The often-used refrain that “change is constant” no longer reflects the current state of the market. While constant state is like a slow but manageable drip from a faucet, change today can more accurately be described as a raging river—unpredictable and often out of control.
Research and survey data substantiate this shift from a change drip to a change stream. Gartner research shows that the number of enterprise change activities increased 5x between 2016 and 2022. In a separate Gartner survey, 77% of HR (Human Resource) leaders now say their employees are feeling fatigued, and 82% of HR leaders say their managers are not equipped to lead change.
But change is going nowhere. Digital transformation continues to play a leading role in corporate initiatives, which means there is an increasing need to align people and processes and to enable integration and collaboration between growing silos.
Although most organizations today have some change management processes in place, few have assessed how effective these functions are. With the volume of change today exponentially greater than in the past, it is imperative to understand how mature your organization is when it comes to navigating change.
How Mature Is Your Organization in Being Able to Move Through Change?
If you are going to build any capability, whether it be data savviness, marketing, or change readiness, you need to start with an understanding of where your strengths and weaknesses are. A maturity model measures the ability of an organization to pursue continuous improvement in a particular discipline, and change management is no exception.
At Propeller, we have developed a change maturity model that measures an organization in three primary areas (that bring together 12 different criteria) that define successful change management: knowledge and rigor, organizational alignment, and effective execution. Each of these simultaneously builds on the other and is composed of four criteria in each area.
- Organizational alignment, or capacity: The placement, integration, and alignment of change management across projects and portfolios, and ultimately, the operating model and how it affects change delivery. The four criteria in this area consist of: project & change integration, change management structure, the organizational operating model, and managing change saturation.
- Effective execution, or efficacy: The allocated resources, the effectiveness of change management project planning, and the communications, training, and delivery. The four criteria in this area consist of: resourcing effectiveness, project design, communications delivery, and training delivery.
- Knowledge & rigor, or capability: The efficacy of the tools change managers currently use, the engagement of leadership in change, and how change is measured. The four criteria in this area consist of: change adoption analytics, process & tool efficiency, practitioner competency, and leadership awareness & engagement.
A thorough assessment of your organization’s change capability—one that’s valuable, honest, and something your organization can build on as you move forward—by necessity looks at the entirety of your organization. But you do not always have time, or the organizational buy-in, to do a full assessment of your change readiness. In that case, you can also perform a quick assessment and take a shortcut by looking at the keystone wedges within each of these categories—the criteria, or capabilities, that serve as a signal of your overall change maturity.
If you are managing these keystone criteria well, vast experience working with leaders across industries has shown that it is safe to assume you are doing the rest well too and are mature as an organization in navigating change:
- Change adoption analytics: Ask yourself, how do you measure adoption in preparation for the change and after the change has taken place? How does adoption connect to larger business KPIs (key performance indicators)?
- Managing change saturation: Ask yourself, how much change does the organization normally engage in (and what is the resulting change fatigue?), and how has previous change affected employee experience (e.g., engagement and attrition)?
- Resourcing effectiveness: Ask yourself, how are change management resources established and assigned to projects based on the change impact analysis? Effectively resourcing change management practitioners sets expectations for intake and focus.
On the other side of the coin, experience has shown that if you are falling short in one of these three criteria, you are falling short in other areas, as they are table stakes for change readiness:
- Process & tool efficiency: Ask yourself, what are your existing internal processes and tools for change management, and how consistently are they used across the organization?
- Practitioner competency: Ask yourself, what training and experience levels do your “change doers” have?
- Leadership awareness & encouragement: Ask yourself, how well does leadership understand the need for change management, its purpose, and its role? Are change management leaders active and present?
Enabling Your Organization and People to Thrive Amid Change
Assessing the maturity of a department, organization, or enterprise is an interesting dance. It takes time and energy to build a capability. Sometimes you build by doing. Sometimes you build by making strategic investments, by hiring more people or restructuring the organization. But far too often, you do not know what you do not know, and it takes a change maturity assessment to understand what’s blocking you and how to move forward.
To thrive amid today’s steady stream of change, organizations must become not only comfortable but proactive with intentional change. By understanding the ways in which your organization is ready for change—and the ways it is not—you can make targeted investments and build a capability based off your own self-assessment of strengths and weaknesses. Along the way, you develop an inherent understanding of where the chinks in your organization’s armor are, so when your organization embarks on the next substantial change, or simply a period marked by a lot of accumulated change, you can guard against where you are likely to trip up.
Riley Smith has spent a lifetime honing his ability to analyze challenges from a systems perspective. A background in sustainability fueled his aptitude for identifying inputs and outputs, locating responsibility, and leveraging points within a system, and being comfortable with the complexity of people-created systems. In his current role as the People Strategy & Change Management practice director at Propeller, Riley manages senior change consultants, engages, and supports large-scale strategic transformations for clients, and lends thought leadership expertise on organizational design and effectiveness, learning and development and change management. His experience includes roles standing up new departments and teams at NextGen Climate, Stanford Hotels, and Saint Mary’s College of California. He holds a master’s degree in sustainability from Arizona State University and a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Utah.