Institutionalisation in Change - Identifying and Overcoming Resistance with Structure

Any transformation journey will experience resistance; that's is a normal behaviour. Important as a change manager is to identify these hurdles and design activities that nudge the adopters forward and create structures that reinforce the change. This will smoothen the journey to the future state.

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Transcript
​Hi, do sometimes feel that day in and day out, for weeks and months, the only focus is on delivery, delivery, delivery. That's how many people feel these days. Still, that's not how we thrive. How can we create, how can we establish simple structures that lead to lasting change?

In this series, we introduced the four knowledge areas of the CPC change management methodology. These themes provide guidance on what to consider in your change activities.

My name is Tim Wieringa and I'm a change management practitioner here in Singapore.

Today, we talk about institutionalisation. In this dimension, we are looking for underlying structures and we're looking for nudges which are reinforcing the change, reinforcing the future state. People, easily fall back to old habits. How can we prevent this from happening?

Best to explain this with an example. About a year ago, I was exactly observing this single focus on delivery, and people around me were struggling a lot. In an agile transformation project, we wanted to allow the people to go through that change in a more sustainable way. The teams were using OKRs and we wanted to use this artefact to create a structure to think in different ways. Beside objectives for deliverables, we overall wanted to introduce two new objectives; one around learning with experiments and another one looking at the way of working. We then encourage the teams to define their own key results, which are contributing to these objectives. This gave the people the necessary permission to look at these two areas and started to improve and the delivery of the change.

In a transformation journey, we need to continuously look out for this resistance and see how people feel about the change. Often, small notches allow people to reflect on the overall purpose of the change and define their own journey.

Thank you for listening. Please click on the link below to learn more about how to become a Certified Associate in Change Management. And stay tuned for the next episode.