You voted and we delivered! This was the number one most requested topic based on an informal poll of our listeners on Facebook. Here it is! Organization change management with a very special guest, Nicole Ripley.

About Nicole:
Nicole Ripley is a Senior Manager, Technology Consulting at Armanino LLP. She is a Certified Project Management & Change Management professional living in Austin Texas. She graduated with a Business degree from Concordia University in Austin Texas, with an emphasis in Human Resources because of her desire to know, understand and help the people side of organizations. During college, she worked in a Marketing and Communication department as a Project Manager. After graduating, she began working with technology firms to help them realize their strategic visions and eventually she went into consulting. Working as a PM for consulting firms and seeing the pain clients went through during times of change spurred her to expand her expertise and use her intuition to its fullest extent by obtaining her Organizational Change Management certification. As the Change Management Practice Lead within Armanino, she provides clients with methods and tools they can use to lead their organization through transformation with an increase in employee engagement and change adoption which directly influences successful outcomes for their projects or strategic initiatives.

Here are Ron’s Questions from the Episode:

What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? How’d you get into change management
You worked in marketing as well. Who was that with, an agency, a corporation?
When did you join Armanino? [January 21, 2019]
I can imagine the competitive advantage it would be if an organization developed a core competency in change management.
You cite McKinsey, Bain, Gartner, and Harvard Business Review: 60-70% of projects fail because the people side of change is not considered, and preparations are not in place to help individuals succeed in making the shift. That’s an astonishing statistic.
I wanted to get your attitude on this philosophically: organizations don’t really change, people change? Like you say, this is a people journey.
Within VeraSage we have an ongoing debate Affectionately known as the Eff’ing Debate: We can be efficient with things, but have to be effective with people. That’s part of the challenge isn’t it, too much focus on efficiency and not enough on the human element.
You cite that an organization is six times more likely to meet or exceed project goals with effective change management. I’m going to ask you to prove it, and ask if that’s been your experience with the organizations you’ve consulted with. You also say that most successful OCM initiatives begin before the project starts. There’s got to be a lot of involved in that process?
Do you find projects more successful when there’s an outside consultant brought in? It’s hard to see the label when you’re inside the can.
I just finished the book, Unlearn, and he walked you through this process of an unlearning cycle. I wanted to get your thoughts on how you approach unlearning, since it’s such a big part of OCM. Do you change minds to get changes in behavior, or do you change their behavior and that will change their minds. I’ve seen it work both ways, but I have to admit, changing behavior might be faster. What are your thoughts on that?
When we first spoke, I sent you the Backward Bicycle video. Unlearning can be a big challenge.
When you’re trying to put in a new system, process, there’s this short U-shaped curve, where there’s going to be a drop in performance when they’re making that change, and then it’s going to rise above where they were before the change. How do you deal with that dip? When you’re in that dip, that’s when people will say, “We’re not getting the ROI on this” because that’s when people will want to kill the whole program. How do you handle that?
You’re managing their expectations from the start. I love that “valley of despair” phrase.
What organizations do you admire and think that they get OCM right?
I think OCM is similar to the pricing movement, we see more and more organizations beginning to build pricing competence.

…and Here Are Ed’s Questions

Let’s back up a bit here. Define what you mean by change management.
You’re focusing on the people rather than the technology side?
I used to call change management was a transition; change was the physical nature and the transition was the emotional response of the people to the physical change. We can physically change out an accounting system in a weekend, but people couldn’t adjust their emotional systems to the physical system in such a short period of time, and that was really the issue.
Let’s get specifically to OCM (or what I call transition), and discuss some of the techniques. Often times you are probably brought in too late to the process. Am I correct about that?
What are the first couple of steps you do in a situation where the implementation has gone sideways mostly due to the emotional response of the people, and now you’re in the middle of things, what do you do to extract yourself from that, other than stop digging?
You brought up the notion of resistance. One of the best methods when you encounter resistance is not to oppose it, but get people to talk about it. In a way it’s business psychology.
It’s called the “presenting problem.” What people say is the problem is really usually not the problem, there’s something else underlying it. What’s funny is they often blame the technology. But the reality is there’s an underscoring of fear if this system changes I might lose my job, and you’ve got to get that, and technologists just keep answering over and over how to fix the technology, and not deal with people’s concerns.
Ultimately, it’s all about people—nobody here but us people.
I wanted to ask you about some of the key metrics you might use to monitor how a project is going from a change management perspective. What is that you look at?
Definitely on-time performance is an important one.
The other measure I wanted your take on is one I asked everyone who was involved in the project to send me a rating between 1-6 every Friday. I called it the Confidence Level Indicator, which was their agreement with the following statement: “I am confident that this project will succeed?” When I saw a precipitous drop from one week to the next, there was usually something I could do Monday morning to turn things around a bit.
I wanted to ask you a really tough question: How do you deal with not just resistance, but sabotage?

Bonus Content is Available As Well

Did you know that each week after our live show, Ron and Ed take to the microphone for a bonus show? Typically, this bonus show is an extension of the live show topic (sometimes even with the same guest) and a few other pieces of news, current events, or things that have caught our attention.

Click the “FANATIC” image to learn more about pricing and member benefits.

Here are some of the topics and links Ron and Ed discussed during the bonus episode this past week: