make it the ‘model cell’ for the entire organization.
2- Create a core team. At ThedaCare, we allowed two nurses, a physician, and a pharmacist six months to pull their colleagues together to rethink inpatient-care processes. (All of the nurses’ and half of the doctor’s and pharmacist’s time was devoted to the effort.)
3- Define the goal. Any model cell should address a business problem. Senior management should establish criteria for choosing the model cell.
4- Have the unit do the work. ThedaCare’s Medical Center chose to redesign a 12-bed inpatient medical surgical unit. The doctor, nurse, and pharmacist team organized over 30 unique redesign events
5- Scale the initiative. ThedaCare began to spread the model cell’s approach to similar hospital departments 11 months after the ThedaCare had used it. By that time, the center had seen 1,500 patients without experiencing any medication reconciliation efforts and 95% of those patients had given their care a top rating of five (on a scale of 1 to 5).
Empowering your own frontline caregivers to build new standards of care, giving each site the power to adapt them, and then encouraging everyone to continuously improve them is the best way to achieve better outcomes.
6.2 What is change management?
A key question for any organization is how to effectively organize and implement change. Innovation requires strong institutional support. There must be an ongoing organizational commitment to encouraging these improvements and putting them in place.
Consequently, for change to be successfully realized it must be effectively managed.
This need to supervise innovation in practice has led to broader theories of change management. This can be defined as “any perspective or method for the transitioning and redirection of any part of an organization in a way that significantly alters it”. This could include any and all business functions whether it be finance, operations management, marketing or human resource.
6.2 What is change management?
One of the earliest and still most influential theories of change management is Everett Rogers’ ‘Diffusion of Innovation’ (1962). As the title suggests, he focused on how change must be ‘diffused’ over time and in relation to existing communication channels.
for an innovation to be successful it must be adopted by enough people for it to be self-sustaining and lead to further growth. For this purpose, there are five categories of people associated with innovation:
innovators
early adopters
early majority
late majority
laggards.
Over time if an innovation reaches a ‘critical mass’ – reaching a large enough majority of users – it will have effectively realized change within the culture.
6.3 Constructively engaging with resistance to change
Innovation is often met with hesitancy or even resistance.
A crucial question, then, is why do people resist change? Traditional change management theories have been increasingly criticized for their top–down ideas of introducing and implementing innovation. Specifically, for not taking into account the so-called ‘human dimension’, or the reasons why people may not be immediately comfortable embracing change. This can include a fear of uncertainty, a comfortability with existing methods and ideas, as well as a distrust of the intentions of management.
6.3 Constructively engaging with resistance to change
In order to deal effectively with this resistance, managers must adopt a more bottom-up and consultative approach to change.
Linda and Dean Anderson proffered the need to create change leaders who are focused on the human side of innovation. To do so requires properly communicating this change to organizational members.
Kotter (1996) has famously introduced an eight-step process for achieving successful change management:
1- establish a sense of urgency
2- create the guiding coalition
3- develop a vision and strategy
4- communicate the change vision
5- empower employees for broad-based action
6- generate short-term wins
7- consolidate gains and produce more change
8- anchor new approaches in the culture.
6.3 Constructively engaging with resistance to change
These strategies, however, are based on an assumption that such change is, in fact, good. While the significance of change should not be underestimated, not all innovations are equally valuable.
There is a critical aspect to innovation that is often missed by change management theories. Some innovations advantage certain stakeholders over others. For instance, globalization and the need to be competitive is often presented as necessary and inevitable, but often primarily benefits shareholders at the expense of workers and the wider society.
6.4 Creating sustainable transformation
Innovation is not a singular event. Rather it is an ongoing process that must be implemented over time and accepted within the wider social context. It is also imperative to foster a culture that encourages continuous innovation, where change is welcomed rather than feared and is constantly occurring among and driven by all members of the organization
However, a commonly ignored issue with change management is that it focuses on innovation as opposed to transformation. Put differently, it is primarily interested in how to solve a given operational problem or introduce a new product – less explored is how to help generate or create a different and better social system.
6.4 Creating sustainable transformation
This is especially important given that technological and operational improvements are usually value neutral. More precisely, they are not positive or negative in and of themselves. Instead, their overall desirability over time is based on how they are used and for whose principal benefit.
To this end, novel forms of automation such as 3D printing may be introduced in a way that reduces the need for human labor and allows for a more ‘leisure’ society. Or it could be exploited in a manner that further enriches current economic elites while leaving the rest of the population unemployed without a social safety net.
