When attempting to manage change in an organization you have to first understand that there is no such thing as organizational change - there is only people change. Organizations are simply groups of people working under a certain structure that enables them to accomplish the work at hand. It's important that you get that as most people don't.
Now that we have that out of the way, let's turn to the question of 'why' people change. Understanding the 'why' is the first step in the challenge of engaging people in the organization in the change efforts. If you miss this one, you'll miss lots more and your efforts will never get off the ground.
There are two reasons and two reasons only that people change. One is inspiration, the other is desperation. People are inspired to be different or they are forced through some form of desperation. Think about it... people change primarily around events like marriage, birth, death or a health crisis. Let me explain.
Several years back I was an alcoholic. I started drinking when I was fourteen years old. Growing up in a small town in Ohio, seventy-five people, and we had one saloon. If you could get your head over the bar, you could get served. My friends and I used to gather up soda bottles for two cents each and cash in a quarter's worth and buy a quart of Carling Black Label. That was my start.
Fast forward a little over a decade, I'm late twenties, married with one child and still drinking out of a fire hose. My time in Nam as a Marine sniper didn't help matters and after six years of marriage my wife had had all the fun she could take. Long story short, one day my wife punched me in the mouth and said, "Me, or drinking... make a choice!"
Well she changed my life and in that moment of desperation I made a choice... I changed. But I tried for years to change out of my own inspiration and each time I failed. For me, I couldn't make that dramatic change until my life was on the edge of the cliff and while it was difficult and very hard to do... I made it, purely out of desperation. While my change was personal, it is the same. Almost all 'organizational change' is also made out of desperation.
Think about IBM when they had to bring Lou Gerstner in to fix it. They put off the changes for years until they were near death as a corporation then brought Gerstner in out of desperation. Gerstner was talented and came with a mandate and his changes could be said to be out of inspiration. So what drove the changes was desperation, the changes were out of inspiration.
People in the organization, in IBM's case, were first forced to change out of desperation from the lack of leadership before Gerstner. After he took charge and introduced the changes necessary to save the business, the people were now being changed as a result of his inspiration. That's how it works. Change from inspiration happens twenty percent of the time and the other eighty percent comes from desperation.
I just returned from working with a large organization that decided to move a headquarters to Europe to save a couple hundred million on taxes. For the people here in this country, many with over twenty years with the company, one person's inspiration was their desperation. While it doesn't change the pain involved with changing, it does help to understand the 'why' of changing. When you're managing change, always understand the two reasons people change... one is inspiration and the other is desperation.
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