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0:00
Hi, I'm David Buchanan,
an Emeritus professor of
organisational behaviour at
Cranfield University School
of Management in the UK.
This talk is about
why change fails.
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Ask a group of managers
to reflect on their
experience and to
identify what to do
in order to make
organisational change fail.
The response usually
comes in two stages.
First, they laugh.
Second, they then
have no problems
in quickly generating
a list of actions to
guarantee that an initiative
will not succeed.
No vision, highlight the
negatives, don't communicate
choose the most
expensive way to do it
and divert resources.
This points to two conclusions.
First, ensuring
that change fails,
should one wish to do
that, is not difficult.
There are many tools at
ones disposal involving
a combination of
actions and inactions.
Second, if we have such
a good understanding
of what can go wrong,
then getting it right
should be easy.
Have a clear vision,
highlight the positives,
clear communication,
adequate funding and so on.
But getting it right turns
out not to be so simple.
The management of
organisational change
appears to be a
high risk activity.
The evidence suggests that
around 70% of planned
change efforts fail to
achieve their objectives.
Why?
What can you do about it?
Practical guidelines all
offer much of the same
best practice advice
about communication,
vision, employee involvement
and tailoring the
approach to the context.
This is not a
controversial topic.
One can point to the
scale, complexity
and pace of organisational
change today,
making it harder to implement
those guidelines fully.
As the saying goes,
there's never time
to do it right,
but there's always
time to do it again.
Some change programs
start before
the previous programs
is even complete,
so both programs are likely
to suffer from poor outcomes.
One of the best known
explanations for
