Navigating Constant Change

During the reunion of the executive education alumni of the London Business School in June 2018, I had the pleasure to co-moderate one of the workshops. The topic was how to navigate continuous change. About 20 international executives exchanged their experiences. Here are the key learnings.

All executives confirmed their organizations are going through massive changes and that change is abundant. Not everyone has the same calibration of the intensity of the change. For some change is very intense, whilst others seem to have a different pace as in some industries the change cycles are longer due to regulations and high capital requirements.

All of these executives have a positive attitude towards change. They see it as an opportunity and not so much a threat. And they seem to be used to living from change to change. But they are aware that most people prefer stability. So they need to remain empathetic when people do not go along in change.

Apparently executives have no trouble in dealing with change. They don’t see it as a burden and think it’s rather easy.

But when asked if their organizations can handle the change well, they are far less positive. They are rather critical about the change ability of their companies. For them the execution of change is difficult because of the people aspect. And this is remarkable as people seem to be both the main factor of success and also of failure of change.

We discussed change and strategic choices together, as if they were interchangeable concepts. Every strategic effort requires change and strategy is also an answer to change. However as one of the participants pointed out, you need to change with a vision for the longer term. If you were to change your vision too often, you become steerless.

If we know that strategy is about change, we can see every strategy execution as a change process. I believe it would help us tremendously if we go away from the more financial and operational view on strategy into a more change or transformational approach. Change is not a part of strategy. Strategy is change.

So when we went into the debate on how to deal with change, there were 5 pieces of advice.

Thanks to all the participants of this workshop and thanks to Leonardo Moreno for co-moderating this workshop. I wish we had more time.

David

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