Halcyon: Ensuring Successful Change Management

When it comes to adopting new ways of working, both tech-related and not, organisations can go through numerous struggles to get changes fully adopted by all users, and this can lead to failure of change.

Halcyon aims to revolutionise change in order to help organisations adopt new ways of work, with or without technology. Halcyon is constantly looking for new ways to evolve and enhance our change management knowledge and approach, and as such we have recently begun to shape our work around the ADAPT theory, which was influenced by Dr John Kotter’s ideas on implementing successful change management.   

Kotter’s eight steps to successful change

Kotter’s theory revolves around eight steps that will lead to successful organisational change. He argues that 70% of major change efforts in organisations fail due to leaders not employing sufficiently rigorous and holistic steps in change management and thus are not able to overcome large personal and organisational inertia to resist change.

His eight steps to successful change are:

1. Establish a sense of urgency – help others feel determination to move and win, now
2. Create a guiding coalition – put together a group with enough power to lead the change
3. Develop a clear shared vision – clarify how the future will be different from the past
4. Communicate the vision – ensure that as many people as possible understand and accept the vision
5. Empower people to act on the vision – remove as many barriers as possible and allow people to do their best work
6. Create short term wins – create visible, unambiguous success as soon as possible
7. Consolidate and build on gains
8. Institutionalise the change – anchoring new approaches in the culture for sustained change.

Kotter’s theory follows the importance of ensuring key people within the organisation communicate effectively the vision behind the change so as to successfully encourage a high rate of adoption of the new way of working.

Halcyon’s ADAPT theory

Halcyon customers get the best from leading technology through our transformation model that engages stakeholders, lots of communication, interaction with the people and followed up with extensive training and monitoring.

We have found that the only way users adopt new technology is if they are well prepared, and they embrace the changes. Halcyon ensures a higher rate of consumption and adoption of technology in the workplace. When technology is consumed at a higher rate, a better return on investment is achieved.

The Halcyon team uses a change management theory based off Kotter’s ideas – ADAPT – which involves five key actions: 

1.      ALTER

Having an understanding behind the importance of the change is key to getting your organisation on board by altering their mindset around how things currently work and accepting the change.

2.      DRIVE

Identify the key stakeholders, sponsors, advocates, and change champions and form a powerful partnership with someone who embraces the need for change and can rally others to adopt the change.

Conduct an impact and risk assessment to find out what else is going on in the organisation. Then create a vision of the desired result that everyone can work towards.

3.      ANNOUNCE

Communicating the vision will help ensure people understand the vision and why the organisation is moving towards the new way of working. Using one and two-way communications across multiple mediums, user profiling, roadshows, sponsors meetings and change champions meeting will allow you to communicate numerous times and further emphasises why the change is happening and the potential positive outcomes.

Ensure that you celebrate and publicise the wins to get staff excited and continue driving them.  

4.      PROCEED

Pilot a staged approach and begin the roll-out. Once the roll-out has begun, ensure you provide support so that the transition is as smooth as possible and fully adopted by the organisation.

5.      TRAIN

Provide training and refine the changes for optimum adoption. Celebrate and publicise success and continue to communicate across multiple mediums.

As a result of this methodology and the five key actions, Halcyon is committed to delivering higher rates of adoption and ensuring successful organisational change. This commitment is also reflected in the fact that Halcyon’s change managers are certified in APMG International Change Management.