The BL interview. Change is not the enemy: Warren Parry

In his fascinating book Big Change, Best Path , Warren Parry, Managing Director, Accenture Strategy, Talent and Organisation, puts together the findings of 15 years of research on change initiatives. Parry’s firm Change Track Research had pioneered a predictive analytics system to help companies manage change. Accenture acquired this firm in 2013. “We trekked the world studying everything from acquisitions/mergers, restructurings and technology implementations to cost reductions and others involving nearly a million employees in 50 industries and 150 organisations,” says Parry. Excerpts from the interview.

The pace of change is now accelerating beyond belief. Which is the most common reason for need for organisational change today?

The biggest driver of change we are seeing for organisations today is digital transformation and adoption. Digital is disrupting businesses and forcing them to transform, which is something that organisations cannot ignore.

There are companies that do incremental changes slowly. Others do sweeping changes at once. Which is better?

What we found is that it all boils down to, ‘What the company wants to achieve’. A company looking for product innovation and increasing market share needs to make rapid changes.

A company looking to improve and sustain employee engagement needs to focus on building a strong culture. So it is firstly about the context and intent that the pace of change is decided. And secondly, we have found that the highest-performing groups actually thrive on change. They have more change taking place – 30 to 50 per cent initially, and at a faster pace than their lower-performing counterparts. They have a strong capability to drive ongoing change and, as a result, they achieve far greater benefits from their change programs.

You say in your book that change management need not be chaotic or unpredictable. But layoffs are a big part of change management. As more companies pivot business models, employees will surely face the axe. Can analytics prevent people being sacrificed at the altar of change?

Just as world-class athletes now rely on cutting-edge digital technologies and analytics to train, organisations should take advantage of insight-driven approaches using sophisticated analytics to better manage their change programmes and more importantly, to effectively manage their people through the changes they are making.

In the future, these advanced approaches will simply become part and parcel of the way organisations do business. The workforce of the future will need to manage numerous change initiatives simultaneously. For that, businesses need to build their capabilities through the use of rigorous change analytics. Otherwise, they risk making bad decisions based on flawed assumptions and mistaken conventional wisdoms about what really drives successful organisational change.

How does data play a role in this? Can using data from other people’s experiences with change management be good enough? After all, each company has its unique compulsions and strategy?

Over the past 15 years, we have collected data from nearly one million respondents in more than 150 organisations — a quarter of which were Fortune Global 500 companies. As our change research data grew, patterns emerged and the results are fascinating. The core drivers of change DNA are remarkably consistent across different geographies, nationalities and industries.

Even when you look inside large data sets, the pathways are predictable. It is not chaotic and random as people commonly think. With this kind of insight, we found that organisations can detect the early warning signs of change about to go off track.

The use of predictive analytics can support decision making and highlight paths that will help achieve desired business outcomes during change programmes.

The analysis helps us understand where action needs to be taken in an organisation. As a company’s unique strategy is implemented, they can decide whether to take action on points a/b/c or x/y/z and to what extent. Analytics and insight does not take away the importance of company specific interventions, but rather helps guide and focus the sequence and order of their actions to get a much better outcome — both for the company and the people in it.

It is the ‘wisdom’ of a million travellers through different types of change journeys that helps an organisation to navigate successfully through their change process.

Although one size cannot fit all, is there a framework for managing change?

Yes. We built multidimensional change maps by using data collected and compared across teams, organisations and change programs.

These maps represent the patterns we identified through an extensive analysis of the data. We found that groups undergoing change initiatives tend to fall into different clusters — represented by regions on our map, from very low to high performance — with similar characteristics, behaviours and dynamics.

Our maps capture the complexity of change initiatives and show it in a simple way, and provide leaders with the insights to keep programs on track, early warnings about future obstacles and prescriptive advice to handle problems.

After your mammoth study, can you share what’s the success rate or failure rate for change management?

We define successful change as: 1) Improving business performance while change take place 2) Realising business case benefits of the change programme 3) Building capability of the organisations through the change process 4) Leaving the organisation in a better shape (no burn outs), and in shape to undertake further change.

Change is not the enemy; in fact, change initiatives rarely fail because of the change itself, but because of existing problems in the organisation. This was true of 85 per cent of organisations studied who were found to have underlying organisational issues.

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