Organizational Change
Transition or Transformation?
Change is hard.
Behavior is difficult to understand, and even more difficult to alter. Like people, every organization is unique. There are no two organizations with the same history, employees, processes or leaders. Your transformation must be considered this way as well—your unique organization requires a unique change strategy to fit your specific conditions.
However, there are some core concepts we can employ as we begin thinking about successful transformations.
Tactical vs Strategic Change
There is a lot to unpack with the word ‘change.’ There are two general kinds of activity within the field of change management: Tactical change and strategic change.
Tactical Change = Program-specific transition
Tactical change efforts are intrinsically linked to specific, concrete programs. Because of this, tactical change efforts usually deal with ‘known’ variables. They consequently rely on best practices for their structure and execution. Most traditional change management activities fall under this category.
The mission of tactical change activities is to transition stakeholders to a new process or technology. Success with tactical change efforts are generally thought of in terms of ‘adoption’ of a program (e.g., x% of employees now use a new platform). At the end of the day, tactical change activities should fit a broader strategy.
Examples of tactical change activities are training materials, communications, stakeholder reviews, or change impact assessments—activities that are always directly connected to new processes or technology.
Strategic Change = Program-agnostic transformation
Strategic change efforts are broader in scope from tactical change efforts. They focus on the environment of change programs themselves. These activities delve into ‘unknown’ variables since the nature of this work is entirely unique to a single organization.
The general goal of strategic change efforts is to profoundly transform the organization’s behavior. Success with these efforts are usually defined as progress towards strategic organizational objectives like employee engagement or greater utilization of learning materials. Before you dive into a program, you should engage in strategic change activities to set the vision—and substance—of that program.
Examples of strategic change activities are leadership vision-setting summits, leading and lagging metric workshops, or internal analyses of the habits of their leadership and culture.
What is your goal?
Both tactical and strategic change activities are tools and methods to accomplish different goals.
Perhaps leadership just need to realize their vision with tactical activities. Or it could be that vision is blurry and needs extra definition before any program kicks off. Or maybe there is nothing but a vague sense that something needs to change.
Every one of these scenarios require change activities to be successful. Get in touch today and we’ll help you understand your situation and needs, and select the best tool or methodology to positively influence long lasting behavior change in your organization.