Why does change fail? Because organisations lose grip on its emotional core. Impact's Global Lead of Transformation & Leadership, Duncan Lydon, tells us how they can regain it.
Why do change processes fail when change is the only constant?
For the last 20 years Duncan Lydon has been working to implement Impact’s change model with our clients, partnering with them to chart their path towards successful change in a world where the average change process fails 70% of the time. Listen in to hear about his journey from engineering to organisational psychology, and Impact, with everything that’s taught him about what it takes to make successful, lasting change stick.
Latest Listen
- Why change is a personal, emotive process
- How systems can fail to embody the emotional core of change
- Why the cultural aspect of change can’t be mapped as easily as the technical side
- Examples of Impact’s behavioural model for culture change
- Key skills for navigating change processes
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Why is change such a difficult challenge for organisations today?
I think it’s because change is done so badly. As human beings we’re changing all the time, as individuals throughout our lives and as a species, so why does it become really difficult for organisations when we’re so used to it? Change is emotive: most people have a story of change done badly and that sits with them for a long time, they resist change for good reasons because they’ve had that negative experience. People ask, how is this going to affect me? Fundamentally change is personal, emotions drive behaviour, and organisations intend to address that at the start of a process but then it gets neglected. Ultimately, they don’t acknowledge it the way they should or invest in addressing it.
How does Impact model change as a people-led process rather than a top down directive?
The technical aspects of change are well established, and it’s often very easy for organisations to map them out. And yet there’s this other aspect of change which is about culture: if you’re changing the way in which people work there’s going to need to be a culture shift, and that is messy. Culture is about behaviours – what people decide to do or not do, what they prioritise, so for 45 years we’ve worked on behaviour change which shows up in culture and then begins to shift organisations. Our model of experiential learning is that you can’t do that by talking about culture as if it’s over there, you must put people in an experience where they are solving organisational problems and then help them step back and reflect on how their culture showed up in that moment. With that felt sense of culture you’re able to adapt little nudges, habits, that help leaders move to the desired culture.
What’s your advice to leaders under pressure to deliver change?
Recognise the change process is hugely accelerated, it’s difficult to spend years mapping a change when the volatility of the change process means that assumptions behind that investment might change after even three months. You need expertise that understands culture, because that’s where organisations are getting stuck. Organisational change gets derailed because of fear, the fear of loss that comes with long periods of uncertainty were nobody has the answers. Letting go of that becomes so difficult. Leaders go from meeting to meeting to meeting, they are busy people, under pressure and tasked with growth. They need space to step back and notice, to tune into their own emotions, to see the cues that people are giving them all the time and then be able to connect people with that big picture of where they are wanting to get to as an organisation in three years’ time and why we should be excited about that.
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