It's not Change I fear, but Change Management itself.
It’s not change that I fear, but the Change Management process itself.
Change Management is intended to reduce risk by encouraging responsibility and planning.
Change Management is often staffed by semi-retired technical types who know enough to be dangerous, and not enough to be wildly misinformed of anything new. A change reviewer has already seen the change hundred times before. A change creator is mired in a ton of pointless questions to create the simplest change. Big changes are so complex
In most organisations, Change Management just lets you know who to blame faster and more accurately.
Overcoming human nature is difficult. Overcoming the natural instinct to blame, or feel blamed, after a failed change requires a new approach to people management and team building that is rare. Really rare.
As a team leader, who has several executives who constantly speak trite phrases like
“risk is to be managed & accepted”, “we want to improve the process” “failure is not acceptable”, “we need to put resources into solving those problems”
When I face them down in a the blamestorming session after a major outage, they just want someone to victimise. They all know it isn’t going to fix anything. They all know that blaming a long serving employee who has taken years to develop those skills is counter productive.
And then refuse to sign off reasonable training budgets, practical lab environments, or professional learning time because Change Management has controlled the risk.
It’s not change that I fear, but the Change Management process itself.
