I’ve been talking with some colleagues about the “discipline of change management” – it concerns me the way that we’ve reduced change to a formula comprised of sponsorship, communication, reinforcement, and so forth. It probably feels good to people with a strong management bent, who want things that are controllable, predictable, and measurable. I do believe change management as a discipline has had a positive impact on the implementation of new technology and new processes, and helping business to adapt to changing environments, even though it can feel a little trite.

But it concerns me that we now easily box in change as an event, rather than an ongoing dimension of business reality. Even more concerning is the promise of predicable results that can be managed to a schedule, based on driving individual behavior changes. Changing how an individual does something is hard enough, changing an organization or a culture and moving deeply held collective beliefs, values, histories, and fabrics takes the idea of change management to a whole new level.

Perhaps it is time to change our approach to change – not because we’ve been doing anything wrong, but because we got a lot of things right at the individual behavior level, and now we need to keep pushing forward. How do we start to be businesses that can continually absorb and adapt to change – technology, process, structure, or other?  How do we make the ability to change an ongoing competency rather than a one time bang?