The stakes of change management
Companies and organisations will all be affected in the next ten years, either through a brutal adaptation under external pressure, or through a planned, internally driven migration.
Indeed, resistance, opposition, confrontation, non-decisions, frustration and loss of motivation among front-line operators are at the root of the vast majority of failures, which are common in these rollout conditions.
It is estimated that close to 50% of migrations end up in a more or less major failure, with lasting negative consequences for the organisation. These figures should be put alongside the 75% of employees who don’t understand and/or only moderately buy into the project, as well as the 66% who feel that too many changes are imposed and hard to carry out.
For about fifteen years, many books and publications have addressed the topic, both at academic and professional levels. However, very few really look at the root cause of the problem, namely the origin of human resistance to change.
A paradoxical and delicate subject, which calls for introspection into individual motivations, but also into the collective dynamics that sit deep within human behaviour.
Challenges solved by putting people first
It is precisely through this kind of approach that strategic UX can be a fitting response, and for several reasons.
Successful change management is, in its delivery, very close to the practices of classic user research.
It has to, in the same way, on the basis of a strategic vision, bring together several dimensions, but also deal with the impacts of the evolution, the psychology of change, and the communication around it.
This approach is consistent with the criteria of user-centred design and with taking into account the different phases involved, namely:
- the precise specification of the context of the change and the stakes around it.
- characterising the internal and external environment, and identifying the timing of the change. That is, the exact moment and duration of the process being put in place.
- listening to front-line staff. That is, understanding the drivers and the barriers for front-line staff. Their buy-in directly shapes the degree of success of the migration.
So we find topics and objects of study well known to UX specialists.
To ensure successful change management, we therefore need to address some key user-experience areas.
Taking into account the different change-management profiles
First, the different profiles when it comes to appetite for change (proactive, passive, or opposed) can be overcome by understanding their deep motivation and the collective mechanisms (such as group dynamics) tied to them.
Identifying the barriers and the opportunities
Second, making the individual and collective gains tangible when adopting the new system, in terms of benefits and risks, is an essential contributing factor of the support, on which it will be necessary to communicate in a clear and effective way.
Assessing acceptance
Then, adapting the technological systems to future operators is also a critical issue, even though their acceptability often proves subjective.
This is why drawing on more experiential mechanisms, that mobilise emotion more than reason, can prove extremely effective in terms of the attractiveness and credibility of the transition.
Finally, capturing the specific lessons tied to the migration helps ensure the success of future changes.
Strategic UX: a fitting response
As seen above, user experience seems fully aligned with these challenges, with support and answers provided by specialists in human behaviour and use.
We speak more specifically of Strategic UX, precisely because of the strategic stakes for the organisation and the polymorphous complexity of the analysis.
Strategic UX appears as a relevant alternative to, or complement of, classic management approaches, or at the very least as a tool to help the beneficiaries take ownership of the change, in order to make the rollout successful.
Finally, we still have to consider an important hurdle to the take-up of this kind of approach, one that can explain the low recourse to user-experience specialists.
There is indeed a strong wish from companies to internalise this kind of critical expertise.
In practice, these skills are rarely operational at the level needed within the relevant structures; they are, on the other hand, present in agencies specialised in organisational design or skilled in Human and Organisational Factors (HOF).
Internalising change management is often considered highly strategic, but also as an opportunity for organisations to develop a culture and skills tied to this topic.
This capture of know-how will be all the more interesting if the organisation has to face a brutal, time-constrained adaptation, which remains very likely in the medium term.
That said, a cross-functional approach involving external experts in the user experience field seems to be an optimal formula to avoid routines and entrenched thinking patterns tied to change management.
Wrap-up on change management
So a mixed approach, based on internal resources as a priority, supported by external experts, probably represents the best trade-off in terms of effectiveness, and offers the highest probability of a successful change. In all cases, steering has to remain a prerogative of the organisation, with the experts only providing methodological and analytical support.
We’d also recommend our article on users’ mental workload.
