Change we can believe in

In a departure from our scheduled crawl through "Creativity" by Mihaly C just to write a post about something change management. Unless you have a friend who's a librarian (thanks James), you won't be able to read this in it's entirety.

One of the reasons I began this blog was because I feel there is a lack of rigour, interest in new thinking, and to be frank basic, competence in some of the underpinning theory and practice of what passes for organisational training. I have worked for many years in various guises as an OD consultant, change manager, trainer on some fairly well known major initiatives in local government and the private sector, and for all the bafflingly complex approaches to change, from Prince 2 to John Kotter I am always amazed by the inherent lack of coherence in the field.

Despite the somewhat jargony title, the article in question has a very simple experimental basis. Take a well researched psychological tool for making change, in this case cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and find an industry going through massive change, in this case an insurance firm going through a merger.

Next focus on a group of people, sales agents here, and divide them into two groups one who will receive the change intervention and one which will not. Finally select a way of measuring whether your intervention has been successful or not, in this case job satisfaction, self esteem productivity and general turnover.

Finally run the experiment, then compare groups and see if your intervention worked.

So seven weeks, 3 months and 2 years later how have our two groups fared?

• Psychological stress (measured on several different scales) requiring psychological intervention reduced from 37% of respondents at the start to 10% after the intervention
• Reduction of 66% in staff turnover in the group receiving the intervention compared to the group that didn't
• These differences persisted after a three month evaluation.
  
• After two years 65% of those who received the training hit their sales target compared with 29% of those who didn't receive the training.

I am aware of methodological limits in this kind of study, sample sizes, gender differences etc, but I am not aware of any scientific studies of any other consistent way of managing change in organisations. Surely the cost of an evidence based, repeatable, seven week training programme for your staff and possible counselling in between is a better bang for your buck than the millions presently spent on consultants fees?