Transformation Of Ghana Police Service Into A World Class Police (Part II)

One may ask, what is the key to successful organizational change? The answer to this question is broadly answered in the fact that there are many ways to help guide an organization through their development. The one aspect of successful organizations that is never changing is that they have found a way to bring all employees on board with the changes. This sounds like easy solution, however it is proven that most organizations fail to do this seemingly simple task.

In fact according to Siberman, “up to 70% of change initiatives fail”. Xiongwei Song states that “Change management fails from four perspectives; leadership, culture, people issues and quick responses”. Organisations refusing to go through change will eventually wither and fall. Whether that change has to do with the growth of the organization, changing the status quo or just keeping up with day and age, it is important for them to take the risk of change for success.

The most important models to produce change in any organisation include: Kurt Lewin’s Change Management Model, Kotter’s 8 Step Change Model and McKinsey’s 7-S model. These models are similar but have many differences and all have the potential to provide tool for success.

Change is more likely to happen when leaders-in the form of sponsors and champions- support it. It is in this regard that in the first part of this paper, I congratulated the Inspector- General Police, Mr. David Asante Apeatu for leading a change.

Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines Change Management System as “ Structured process that will cause proposed changes to be reviewed for technical and business readiness in a consistent manner that can be relaxed or tightened to adjust to business needs and experiences and could involve a database to help staff make better decisions about future changes based on historical data such as success or failure of similar changes” or “ structured process that will communicate the status and existence of changes to all affected parties and could yield an inventory system that indicates what and when actions were taken that affected status of key resources, as an aid in problem determination or resource management”

Kurt Lewin , sought to apply psychology to the problems of society which led to the development of M.I.T Research Center for Group Dynamics (Greathouse) in 1969. His overall goal was to “ reach beyond the mere description of group life and to investigate the conditions and forces which bring about or resist it.” He put up a three- a stage model of change that is known as the (melting) unfreezing- (poured into mould)change- ( frozen again)refreeze model that requires prior learning to be rejected and replaced. Lewin’s theory states behaviour as “a dynamic balance of forces working in opposing directions.” The model represents a very simple and practical model for understanding the change process. For Lewin, the process of change entails creating the perception that a change is needed, then moving toward the new, desired level of behaviour and finally, solidifying that new behaviour as the norm. This model is still widely used and serves as the basis for any modern change models.

Kurt Lewin concluded that, before a change can be implemented, it must go through the initial step of unfreezing,

Communication is especially important during the unfreezing stage so that employees can become informed about the imminent change, the logic behind it and how it will benefit each employee. The idea is that the more we know about a change and the more we feel it is necessary and urgent, the more motivated we are to accept the change.

Lewin recognized that change is a process where the organization must transition or move into his new stage of being. This changing step, he referred to as “transitioning” or “moving”, is marked by the implementation of the change. This is when the change becomes real. It is also, consequently, the time that most people struggle with the new reality. It is a time marked with uncertainty and fear, making it the hardest step to overcome. During the changing step, people begin to learn the new behaviours, processes and ways of thinking. The more prepared they are for this step, the easier it is to complete. For this reason, education, communication, support and time are critical for employees as they become familiar with the change. Again change is a process that must be carefully planned and executed. Throughout this process, employees should be reminded of the reasons for the change and how it will benefit them once fully implemented.

Lewin called the final stage of his change model freezing, but many refer to it as refreezing to symbolize the act of reinforcing, stabilizing and solidifying the new state after change. The changes made to organizational processes, goals, structures, offerings or people are accepted and refrozen as the new norm or status quo. Lewin found the refreezing step to be especially important to ensure that people do not revert back to their old ways of thinking or doing prior to the implementation of the change. Efforts must be made to guarantee the change is not lost; rather, it needs to be cemented into the organisation’s culture and maintained as the acceptable way of thinking or doing.

Positive rewards and acknowledgement of individualized efforts are often used to reinforce the new state because it is believed that positively reinforced behaviour will likely be repeated. Some argue that the refreezing step is outdated in contemporary business due to the continuous need for change. They find it unnecessary to spend time freezing a new state when chances are it will need to be re-evaluated and possibly changed again in the immediate future.

John Kotter’s Eight –Step Change Process

John Kotter, currently the head of research at Kotter International, Teaching the High Potentials Leadership Program at Harvard Business School, introduced his eight- step change process in his 1995 book, “Leading Change”. The steps in order include, create urgency, form a powerful coalition, create a vision for change, communicate the vision, empower action, create quick wins, build on the change and anchor the changes in corporate culture. The steps provide a guide on “how you simply go beyond getting your message across to truly change peoples behaviour” and how the “ heart of change can alter the way organizations and leaders approach change management”.

The first step, creating urgency is essentially the most important step says Kotter, as he believes that creating urgency include but not limited to, examining the market and competitive realities, identifying and discussing crisis, potential crisis, or major opportunities or providing evidence from outside the organization that the change necessary.

The second step, forming a powerful coalition, involves bringing the right people to lead the organization towards change as well as continuing to create urgency about the change.

The third step is to create a vision for change. Top do this management should determine the values that are central to the change. Create vision to help direct the change effort and develop strategies for achieving that vision.

According to Kotter’s step four , communicating the vision is all about “using every vehicle possible to

Communicate the new vision and strategies”. It is important during this step to remember to teach new behaviours by example.

The fifth step is to empower action. This step puts emphasis on removing all obstacles to change and changing the systems that work against the vision. For example, during this stage, a company could build optimism by using inspirational or personal stories from the workforce or reward achievement to various employees.

To be successful in the sixth step, creating short-term wins, an organization should plan for and achieve visible performance improvements, recognize and reward those involved in bringing the improvement to life. Kotter argues that, “ many change projects fail because victory is declared too early,”, Therefore in the seventh step, it is important to always analyse what went right and what needs improving and to continue to set goals, building on the momentum the organization has achieved.

The seventh step emphasizes building on the change that has occurred and not settling, but realizing more improvements that can be made.

The final stage involves anchoring the changes or making them stick. By articulating the connections between the new behaviours and corporate success, Kotter believes the change will stick.

McKinsey 7-S Model
The McKinsey 7-S Model is different from the other two models to change in that it addresses the role of co-ordination rather than structure in organization effectiveness. Tom Peters and Robert Waterman created the model in the late 1970’s. Their goal was to show how seven different elements of the company could be aligned together to achieve effectiveness in the workplace. The seven key areas of the model include; structure, strategy, skills, staff, style, systems and shared values.

To better visualize how the seven elements work together to provide organisational effectiveness, Peters and Waterman created the following frame work: The Hard S and the Soft S. Strategy, Structure and Systems are referred to as the Hard S elements. These are the three elements of the model that are slightly easier to define. Management tends to have a better time influencing the hard elements in the organization which include strategy, statement and organizational charts.

The bottom four Soft S elements : skills, staff, style and shared values, are more difficult to describe and are influenced by the culture rather than management. All the seven of the elements are interdependent on one another. Change within one element requires change in the remaining six.

Waterman and Peters believe the framework is best used in five steps. They first believe it is important to identify the elements of the framework that are not aligning properly. This step also includes recognizing inconsistencies between the relationships of the element. In the second step, the organization should determine the optimal organizational design. It is important to note that this will be different for al l organisations. The third stage is deciding where and what changes should be made. The fourth step involves actually making the changes that are necessary. Peters and Waterman believe this implementation step is the most important stage in the organization process. The fifth and final stage is the continuous review of the 7S framework. The 7S’s will constantly be changing and it is important to keep up with each element individually.

Most effort at change fall short of their goals. According to Peter Senge and his colleagues in the book “Dance for Change: The Challenges of Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organisations,(New York: Currency double day, 1999)” many of their efforts to create learning organizations did not accomplish the intended results. Ron Ashkenas in “Beyond the Fads: How Leaders Drive Change with Results” writes that only 25-30 percent of change efforts actually succeed. Then came James Champy who shares similar findings about his work on “Re-engineering Management: The Mantle of Leadership”, reported success rates of about 25 to 33 percent. Clearly, interventions – no matter how well intentioned and carefully thought out – are far more difficult to put into action than we may think.

Many writers on change believe that change measurements matters and that genuinely will create the needed change. These writers believe that expressing enormous initial interest in the measurement approach to change, conduct a workshop or two about how to use these measurements, begin to sort out which measurement tools matter most, and track them once or twice.

Soon they discover that the commitment to the change was more rhetoric and hope than reality and action. In most cases, the “Q”, or technical aspect, of the change is manageable. (Executives can identify the right measures and create indices to assess them.) But high- quality thinking about the change as the scorecard as a change program never occurs. Much has been written about how to ensure that the desired changes actually happen.

In the work of General Electric for example, Steve Kerr, Dave Ulrich and their colleagues drew an apt metaphor for effecting successful change. They suggested thinking about change as a pilot’s checklist. Any pilot preparing for a flight rigorously follows a checklist to ensure that the aircraft is ready to fly. This checklist is not meant to be a teaching tool. Indeed, most of us would refuse even to climb into the plane if we discovered that the checklist was teaching the pilot. In other words, the checklist should contain few surprises. In addition, the pilot should complete each and every action on the list, without fail, every time she or he prepares to go for a flight. Like seasoned pilot, most managers know from both experience and research how to make change happen. The challenge however, is to figure out how to turn what they know into what they do. At General Electric, Kerr and Ulrich created a “pilot’s checklist” for making change happen and then helped managers developed the equivalent of a pilot’s discipline to apply this checklist to change projects.

Of course, extensive debate has arisen on how to define the critical features of successful change. Douglas Smith identifies ten characteristics of change leaders in his work, “Taking Charge of Change: Ten Principles for Managing People and Performance( Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1996). Michael Beer’s “ Why change Programs Don’t Produce Change ”, change model features five core factors.

I would argue that using a checklist – any – checklist - is more important than choosing one particular checklist over another. Trouble in implementing change comes not from misunderstanding what to do, but from a lack of discipline about how to do what needs doing.

A team of internal and external change agents designed the General Electric change checklist. Thierry reviewed more than 100 articles and books on individual, team, organizational and society change and then synthesize the findings into seven key factors. These factors have convergent validity in that they are consistent with the research on other models - in fact, they are drawn from them. Moreover, these factors have face validity – in other words, managers at General Electric have confirmed that these factors help make change happens. Finally the factors also have deployment validity.

However, as Lewin previously mentioned- without the refreezing step, there is a high chance that people will revert back and two steps back can be a common theme when organizations overlook the refreezing step in anticipation of future.

Authored by
Richmond Yao Willington
[email protected]