Change Management as One-Way Communication

I’ve been in enough transformation projects to know what change management looks like in practice. What was always the same: first comes the decision, then the communication. The communication goes in one direction: top to bottom. From the decision-makers who decided, to those who now have to go along with it.

Change management in practice doesn’t mean changing together. It means someone has decided and then it gets explained, often with gaps, until there’s enough confusion that nobody knows the why or the how anymore. It’s too late to be against it anyway. Resistance is always there, but it can’t form strongly enough through the confusion to become a risk. That happens too of course, but I never experienced it.

When there were risk analysis discussions, the topic of employee resistance wasn’t far away, but nobody ever asked: what if the resistance is justified? What if the employees see something the decision-makers didn’t?

Instead, resistance gets classified as fear of change, lack of understanding or poor communication. It was always deficits on the employee side, never with the decision itself.

I was in projects where employees said from the start: this won’t work. Not out of fear and not out of ignorance, but because they knew the process. The consultants always compressed everything into PowerPoint slides. But the employees usually knew better where the weak spots were and which dependencies existed. In more than half the cases I’ve seen, they were right. Really, the rate was that extreme. But their objections always counted as resistance, not as valuable information.

The yes-men were approvingly called “change champions”. They were the people from the workforce who were supposed to carry the change forward and convince their colleagues. That sounds like understanding and intelligence, but it’s the recruitment of those who are easiest to win over or sway.

The terminology was always about creating acceptance, reducing resistance, bringing stakeholders along and so on. Every one of these words assumes the direction is fixed and only the execution is being negotiated. If at all. None allows for the possibility that the direction could be wrong because employees at other levels might have legitimate objections.

I experienced exactly once that a company did it differently. A CEO stopped his automation project after three months because the employees on the production floor showed him that the processes worked differently than what the documentation said. He listened. It cost him six months and a fair amount of money. In the end he set up a different project that worked, because it was based on reality and not on the plan.

That’s not in any change management textbook, because listening isn’t a process step and because the possibility of being wrong isn’t built into any framework.

Change management as it’s practiced is enforcement that’s seen as part of communication, but not as the question whether the change actually makes sense.