Hello all! I am in the middle of working through Prosci’s Chief Innovation Office Tim Creasey’s post titled Change Management Trends Outlook 2024 and Beyond. The post is based off of Prosci’s Best Practices in Change Management – 12th Edition research. Topics include:

In last week’s post I took a look at the Top five expected organizational changes in 2024 and beyond section of the post. This week, I’ll begin focusing on the 6 meta trends in the change management data section.

As the Prosci post points out, the organization started conducting specific research on change management trends in 2013. From 2013-2023, six meta trends materialized in the data.

• Converging people, culture, and strategy
• Adopting Agile
• Increasing awareness of the need for change management
• Leveraging technology
• Building organizational change capability
• Integrating change management and project management

Increasing awareness of the need for change management

According to a decade of Prosci research (and probably many of your personal experiences) increasing awareness of the need for change management is something we have always been up against as a discipline. The post talked about the need to show tangible benefits through change management data analysis, helping people explore the consequences of ignoring the people side of change, and demonstrating its impacts on the organization’s bottom line.

This got me to thinking about what’s gotten in our way of making the need for, and benefits of, change management clear to the people / businesses we work with and, more importantly, what can we do to make progress in better communicating these things. Here’s some of what I’ve come up with:

What’s gotten in our way of making the need for, and benefits of, change management clear and what can we do to make progress in communicating these things?

• If you do an internet search for the definition of change management, you will find lots of them. I think we need one (or as few as possible) clear, concise, relatable, easy to understand definition.
• If you’ve read many of my blog posts, you already know I think we need to do a way better job at defining what we mean when we say “the people side of change”.
• We need to change how we practice change management, moving from “telling and training” / doing change to people to taking a human-centric approach and doing change with people.
• When articulating the benefits of change management we need to, as Stephen Covey says, begin with the end in mind. We need to learn the language and goals of the people / businesses we work with and articulate the benefits in ways that matter / make sense to them.

We need to learn the language and goals of the people / businesses we work with and articulate the benefits of change management in ways that matter / make sense to them.

Closing thoughts

I’m not exactly sure of all the reasons why after the change management discipline having been around for over 30 years we still struggle with making the need for, and benefits of, the discipline clear to the people / businesses we work with. I am confident, though, focusing on making it clear what “the people side of change” is, what change management is and offers, partnering with our fellow human beings instead of doing things to them, and articulating the benefits of change management from the perspective of and in the language of the business would go a long way in alleviating this struggle.

I want to hear from you. How have you struggled making the need for and benefits of change management clear? What has worked well for you? Please post your thoughts and comments below. Let’s help each other become the best change management practitioners and enthusiasts we can be!

Thank you for reading. Until next time, take care and keep up the good work!

Mike