You Can’t Manage Change

The Buddha CEO blog is dedicated to "creating happiness and building business value”.  This process will necessitate some type of organizational change.

An email exchange I had with a client this week really got me to focus in on this age old problem of change management.  Please see the content of that email below:

No matter how well intentioned, it is very easy to fall back into predictable familiar patterns.  It takes roughly 21 days to build a sustainable new habit.

Organizational change is a little like going to the moon.  Most of the thrust is needed from takeoff until you break the Earth's atmosphere.  Takeoff for you was Friday the 30th.  Breaking free of the Earth's atmosphere for you will occur after approximately 21 days of sustained effort to integrate the new tools you have learned into your daily routine.

Once you get into outer space or your new frontier of change, really all it takes is constant, little, minor adjustments, but very little thrust.  Moon missions were only on their intended paths about 3% of the trip.  Therefore, they required constant checking and re-checking of the flight path. 

However, the adjustments needed to get the flight back on track were minor and took very little energy as long as they engaged in the constant checking and re-checking to make sure they were not too far out of their plan. 

If you let your change initiative, get too far off track, it is almost like starting all over again.

As I reflected on the massive difficulties and frustrations organizations go through to evolve and change and the resulting amount of headache and heartache involved it occurred to me that we are using the wrong tool for the job.

For those of you who attempt home improvement projects around the house, you can well appreciate the value of having the right tool for the job.  It makes the job at hand infinitely easier and more enjoyable.

So, let’s make organizational change easier and more enjoyable and more successful by making sure we are using the correct tool.

The light bulb that went off in my head is that you CAN NOT manage change because change is largely a people function.  Stephen Covey has always taught that you manage things and you lead people, but you can’t lead things or manage people.

Yes, change is process oriented as well and that requires management.  But the fundamental determinant of success of a change effort will always lie with people as opposed to process and so the dominate force in the change effort must be leadership and NOT management.

To see how wrong we are on this look at the results of my recent Google searches below:

Results 1 - 10 of about 27,700,000 for Leading change. (0.19 seconds) 

Results 1 - 10 of about 75,000,000 for change management. (0.18 seconds) 

Results 1 - 10 of about 18,300,000 for change leadership. (0.42 seconds) 

75M hits for change management vs. only 18M for change leadership of 28M for leading change.

Now, let’s look at the results from a Wikipedia search below:

Change Management is a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state. The current definition of Change Management includes both organizational change management processes and individual change management models, which together are used to manage the people side of change.


There are no Wikipedia page titled “Change leadership” or "Leading Change"!

No wonder we experience the degree of angst and gnashing of teeth that we do.

Please STOP trying to manage change and start LEADING it instead.

How do you lead change in your organizations?  We would love to hear from you!