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Why “sending a memo” does not bring change

Change management is a hard concept to explain, let alone understand and buy into. And yet, that blurry concept is the very reason why “sending a memo” is simply not enough to make a team durably remove or incorporate a process step to their current procedure(s)…

Because, truthfully, the hardest part of the organizational change is not identifying what is currently not working optimally, or even deciding what needs to be done differently (i.e. what would happen before “sending the memo”). Rather, it is adjusting the people’s mindsets and behaviors to the new reality that requires time and attention. Usually described as the process of accompanying a group of people, successful change management involves multiple components, but for the sake of this article, we can limit them to 2 major ones: people and time.

How can we reduce something seemingly as complex as change management to people and time? Because change management essentially exists solely because “old habits die hard” and because as human beings, we are naturally resistant to change. The same way teaching someone to ride a bike requires several stages, change needs to be discussed, agreed upon, coached and monitored over time with all the stakeholders in order to be adhered to successfully.

The most acclaimed change management model (ADKAR) states that individual need to go through 5 sequential stages to durably accept a new state: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement. The Trindent methodology is built so that each one of our projects tackles each stage with a realistic timeframe set up in the project plan to ensure full subscription from our clients’ team.

This blog was written by Adeline Bibet, Senior Consultant at Trindent Consulting. She has extensive experience implementing change and improving efficiencies for organizations in the financial services, healthcare and energy industries.