When change derails

Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for me to get a call asking for help with change enablement AFTER the project is already in the process of derailing.

In an effort to save that particular project, it can be tempting to go into crisis mode and pump hours and dollars into recovery. But what if that just makes the problem worse?

One of the hardest things to do when a project starts to unravel is to take a moment to assess what is really going wrong. Too often, crisis mode activities are aimed at symptoms and not at the root cause of the problem, and problems that are big enough to jeopardize the overall success of a change won’t go away on their own.

Competing priorities and calendars that are too full can make the idea of pulling out the big guns and ramming the change through all too appealing, but that approach is almost never sustainable and, even if you can temporarily get the change implemented, you’ll soon be in a worse place than when you started. You’ve just paid the problem forward.

Problems have causes. If you don’t invest the effort to understand what those causes are, you’re just shooting in the dark — wasting time, energy, and any buy-in you might have gained.

The good news is that these causes are usually pretty easy to identify and often quite simple to address.

Need help? Contact me — I’d be happy to chat!