Amongst professional change practitioners, a favourite love-hate subject is how Change Management differs from Project Management.

Disambiguation first: By ‘Change Management’ I mean, Organisational-People Change Management, not ITIL Change Management or Product Change Management or any of those functional-centric views of managing how a change gets made.

Of course, Project Management and Change Management both take a functional view of change being made. After all, projects are a mechanism to bring about a change.

So one way to differentiate is to emphasise that Change Management is about people.
This isn’t particularly useful, for Project Managers are people too, and emotionally intelligent ones care about people aspects in doing great Project Management work.

Here’s my short elevator-ride (i.e. 10 seconds!) take on the difference:
• Project Management is concerned with Time, Cost, and Quality.
• Change Management is concerned with Hope, Trust, Compassion and Stability.

These four aspects for Change Management are from GALLUP’s research on what a Leader is about or does [1].  They say that Followers want four things: Hope, Trust, Compassion and Stability. The Leader’s job is to Create Hope, Build Trust, Show Compassion and Provide Stability.  Sounds like the perfect description for human-centred quality Change Management!

Let me expand a little on each of these.

HOPE is what gets people out of bed; has them believing in something they can’t yet see or touch; and gives them a sense of purpose in the midst of confusion, uncertainty or chaos. Hope is connected to optimism – a sense that there is a reason to be positive about a better and meaningful future. The absence of hope is doubt, which often results in pessimism.

TRUST is when people are confident that their belief in something is not misplaced; that the person or thing in which they are placing trust is reliable, will make good on promises and is worthy of being trusted. When there is high trust, people will be gracious, forgiving, and tolerate ambiguity and discomfort. The loss of trust is often felt as betrayal.

COMPASSION for some is synonymous with kindness, for others with pity. I see it as recognising that others are feeling something or experiencing something, for which your consideration and thoughtful actions would provide a degree of comfort, solace or relief. Compassion is about connection to another human being; it requires attention and caring. The absence of compassion is separateness and neglect.

STABILITY is about ordering and organising the things that can be managed, and – with a combination of trust and compassion – having capacity available to cope and deal with things that can’t be managed. Change can be disruptive, that is the nature of change! But all changing doesn’t need to be handled as a surprise. You can get useful insights for advanced planning from people with knowledge gained from experience, and people with a sense of the future. When you can give stability to aspects (not all) of a changing process, you provide an anchor to weather the storms of that which cannot be predicted.

Hope, Trust, Compassion, Stability – are all things that deeply affect people, even if sometimes they can’t articulate it. The absence of these is often at the root cause for the failure of a change initiative.

I have a dream that organisational change initiatives will be shaped and led with Hope, Trust, Compassion and Stability as guiding principles; and that at the end of an initiative, the group of people who enabled the change and who were asked to change, will have more Hope, Trust, Compassion and the resilience to cope with instability than when the initiative started.

Anybody else share my dream?

[1] Rath, Tom, & Conchie, Barry. (2008). Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow: Gallup Press.

See the collection of resources for Hope, Trust, Compassion and Stability.

Author

Helen Palmer is Founder and Principal Change Agent at Questo. Like Winnie the Pooh, she ‘sits and thinks’ … and imagines how people can make a better life for others and themselves in their work-scape. She likes to share those thoughts with the possibility that they inspire and initiate meaningful change.