The culture change accreditation trap

Much like the delivery of projects, the process of changing culture has become a million-dollar industry of accreditation rather than a reliable route to changed behaviour.

Prosci's ADKAR and Kotter's eight steps are both research-backed, and plenty of organisations use them and still get nowhere. ADKAR is the most common. It sequences change into five tidy stages and hands a sponsor a report to point at, proof that change is being managed. Which is precisely its appeal. It makes an anxious, intangible process look orderly.

The trouble lies in what all that documentation assumes. It treats culture change as linear, one stage after another, when in reality people move back and forth and rarely in a straight line. Worse, it says almost nothing about the specific leadership behaviours that meaningful change actually depends on.

None of this is the fault of change managers, who try their hardest to overcome the barriers that organisations (and their leadership teams) continually erect in their path. They become accredited as that’s what the organisation says they are looking for, only to ignore their strategies, plans and appeals to remove the inertia (and excuses) that cause initiatives to stall.

As a former senior director myself, I understand the appeal of a clean methodology. I have also watched plenty of them fail. A good change manager can map the bottlenecks in any system. Only the behaviours and skills of the people in it, can actually change it.

Structure change, technology implementation and training are easy to move on a project schedule. The people required to change are not. More accreditation won't close that gap. The human skills that make change stick will.

I’ve written about this more comprehensively, along with the steps required to achieve meaningful change in my new whitepaper, which you can get at www.colindellis.com/culture-papers - I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.