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Wisely

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The way an organisation gets ready for the next disturbance says a lot about it. Readiness for change is not a check box experience. It is the single diagnostic, and all too often, the one that is ignored, that distinguishes between expensive retrenchment and strategic advantage when a Company changes course. I've seen leadership teams in Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth who seem to have thought readiness was an optional extra, but that's what it cost them. On the flip side, I've also seen tiny teams completely reimagine entire delivery models seemingly overnight because someone did the difficult work in advance: listening, mapping and planning. The difference? They'd assessed readiness properly.

Why testing is more important than ever

We are living in the new normal called constant change. Whether it's digital transformation, regulatory turmoil, M&A action or a straight up restructure, chances are the technical plan is not the issue here. People are. A study by Prosci illustrates the point: projects with effective change management are six times more likely to meet objectives. That's not an academic nicety, it's a business multiplier. Great change readiness assessment equips you with intelligence about how to spend your training efforts where it counts, on the human levers that make the technical outcome stick. A quick myth busting: Readiness is not a scorecard for "bravery" or a morale report. It's practical. It tells you whether the people in charge will turn up, if managers are capable of coaching in a world without certainty, if your systems can cope with new working practices and even whether the problem might actually be located where we allocated it.

What readiness actually considers

A comprehensive readiness assessment looks into three overlapping domains: the organisational, the team level, and the individual.

  • Organisational: governance, resourcing model, interdependencies, technology maturity and how change is funded or prioritised.
  • Team level: management capability to lead change, communication cadence, and the alignment of KPIs with changes objectives.
  • Individual: personal readiness for change; perceived value of what's changing; prior experience undergoing a transition; current ability adopting new behaviours.

Too many assessments simply end with a pulse survey and say, "there you go." That's a headline, not a map. The best evaluations triangulate surveys with interviews, focus groups and objective systems data. You analyse helpdesk tickets, rates of training completion, churn in the affected teams, hard signals that confirm or question what people say.

Why culture is the fulcrum

Culture is no HR buzzword in these parts. That's a culture that supports experiments, and where transparent feedback is shared and learning is normalised; just miles out in front already. Casualty 30 Parties that cut corners in changing complex processes will quickly find components of their designs catastrophically failing in practice; meanwhile a blame and hide culture can suffocate the best intentioned change with finger pointing and half hearted compliance. "The stretching culture deliberately, not in spite of change, but actually using change as a tool to move behaviours is okay and indeed important." Some readers will insist that culture is a "long game." True. But you can intentionally plan a change to mirror desired behaviours. Give the initiative a reward for transparency, show them some small victories, let people see that our leaders are willing to take a risk. Those steps boil culture change down to the delivery path of the initiative itself.

Leadership and sponsorship: where plans go flabby

Good leaders don't approve the budget and then bugger off. Sponsorship is alive: it is visible, vocal and made accountable. Sponsorship is all too often tactical, a CEO pops up in a launch video and that's that. Better sponsorship looks like leaders showing up in different forums and consistently framing the change in day to day language and unblocking roadblocks that managers can't. It's not theatrical. It's operational. A less palatable but more accurate one: a sponsor who refuses to role model new behaviours sabotages your change as much as any cynical frontline member of staff. Leadership aligned workshops are not extra. If the leaders don't agree on end state or metrics, then run the workshop again until they do.

Methods you will use (not just templates)

There are lots of tools out there, and you don't need to buy a suite to be effective. Useful mix:

  • Surveys with focused, behavioural questions (no general sentiment). Ask, who will need to change tools or processes next month? Who's trained? Who has dependent workloads?
  • Semi structured interviews with various functional representatives (Critical Vendors; Major Customers in external impacts) if applicable
  • Focus Groups to test out communications and early scripts: If it is not clear to communication skills to a small group, it won't be clear communications get out in the thousands
  • Readiness audit that maps capability gaps to the project timeline

These audits often uncover that the training budget is too low, or that a vital integration will not be ready in time.

  • Data triangulation, like what you find from system logs as search compared to incident volumes and compare it with training LMS completions, to prove out perceptions.

Surveys are helpful, but you are a first pass. A well managed interview or focus group often reveals barriers the survey has never asked about: informal workarounds, shadow IT, or managers' unspoken doubts. Workshops uncover politics. Politics matters.

Evaluating readiness for one's self

So why do people make changes in their lives, and it isn't often because they see the logic in it. They don't because they know why it matters to them, and trust those influencing change, and have the means and opportunity. Questions to determine individual readiness:

  • Do staff perceive personal value? If not, you have to encode that value in some explicit form.
  • Do they trust that the source of change is a good one? Belief in management training and whoever is communicating about it predicts adoption.
  • Do they know what to do? Training will only be successful if work rebalances to allow people to practice new ways.
  • What was the landing of past change? Past failures condition current resistance.

And here's another controversial position I think it is worth taking: Invest in the people who will be change multipliers. Not everybody, but figure out who in the 20 to 30 percent drives the rest. Train them, arm them, and let them be the example. It's directed, swift and easy to overlook.

Turning assessment results into action

If you don't use the assessment it just becomes dust on your shelf. There needs to be a rapid and practical translation of discovery to plan.

  • Segment your response. Do not design one single, monolithic program for 5,000 staff. Target by role, by business unit, by dependency risk
  • Prioritise interventions that remove blockers early. If you are worried about propensity for a third party integration, deal with it now, adjust timeline, scope. Change order "minimum viable adoption" milestones. What is there that you can end up having a working, useful result in 6 months? Early victories diminish resistance.
  • Connect governance to adoption metrics. Define adoption as a component of the program success criteria, not something else for HR to worry about.

Stating findings, the part Organisations stumble upon

Clarity trumps complexity. When you share findings communicate different messages for different audiences. Senior execs want the headline and dollars. Team leaders need to know what to say, and how to have real conversations. What you are being asked to do, and why, must be clear. A tiny, effective strategy: couple communications with brief micro resources. A one page "what changes for you tomorrow" is more valuable than a long whitepaper. Busy professionals do not have time to read lengthy documents. Do the work for them.

Monitoring, measuring and feedback loop

Readiness to change is fluid. You estimate, act, measure and adjust. Bake in monitoring from the get go:

  • Pre and post surveys on specific behaviours
  • Quick pulse checks in rollout (Managers!),
  • Manager observation and roleplay scoring for critical interactions,
  • Operational metrics, time to competency, error rates, customer complaints.

Note: data without action is vanity. When a metric points to trouble, the plan must already have contingencies planned against it.

Pop traps, and some blunt truths

  • Trap: Thinking of readiness as a one and done. Readiness needs a lifecycle, evaluate at discover, pre GA, early adopter and stabilisation.
  • Trap: One size fits all training. Different cohorts learn differently. Role based training, bite size modules are much more effective than lengthy classrooms sessions.
  • Truth: You'll meet pockets of resistance Metered Release Content purification is paramount! Don't personalise it. Name and address the structural causes of resistance.
  • Fact: Capacity for change is limited. Two huge initiatives at once are often a recipe for disaster unless you resource very carefully.

Very moderately put: Small frequent changes face less pushback than occasional big changes. Grand redesigns are popular among leaders, because you are visible and eye catching. But from an adoption perspective, it's a regular and incremental change that is well communicated that builds muscle. Some won't want to, they like the theatre of a big launch. Fine. But choose your battles.

How we interpret readiness, a pragmatic perspective

There have been times when we've run multi week readiness sprints for ASX listed clients and 6 week blended programmes for government agencies. What works: A quick diagnosis followed by a prioritised playbook. We concentrate on the 20 percent of interventions which yield 80 percent of take up. That could involve upskilling line managers, generating a shadow support roster at go live or rebalancing workloads so that people can learn while not being crushed by day to day tasks. One last thing for sustainable operations: Don't forget vendors and partners. Your change can flop because a key supplier wasn't prepared. Add them to your interviews and readiness checks.

Where the Organisations should improve

If I had one VPN% improvement to recommend across the board: treat readiness as risk mitigation, not "people stuff." Monetise the risks of low adoption. When finance starts to experience the effect on revenue, customers lost or cost of rework, priorities evolve. Through measurement readiness is transformed from a fluffy HR issue to something that poses a risk at business level.

Conclusion, and a parting thought

Change readiness is GPS, not a map. It reduces risk, hastens value capture and protects organisational capacity. You don't need perfect culture or flawless leaders in order to succeed; you just need honest assessment, focused action and dogged follow through. Readiness isn't easy to explain and nearly impossible to measure well. So begin small: Map out who's most affected, question assumptions, go after the highest risk gaps and measure everything. And don't forget: The loudest person in the room is not necessarily the most accurate. Listen to the quiet ones. Because the next disruption, when it arrives, is one you will either be choosing from, or reacting to. Which would you prefer?

Sources & Notes

Prosci, "Best Practices in Change Management," Benchmarking Report, 2020, Prosci research reveals that projects with excellent change management are six times more likely to meet objectives.