The change kaleidoscope: how Glaxo prepared for organization change

The tool that we've developed is called the change kaleidoscope. The change kaleidoscope has two parts to it. Around the outer ring, there are eight features that we ask senior managers to consider, in turn and in depth. The central ring gives them a series of design choices, a series of questions that enable them to think about the design of change. But we only get them to look at that central ring when they've actually worked their way around these eight features in the outer ring. Over the next few minutes, I'm going to concentrate on explaining those eight features and why they're so important to successful change implementation.

Here we've got an example of an analysis of a change situation in the pharmaceutical company, Glaxo. This is before Glaxo became part of GlaxoSmithKline, so it's a change scenario back in the 1990s. Now, as you can see, what you can do with this model, the change kaleidoscope, is to actually map which of these features are against the change, which of the features are actually for the change, and which - well, we've analyzed them, we found out the data, but they're actually neutral. They're not actually critical for this change. They're not change-critical as we would say. If I just point out a few features here to help you see how this model actually works, you can see that one of the key things that Glaxo wanted to do was preserve the workforce that they had. In the 1990s, Glaxo had an extremely good sales force, probably the best in the industry. They had very good research and development scientists. They were facing competitive threats because the patent on their blockbuster drug, Zantac, was due to expire in about 1997. So once they needed to change, at the same time, they didn't particularly want to lose their excellent workforce. They wanted to keep people, they wanted to retain the talent within the organization. They saw them as an important and inimitable asset. That meant that the way they set about trying to implement this organizational change was in a hugely participative and consultative way with the workforce, where they would attempt to take the workforce with them and consult with them at all times to keep their motivation and to keep them staying in employment with them. The other area that was very critical for them, as you can see, was the level of readiness for change. Now, funny enough, one of the reasons the level of readiness for change in Glaxo at this time was quite low was because they were actually very, very successful. They had this blockbuster drug called Zantac, and it was a hugely successful, best-selling drug around the world, and it gave them a huge competitive advantage, and they were recording very, very good business results. The consequence of that was that, actually, they had quite a complacent workforce. The workforce saw the business results, they enjoyed good bonuses, they thought the company was excellent, they trusted their senior managers, all of which are fantastically good things in the short term. But it meant that actually they couldn't see why change was necessary in the longer-term. This meant overall that they had very low readiness for change. The other features in this kaleidoscope, as you can see, were quite positive. They had quite high potential for capability for change because they had a highly educated and loyal workforce. Their capacity was good; they had quite a lot of cash they could invest in this. Because it was a long-term change - they had quite a long period of time before this patent expired - time was on their side. So there were some positive features, but one of the things that Glaxo actually chose to do was to phase this change, and, in particular, in the first phase of change, try to address this issue of readiness for change. One of the things they did was that, for the first year, 12 to 18 months, they actually invested in a huge communication campaign to raise levels of awareness within the workforce about why change was necessary, even though they were enjoying very good business success in the immediate short term. The way that they set about designing these communication activities became a change program in itself. On the next slide, we'll go on and see how they actually set about designing these communication activities.