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Richard Selwyn Posted: 07-21-2010 3:47 PM

We received the following question from a London Borough:

I would be interested to know at what point in the process a formal change programme would be disbanded to enable the commissioning journey to continue as the ‘business as usual – albeit new way of working'.

Hi - good question and I think it gets to the root of why 70% of change programmes in industry (and potentially government) fail.

There's a tendency to think that once a programme has been put in place and it is starting to deliver the benefits, we can concentrate on the next initiative or change programme.  Unfortunately things are never that simple.  Often the positive changes we witness are short-term changes to people's actions rather than real behavioural change - this takes more time.

It will sound unrealistic, but I'd suggest that to embed a significant redesign of children's services (including a culture change for professionals), that embedding should be actively managed for the next 5 years or so.  If the benefits require a culture change in society and users, then I'd suggest about 10 to 15 years of actively embedding the change.

If you compare those timescales to the cycle of new initiatives and local / central elections - we start to see why it's so difficult to embed real change.  However, there are some things we can do to make it more likely for an Outcomes & Efficiency whole system design to deliver sustainable benefits.  The DfE Change Management Jigsaw shows the 9 most important factors in a local change programme (the tool was created by children's services commissioners).

Overall I think the most important elements of the 9 are the burning platform and the vision.  We have a burning platform with the economic climate, but a vision is more difficult when staff are feeling very demoralised.  One County Council going through an Outcomes & Efficiency programme has benchmarked themselves against other countries to show how much better local outcomes could be if they redesigned services - I think that's a positive start to establish a vision for better local services and better lives, despite the cuts.  If you can establish a local vision that professionals and users buy into - then you are closer to changing the way we think and behave rather than just changing actions.

I was wondering if colleagues might have other views that they would like to share?  e.g.

Qu: Can colleagues in other local areas offer views of what works best to embed change?  

Qu: How long do you think we should actively embed change for?

thank you for your question, Richard

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