Failure to Launch: Why OCM is not a last-minute consideration

If you were going to have elective surgery and you asked your surgeon what his plan for the surgery was. Would you expect a step-by-step guide through the process including safety, risks, benefits, aftercare, and rehab? Would you expect pre-op instructions and time to plan how you will get home or receive care afterward? What if your doctor started walking toward you with a release form and just said, "I've already prepared everything. We are just going to cut you open tomorrow. We'll take out an organ, we'll sew you up, you'll get some post-op care and we'll discharge you. You ready?"

My first reaction would be, "No, I am NOT ready!"

Yet so many projects behave as if this is an acceptable way to approach Organizational Change management. Project Managers don't bother to do a written Impact Assessment, Stakeholder Analysis, Communications plan, or Training plan. In fact, it's not until they need to start sending out communications that they think about who needs to know, when, and what information they need.

One of my biggest pain points as an OCM practitioner is working with projects who haven't integrated OCM into their project from the beginning. Here are 5 (of many) reasons why this doesn't work, even with small projects:

1. Lead Times

   When you don't lay the groundwork and create OCM plans, all of a sudden you need to deploy communications and training that haven't even been created yet. You don't leave yourself enough time to draft thoughtful communications, get them to appropriate approvers, and have them published with reasonable lead times. It's very difficult for an organization to disseminate communications, schedule training, and publish job aids on short notice. If you consistently send drafts of communication and training materials at the last minute, people in your organization are going to get very annoyed with you very quickly. On the other hand, if you plan ahead and give yourself plenty of lead time you can draft communications, have them reviewed and approved, and send them out with plenty of time to spare.

2. Change Resistance

   Human beings require a little time to prepare for a change, even a small one. So in addition to needing lead time for logistics purposes, the people experiencing your change need enough notice to get emotionally and psychologically ready. They need to understand the benefits, the drawbacks, and why the change is being made. Impact analysis and stakeholder analysis can give you this insight so that you can minimize resistance. If you don't understand what your stakeholders' concerns are, what they need to know, and when they need to know it, you are in for a lot of resistance to this change. In addition, when you give people enough time to understand the change, you drastically reduce the resistance to that change.

3. Change Champions

   Change champions are one of the most helpful tools in an OCM toolkit. These are leaders in your stakeholder groups who can help generate momentum for the change and minimize resistance. However, these key stakeholders need to be engaged at the beginning of the project and probably involved in UAT/testing, if not the design of the solution. You cannot create Change Champions at the last minute. However, when you successfully engage and create a Change Champion network for your project, they will do most of the heavy lifting for you. Its a great way to work smarter, not harder.

4. Training

   Training often requires producing training materials and scheduling training meetings. Even if you have all of the materials created, they often need to be reviewed and approved; and this takes time. If you have teams that are in different time zones or on different schedules, it's going to be very difficult to schedule training at the last minute. Everybody has full calendars already.

5. Solution Problems

   If you have gone all the way through project planning, design, building, and testing without any formal OCM consideration, you may think you have the perfect solution. Sadly, I can't tell you how many times I have worked with a project that has already built a solution that doesn't work for a group of stakeholders they did not consider. OCM is all about understanding the ways that people work and visualizing a future with those people's perspectives in mind. Change is just the path between the current state and the future state. When we fail to adequately consider the impact of a change or we fail to thoroughly explore which stakeholders will be affected, we have no guarantee that the solution we have built and tested is actually a good solution for everyone. It may only meet some needs of a limited number of stakeholders. In this case, the change is doomed from the start.

These are only a few reasons why Project Managers should be thinking about OCM and building its practice into their project management practice. OCM Ensures that the organization successfully transitions to a future state achieving expected benefits while minimizing perceived negative impacts on risks. It's no wonder that organizations are more frequently hiring OCM practitioners and implementing OCM practices. They are seeing the benefits of Organizational Change Management in more thoughtful project consideration, designs, and launches which translates to more successful projects that launch on time.

Employment as a Spiritual Practice

This article is an edited summary of the following talk I gave on June 6, 2019, in St. Joseph, Michigan.

https://www.pechakucha.com/presentations/employment-as-a-spiritual-practice

Regardless of what other people do or think or what the world tells me I should be doing, do I have the courage to live my core values in every area of my life? Do you?

Most of us focus in the workplace mainly as a means of gaining financial growth, gaining power through politics and personal aggrandizement, and set aside our desire for personal and spiritual connection thinking that spiritual practice doesn’t belong there. But we have opportunities, maybe even a duty to make our employment another venue to practice personal and spiritual growth.

I was fired from a job where I made more money than I ever had but where I was unhappy. I felt pressure to participate in mildly unethical practices and was working 50-60 hour weeks. I felt obligated to work more under the assumption that eventually I would be rewarded. Then I took another job thinking it would be different and it was the same thing. Facing unemployment I felt that I was either a victim or a failure. I had thought that if I worked in jobs at mission-driven organizations, the mission should be enough and that sacrificing my time, life balance, and a healthy amicable workplace was the price I had to pay to be “successful”. I was wrong.

Through this experience I learned 3 things:

1. When I view my work-life as a game to be won, I lose.

2. When I am not consistently living my values at work AND outside of work, I’m not who I say I am and that makes me miserable.

3. When I think that my work-life defines me or defines my personal worth, I feel worthless.

Subsequently, I’ve identified 3 key Spiritual Practices for me that have transformed my work-life:

1. Don’t make important life decisions based mostly on money, power or prestige.

We know we shouldn’t do this in romantic relationships, with our children, or in connecting to our chosen spiritual practice - why would I do this at work? After my job honestly meets my basic financial needs, what do I make decisions based on? My values: Work-life balance, feeling challenged and useful, liking what I do every day, and the opportunity for personal growth. I suggest you get clear on what your values are and start making decisions based on those.

2. Practice humility.

For me this means being willing to honestly admit promptly and without shame when I am wrong. I also have to allow others the right to be wrong sometimes. It means being willing to listen to and learn from everyone regardless of how old they are, what title they have, where they sit in the hierarchy, or how much I personally like them. How many of us have a friend group at work and champion our friends ideas in a meeting; but then when the person I don't really like very much comes up with a good idea, do I act the same way?

It also means being willing to stand up and speak out when I believe something is wrong or unethical without being overbearing or self-righteous. Can I walk the walk without needing to be the star? If I want my employees and my boss to be professional and trustworthy and healthy, I have to show up to work and be that.

3. Get a life.

There is a scientific explanation for this if you need proof: The frontal lobe of the human brain is responsible for reasoning, planning, decision-making, and judgment. These networks work for you in creative ways when the brain is quiet, not while you are effortfully trying to find a solution to a problem. This is one reason that sleep and rest and play are so important in our lives. So I pause periodically, take a walk or a deep breath and ask for time off when I need it. No shame or guilt, because what I am doing is actually making myself a better performer at work. Working 60 hour weeks do not make you a better employee. Additionally, when work is over, I GO HOME! I cultivate friendships, go do fun things, have a hobby. When I have a life, my job doesn’t define me as a person and I don’t take things too seriously. I have better things to occupy myself than whatever some other person is doing or not doing at work. I stay in my lane.

Paradoxically, when I practice these spiritual principles in my work life, I gain more meaning and satisfaction out of every part of my life. When I am willing to stand for my principles and act based on my personal values, and not on whom I think others want me to be, I gain a sense of true belonging. I am so grateful for being fired because I never would have left that job on my own. Because of that experience, I had the opportunity to become the person I actually want to be.