Changing your change!

One of the hardest things is changing your planned course of action in the work that you do.

You have carefully nurtured your idea and shared it. As it has grown stronger, it has emerged into the light, developing into a process.

It becomes the blueprint of what you are going to deliver. It becomes a steady and reassuring presence in your project.

Then it happens! A comment, a suggestion and then a challenge.

Someone suggests a better way.

Or you realise your thinking has shifted and there is a different way. Your precious change process has opened up to change.

If you are still going to deliver the value to your clients and meet the benefits you have mapped out, you now need to change the change!

But this acceptance is difficult. You have written your paper, got sign off from the board and socialised it with your stakeholders. Because you have acknowledged in your heart of hearts, the process needs to change and is no longer viable precisely as it is. You will have to do the work again.

You will have to explain to the very people you convinced before that it has to change.

So this introduces delay and creates more work. In some cases, on some parts of your project, you have to start again and engage with critical stakeholders to reposition them.

But the disruption and extra work are balanced by delivering something better than your original change. Your change idea is always a starting point based on what you know, then.

As soon as you start to explore the change, define it and plan to deliver it - the situation changes and the viability of your proposed solution can also change.

It takes courage to accept this and face into supporting and delivering the new approach. If you can maintain a view that things can change at any time or that your idea may not always be the best one or that its original form may evolve as you progress then something new may emerge that is better.

Of course, the change becomes locked down at some point, and you are committed to follow through and deliver, and any variation after this point will become a future adjustment that can to be provided as a phase two of your project.