By Michael L. Tushman, Anna Kahn, Mary Elizabeth Porray & Andy Binns
Retailers combine data on demographics and weather to predict sales and develop merchandising plans. Back lenders use predictive analytics engines to tell them whether a customer is likely to pay them back. Analysis of Google searches can more accurately predict price changes in the housing market than can a team of real-estate forecasters.
Change management, however, remains relatively untouched by the data revolution, even as many change programs fail to achieve their goals.
Marketing has moved from soft to hard science in the past 20 years, and so, too, will change management. But first we have to understand why data has failed to catch on in this area.
A big obstacle is the change management profession itself (of which we are all proud members). The field hasn’t been based on data. That’s because so many of the relevant issues depend on human behavior— intangible factors like culture, leadership and motivation.
Change management works when professionals successfully weave together a set of practices to help a business reach its goals. Change practitioners operate as artisans, not scientists. They struggle to reach the levels of proof in their work that a marketing or supply-chain professional takes for granted.
This makes it difficult for a data-driven CEO to justify investing in change management. With no data to validate the return on investment, change management doesn’t attract the resources it requires, and the results depend on the caliber of the artisans at work.
Improving the tools that the artisans use may make for better outcomes, but it won’t enable demonstrable cause and effect. Converting change management from an art to a science is the key to solving this problem.
Michael L. Tushman is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and the director of Change Logic. Anna Kahn is a partner in Ernst & Young’s people advisory services. Mary Elizabeth Porray is a partner/principal at EY’s people advisory services. Andy Binns is the managing principal of Change Logic.