In the beginning…

It all begins with an idea.

A group of close work friends, all enmeshed in the world of delivering large complex change programs into corporate Australia, meet virtually to cope with COVID-19. To feel connected as humans. To consider how we can emerge - and what role should our discipline of change management (read organisational psychology, leadership coaching, customer engagement design, behavioural economics, social cognitive neuroscience, good old fashioned project change delivery) have in structuring a different way of thinking about and delivering change, that can be part of the healing solution to the post-traumatic experience of Australian business.

We have all become master Zoomers, can deliver amazing virtual conferences, workshops, coaching sessions and team meetings. We are applying better practice in meeting the needs of the brain, we are making the extra effort to connect as people, we are doing everything right. And yet there is a hole. There is a human-shaped gap where the non-verbal clues that foster meaningful trust and engagement are becoming increasingly apparent. Business globally is starting to cautiously emerge into the CBDs - but with the constant fear of state lockdowns and mask-free areas full of unknown risk, we are all still pretty wary.

As a collective of practitioners, you could say that we have been around the block a few times, with plenty of silver vixen/fox experience under our combined belt. As a gaggle of ‘changies’ we were already looking towards the Future of Work with a heightened sense of curiosity. There are a number of critical factors that are weaving into this story of complexity:

1. Customers’ expectations are in perpetual motion. Lockdown saw unprecedented increases in online purchasing. Customers expect/ demand amazing digital presence, 24/7 support, deferred payment options for everything.

2. Technology is no longer an inhibitor to people’s ability to work from anywhere. How, not where, is the new normal. Having proven that most corporate roles can be successfully delivered from a home working environment, all the research coming out through McKinsey, PwC, HBR and the like point to the fact that there is very little interest in rushing back to a five-day week in the city work environment.

3. Most PMOs are trying to drive holistic portfolios of change that include some or all of the following:

   • Regulatory change (especially in financial services)

   • Technology-centred transformation (core system replacement, new and ‘innovative’ digital offerings)

   • Some version of ‘return to the office’ (don’t let the CBD die, don’t let us waste millions of dollars on empty depressing office spaces)

   • Most will be dropping a restructure somewhere in the business

   • Shifts with offshore service providers, as the winners and losers of Chinese, Philippine, South African and Indian responses to maintaining service standards through the various government’s responses to the pandemic start to play out in the choices made by Australian businesses

   • There will be grand reset strategies emerging that cautiously speak of growth and customer retention

   • None of these projects is happening in a vacuum. Our delivery environments are increasingly complex

4. The role of people leaders (and I’m not talking C-Suite here - I mean leader of people and leader of leaders) as the critical translators for their people as they navigate the operationalisation of a multiplicity of change on top of hard pushing of KPIs and trying to be great coaches, great communicators and great servant leaders. These peeps are doing it tough. They want their teams to be happy, they want (for the most part) to be accommodating, to support ongoing flexibility and to maintain team life/work integration.

It's enough to make your head spin. Then throw in the need for organisational agility (which I’ll cover off more deeply in the next article) and what we have is a high risk that some part or all of the changes we are trying to play through will fail, to some degree, to deliver their agreed ROI.

Part of the risk we carry now is that we try to bypass the complexity and gallop into the simplicity on the other side. We can’t just emerge, fully formed, on the other side of the complexity without doing the slow work, without doing the deep thinking, without engaging in people experience-centric delivery risk management.

So this is why we have formed Change as Usual. Business as usual is no longer a thing, there is no static state. We are in perpetual motion and the things we need to integrate into our approaches to change delivery need to focus on building organisational agility as much as our personal comfort as leaders with living in some degree of ambiguity and uncertainty.

We want to connect with, and support, a small number of interested and engaged PMOs/Transformation offices, Program sponsors, and forward-thinking businesses to experiment with new models of engagement and change delivery. If you are interested please hit me up either through the website, by email or via socials.