Creating organizational readiness is one of the most critical requirements for successful implementation.  While getting the “technical” aspects of the implementation accomplished—on time, and on budget—is indeed a major undertaking, unfortunately, it is not enough to reach the primary objective:  Return on Investment.  If we measure success as being anything less than ROI, we are missing the mark.  It’s common to wait until the project is relatively close to launch to start to think about readiness and adoption, but that’s a mistake.  In fact, if we are to achieve ROI, we should develop a strategy for creating readiness very early in the project development cycle. 

Two Questions to Answer
Think about the people who will be most impacted by the changes resulting from your project or initiative.  These are what we call the “targets”, and each target looks at the change from his or her individual Frame of Reference.  There are two simple questions that all individuals ask in the face of change:  “What’s the impact of this on me?” and “What’s in it for me?”  These simple questions have great significance on the eventual outcome of our projects, because they point to why it is so important to have strategies and tactics in place that create readiness for the change.  The more work we do up front to help to answer these questions, the better job we will do at managing the inevitable resistance.  This is the hard work of managing change, and it can’t be done solely through a constant flow of one-way communication updates on the progress of the project. 

Change Equals Disruption
Once we understand that from the targets’ Frame of Reference, change equals disruption, we begin to see that whether the change is perceived to be good or bad, it is the disruption that creates the resistance.  We can actually anticipate what the impact of a change will be on a target by using a diagnostic tool called the Individual Readiness Assessment.  This Assessment measures perceptions across nine key dimensions of the change.  From the target’s Frame of Reference, does this implementation:

1.    Have low perceived need?

2.    Have unclear expectations?

3.    Have unknown outcomes?

4.    Have negative impacts?

5.    Seem irreversible?

6.    Have low reward and high cost?

7.    Cause a high level of disruption?

8.    Have low involvement?

9.    Imply poor past performance?

By measuring the responses to these questions, we can begin to pinpoint likely areas of resistance, and develop targeted, data-based strategies that will help surface and manage the resistance. 

Management’s Accountability

With the data in hand, we can work with leaders on implementing strategies for surfacing and managing resistance.  Leaders must play a key role and have accountability for creating readiness for the change, because this is not a task that can be completed solely by a project team.  We can teach leaders how to be much more effective in this role, as it is, in fact, a management skill.

So while resistance to change is a natural and inevitable dynamic in any implementation, unsurfaced and unmanaged resistance costs money, time, and threatens implementation success.  If we start early, take a data-based approach, and teach leaders how to deal with resistance from the targets’ Frame of Reference, we will dramatically improve the odds of achieving Return on Investment.

The Individual Readiness Assessment can be conducted electronically in your own organization.  To learn more, contact us at 303-996-7777 or 800-752-9254.