Organisational change is ubiquitous. According to the CIPD, “All organisations are in flux: changing their focus, expanding or contracting their activities and rethinking their products and services.” Changes can be large and can affect a whole industry, or they can be small and affect a simple process within a single team or department.
One example of industry-wide change is banking. Firstly, there has been a move away from face to face, retail banking to online banking. According to a recent Which? report, over 1,000 UK bank branches were closed between January 2015 and January 2017, with HSBC stating “that the amount of footfall in its branches had fallen on average by 40% in the last five years as a result of more customers banking online.” Secondly, the rise of smartphones has enabled customers to manage their money via their mobiles. Banks have developed mobile apps to allow their customers to carry out transactions whenever they want and wherever they are. Now we have the introduction of OpenBanking moving away from the bank’s own online service completely.
The impact has been significant. While the purpose of the banking industry remains unchanged, the way in which business is conducted and how organisations interact with their customers has fundamentally changed. It has resulted in the establishment of new infrastructures and operating models, all of which put tremendous pressure on leaders and frontline staff to be re-skilled and confident in the new ways of working.
Any organisational change can bring uncertainty to an organisation and its employees, so it is key that people at all levels understand what is driving the change and why things need to be done differently to ensure the organisation’s future success.
In this white paper we look at some of the forces for change and why change fails. 70% of organisational change initiatives fail according to the Harvard review. We believe some of the failures can be attributed to three common challenges:
- Inability to define the desired result of the change programme.
- Lack of a detailed plan on how to achieve a defined vision.
- Resistance because the people in the organisation have not been involved and are not committed to it.
We focus primarily on reasons 1 and 2 and how Business Simulation Games can help illustrating our argument with examples for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Brexit. Challenges that affect almost every organisation.