This is not the 80/20 rule
Everyone under the sun in the management consulting world seems to know that 80% of all change efforts fail. What I rarely hear ever is why is it that the 20% succeed. As a change management consultant who began his career carrying around the bags of some of the best independent OD professionals on the planet, I have my opinions. In this brief article, I will use the hospital industry as an example.
Why hospital change efforts fail
My wife is on her 3rd hospital where they have implemented e-charting. The first 2, the Detroit Medical Center and Garden City Hospital, both scrapped their e-charting systems and went back to paper-pencil charting. Why? Because the consulting firms that built the systems used the 'expert model' to build the systems.
If an MBA wants to interview you, hold on to your wallet
They included as FEW of the nurses as possible when building the system. In the end, they built a system that was unworkable to the nurses because they were spending more time on the computers than they were caring for the patients.
Involvement - a simple, yet miss ingredient
So, what happened? Well, in the DMC case, they paid Coopers & Lybrand 50M dollars for the system that is now in the toilet. That's right. They wasted 50M dollars. The problem was they hired a bunch of hot shot MBAs who came in and thought they knew everything. They interviewed the nurses to squeeze out of them the information they thought needed. Once they thought hey had enough, they cut off relations with their focus group, then designed the system themselves.
InvolveEveryone.com
Sounds pretty cool, huh? Well, I bought the domain, but have not used it yet. It is the answer, however. You can easily use a mixture of electronic surveys, standing focus groups, committees, and a half dozen other methods of involving nurses from the very beginning to the very end.
In conclusion, people support what they help create. If you involve everyone from start to finish, it is THEIR baby. Nobody calls their own baby ugly. Everyone nurse does whatever he or she can to help their own baby succeed.
About this Author
Ron Koller is a change management expert, author and speaker. He is co-author of Whole-Scale Change: Unleashing the Magic in Organizations (Berrett-Koehler, 2000). He works to help leaders involve their entire workforce in corporate change in a MANAGEABLE way. People support what they help create and resist what they do not have a hand in deciding. He is currently building http://www.ChangeManagementResources.com so that leaders have one place where they can find tools to manage their organizational changes more effectively. He can be reached at ron@fenwickkoller.com.
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