Some agencies take advantage of changes that come their way, while others struggle to adapt. Building a culture for change allows agencies to not only readily adapt to unforeseen changes but also to practice introducing change as a mechanism for solving problems to improve service delivery to the public.
Public agencies have seen a variety of significant unforeseen changes in the past decade. Agencies that survived and thrived have a management and team approach to work that accommodates and capitalizes on change. How can agencies transform their approach to change as a source of strength rather than an impediment?
Change Model
It is helpful at first to understand the impacts that change can have on teams.
Common change models derive from Kübler Ross’ Change Curve Model. This model looks at emotional reactions to change in stages to help managers prepare for and mitigate the negative consequences of change.
Change curve models, applied to organizations, seek to group reactions to change and their effect on confidence, morale, teamwork, effectiveness, and quality of work. In one common and useful model, reactions to change are grouped into 4 buckets - shock, anger, acceptance, and commitment. As a person encounters change, they may be shocked and angered, which reduces productivity and quality. As the change becomes more common practice, people begin to accept the change and finally commit to it, increasing productivity and quality of output again.
If the acceptance and commitment to change fail to increase productivity, quality of output, and a positive organizational culture back to before the change began, the change has been a net negative.
The readiness of an agency for change is the ability to regularly start and respond to a change in such a way as to engender advantage, minimize risk, and sustain effectiveness.
Crawling out of Entrenchment
Many public agencies are stuck in workflow entrenchment, where teams are so accustomed to the present routine that they lose the ability to innovate.
A mind shift around change needs to start from the top. Management that models reaction to change in constructive, transparent, and positive ways will build a broader culture of the same across the agency. Teams that have access to a pathway of experimentation and failure as a positive exercise rewarded by management are much more likely to have reduced fear of the unexpected and a more constructive approach to innovation.
Building toward continuous change requires the whole team’s participation. While management must model the change and should start as change agents, they cannot expect to change the agency culture alone.
Change as an Asset
One model of a change-focused organization is one that reframes challenges, reinterprets options, and reforms workflows.
An example of reframing, reinterpreting, and reforming is defining the value of work. Technology work has often been defined in terms of “hard” and “soft” skills, which incorrectly communicates that some work is inherently more valuable than other work. We have learned that IT skills traditionally considered “hard”, such as network administration and programming, are no more valuable than the “soft” skills of IT training and project management. Changing the culture to value the skills that look at challenges from several frames of view allows for a much quicker adjustment and solution definition. We often experience this on an individual level - walking away from a seemingly intractable problem for a while resets the frame, often allowing a solution to emerge.
Qualities of a Strong Change Culture
Agencies with a strong change culture have several characteristics.
- Agencies should quickly recognize a change. Good change recognition includes reviewing the current context for opportunities, evaluating promising emerging tools and practices, and proactively planning for future improvements.
- Agencies should be nimble in engaging change. Nimble agencies are capable to reach beyond their entrenched modes of operation and rapidly move resources where they will be most effective.
- Agencies should manage the reaction to change. Management should focus on their team to provide critical support to sustain everyday workflows while recognizing and engaging in change. Managing expectations, using strong listening practices, transparency, and clear communication is key.
- Agencies should build strong change workflows for manifesting and rewarding practices that adopt change within teams. This smooths out the change curve to reduce the negative consequences of change within teams, and better realize the positive impacts the change can manifest.
Conclusion: This is a Team Effort
Teams will accept change faster and be open to innovation if they have been listened to, understood, have had their needs addressed, and are rewarded for innovative practices in some way.
Changes, especially in technology projects, often come in stages. Launching the change is not the only victory - there should be many other milestones along the way that provide opportunities to identify how far the change has come. We typically see technology projects with conceptual stages, research, definition, architecture, design, development, revisions, and rollout. Identify in the project plan specific places where the team has input and how that input will be processed.
Make sure to schedule updates that also celebrate team input - places where the contributions of the team are seen as having positively impacted the project. These celebrations do not need to be extravagant - it is much more important that they are meaningful and truly reflect the effective input of those facing the change.
Management, working integrated with teams, should build a positive culture of trial and error where the impact of failure is successful learning, not a punishment.