Where Change Essentials actually came from.

For a long stretch of my career, the way I did change didn't have a name.

It was just the things I found myself doing on repeat.

I've been leading change programs for nearly two decades and I've used all the different frameworks that are out there. Prosci and ADKAR. People-centred implementation. The Change Management Institute's approach. The bespoke programs that organisations like Deloitte put in place, and a fair few I built from scratch for clients who wanted their own. So I was never short of method.

But what I found, time and time and time again, was that it was the same things we kept coming back to that actually moved the dial and created a shift in the organisation. Not the whole methodology.

The same handful of things, whichever model happened to be on the cover of the plan.

And the things I kept doing didn't align to any of the other models that were there, which is an odd thing to sit with when you've spent that long inside the profession.

Then I started pulling it together properly, and those four themes kept coming up.

And so Change Essentials was born.

The four focus areas

Create engagement, which sits over the top of communication and stakeholder management rather than replacing them. Yes, we still look at stakeholders. Yes, we still plan how we're going to engage them and work with them and, in inverted commas, manage them. Yes, we still do the communication planning, and we still think about what the channels are. But the overarching intent is engagement, and that's what's built in.

Enable leaders, which I pulled out as its own piece, because leaders truly are the thing that makes the difference in any change program. And more and more, when I'm working with clients who don't have the budget for big expensive change teams, the responsibility to create a shift in the organisation falls to the leader anyway.

The flip side of that, of course, is that leaders are the thing that makes or breaks a culture. They're the linchpin of any team's environment. They're the way the messaging gets transferred and then also translated, and the inferences, and the way people interpret it, and the perspectives and the lenses, it's all shaped by the leader. So it's a super important part, especially once you start thinking about change through the lens of experience.

Build capability, because folks need the understanding and the skills and the ability to work in the new way. But we need to think about that differently, right? Formal training imparts technical skills and knowledge, and it very rarely translates into a shift in behaviour in how work actually gets done. So what we're exploring here is how you create that shift without people feeling like it's an imposition, something extra they have to do on top of everything else.

Embed adoption, which is where the science of change sits. We do still look at a change impact assessment, we just do it differently and with an engagement and experience lens over it. We do look at readiness. We do think about how people are able and willing and ready to step into new ways of working, and what needs to be done to support that. We do look at adoption data, and at measuring experience, and at benefits. All of it still happens. It just happens to a degree that works for the size and magnitude and complexity of what you're actually doing.

I want to be careful here, because none of the other methodologies are wrong. They all deal with the science of behavioural change, they all deal with the science of project management, and different ones genuinely work for different people depending on how their thinking is organised.

Change Essentials is designed to work with whatever methodology you've already got baked in.

What makes it different

What it brings is the experience.

Change experience is what makes or breaks culture. You could have a really strong culture, and a leader who puts a lot of effort into how they're engaging with their team, and then a poorly managed change where nobody thought about the experience people were having during it, how they received the information, how supported they were, whether they were engaged in how things were unfolding, whether anybody listened when they said something needed to adjust in the approach, and all of that can really quickly undermine trust in management, in leadership, in the change outcome that's being chased. And if it's left unchecked it can significantly impact the culture of the organisation.

There's also a direct line between change experience and customer experience, and it runs via employee experience, which is a well-documented and accepted thing we already look at in organisations. So if your change experience is undermining your employee experience, you're going to see it in your customer outcomes eventually. Most organisations don't want that.

The other thing is that it's a lens that's a lot easier for a leader to understand. They might not appreciate why all these change activities they're being expected to do are more important than whatever business-as-usual delivery their team owes this week.

But they generally do appreciate the impact on the experience their people are having.

Why I call them the change essentials

Because if you only look at these four things, whether you're a change manager or a leader, and if you only ask yourself a couple of questions in relation to those four areas, you will create a different experience of change than the one they've had before. And you'll increase the likelihood of there being sustained results from the change you're trying to implement.

So they're literally the essentials.

It's not less effort, by the way. It's more intentional effort, in the choices you make about which activities you do and then what you do with them.

The rule I hold myself to is that I won't run an activity unless there's an outcome on the other side of it, something that shifts the felt experience or the behaviour or the understanding of what people need to do differently, or it's giving me data I'm actually going to use to do something else. Oftentimes the change activities we're doing give us data and then we don't have a lot of scope to take that into intentionally shifting what we do next.

Over the next few weeks I'm going to take each of the four properly, starting with the questions.

One last thing.

When a change stalls, it very rarely stalls at random.

There's a shape to it, and it's usually one of a small number of shapes, and once you can see which one you're sitting in, the next move gets a lot more obvious.

That's where I want to start.

For regular notes on leading change that actually takes hold, you can subscribe to the fortnightly newsletter through our website: https://nicoletewierik.com/impactfulchangenewsletter

In the meantime I'm curious.

What was the change that taught you the most, and what did it teach you?

Hit reply and tell me, I read everything that comes back.

Warm regards,

Nic