ALL executives are accountable for change. If you know 'what', someone can help with 'how'

Change has become synonymous with upheaval and chaos, and as a result, it has become critical for companies to understand how better to manage change. Indeed, few of us have probably encountered more global change at a single sitting than we are experiencing right now!

Change within an organisational entity, where an entity may refer to an entire organisation, parts of the organisation, or relationships between organisations, is simply the difference in form, quality or state over time of that entity. Furthermore, it is useful to distinguish the process of change from the content of change. Content refers to what it is that actually changes within an entity, as well as considering the antecedents and consequences of that change. On the other hand, process refers to how change occurs, and considers the sequences of events that occur as change progresses over time within the organization. 

The above is a very important distinction to understand for next time a change management guru comes knocking at your door. Are they process consultants, or are they content consultants? As an executive, you not only ought to have a depth of content as a result of being accountable for various aspects of the business, but you also ought to have a good view of the process required to implement change. On the other hand, the typical change manager needs to be an expert at the process, integrating your content into it. 

As an executive, the main type of change you encounter tends to be change that changes the organisation's operating boundaries, changes brought about by mergers, acquisitions, or divestitures of organizational units; changes that establish joint ventures, partnerships or strategic alliances; or organizational expansions or contractions in regions, markets and/or in the products and services portfolio. Most if not all of these changes are quite dramatic. In fact, any change with financial consequences tends to be dramatic. This is because these activities tend to make fundamental changes to the organisation that needs to be managed with particular care, as activities such as these have the potential to forcefully interrupt the status quo and to cause all sorts of operating model disruption, whether in people, process or technology. 

As an executive, it is also important to realise which changes are controllable, and thus those which can be planned for, versus uncontrollable change which takes particular leadership and management skill to master. 

• Intentional change is any change required to achieve an organisational goal, financial, market-oriented, process-oriented or resource-oriented. They could be simple, from optimising the procurement process, to complex, such as selling off a non-core business entity. Staff key performance indicators are normally set according to intentional change.
• Uncontrollable change occurs largely in the political, competitive or legislative domains, such as changes to the credit act, which will result in changes to processes, technology and to people, often in the form of training. Much of this is almost 'grudge' change, diverting resources from planned outcomes, and which therefore have the power to change a whole lot within the business. It is important for executive leadership to contextualise this change and even to amend their key performance indicators so that staff don't become demotivated.  

What is important to note that both changes outlined above are content changes. A process expert ought to be able to improve the management of changes such as these by encapsulating them within a people-centric process.

In conclusion, my experience that proper change management is not only about managing change interventions such as those outlined above, but rather, as a result of the state of continuous change that business operates in these days, that change management becomes a constant part of your business as much as IT or Finance may be.