Jen Frahm 0:04
Hello and welcome everybody to another episode of Conversations of Agile Change. I’m doctor Jen Fram. Now this is a really interesting conversation for me. ’cause just I think it was a day ago, two days ago the Association of Change Management Professionals dropped their latest White Paper on the future of change management. And as I was reading through it, I saw.
That they one of the things that particularly interested me was that they had called out.
That in terms of the future of change management was going to be really important to use agile methodologies in the space of merger and acquisitions. And I found this really curious as to why they would single out this specific area. And then more generally why that might be so. So fortuitously we have in our alumni the very fabulous emulation. Amy is an absolute gun in the space of mergers and acquisition. She has a long.
And experience of working in agile change. She contributed to one of the very first early books on agile change being managing change in an agile world by Kate Nelson, Gina Gianna, Telly and Shannon Stortberg. She’s done our courses and I have been privileged to work with her and see how incredibly talented she is. So Amy Leighton, welcome to this podcast episode.
Hot off the press off this white paper.
Amy Leighton 1:34
What an introduction. Thank you, Jen. I should hire you to give my forward speakings to everything that I go to, I think.
Yeah. Look, I it was very exciting to see that White Paper drop. Jen, I like you as you know, really pleased to see that both Agile mentioned but also in the M and a space because I think that is a beautiful pairing. So you’re happy to be here today to talk to you about it.
Jen Frahm 1:59
Fabulous. I’m really keen to get into this. Let’s let’s start. Big picture. Big picture. Let’s zoom out. If we think about the state of change in mergers and acquisitions.
Can you describe what you’re seeing at the moment in M and a work, and perhaps how it’s changed over the the last five years and you or is that appropriate time period? You know, tell us what’s been happening in the space.
Amy Leighton 2:24
Yeah. I mean, five, maybe the last five to 10 years has been a huge shift, I would say in the M and a space and and the delivery of of M and A, if I think back to probably one of my earliest.
Integrations I worked on the visual that comes to mind is long wieldy Gantt charts and it was, you know, very formal, very, very waterfall in nature and things happened you know consecutively.
I would say you know, one thing happened and then we closed it off and then another thing happened and the big shift I think in the last you know certainly five years in my experience is that that just doesn’t work anymore. And to be as as truly nimble or to work as fast as we need to those long wieldy Gantt charts just don’t, they just don’t serve anymore. So I’m really seeing a change to.
Grouping things together. I think in you know, around the moments that matter less about.
The distinct milestones necessarily that we would have once be beholden to.
Jen Frahm 3:29
Yeah, great. For those who haven’t worked in mergers and acquisitions, you just mentioned the, the, the necessity of speed. Can you tease that out a little bit more and explain what it is about that type of change that needs speed as as you know, one of the the core strategic drivers of that change?
Amy Leighton 3:48
Well, I think it off from the outset. I would say that not one size ever fits all in in M and A. So I really wanna sort of emphasise that. But the big shift I think for a lot of companies is we used to take a very slow approach and there was almost this understanding or this thinking that if we did things slowly, slowly that, you know, people would be more comfortable. And I think the opposite is probably been proven to be more true in that.
The speed at which you can get things moving and get things done gives people.
Quicker path to being comfortable. Ironically, in many ways so it it does sort of go against some of the change management principles that we often hold ourselves to, which is doing things that are at a, you know, considered pace with M and a. It is about getting people back to a sense of normality as quick as possible. And there’s a lot that needs to happen behind the scenes for that to happen.
Jen Frahm 4:40
Interesting.
And interesting. Interesting. OK.
The ACMP Paper identifies cultural misalignment as the biggest barrier and M and a work and does. Does that fit with your experience?
Amy Leighton 4:59
Absolutely.
I think that for a long time.
This term culture cultural was a little bit sort of seen as you know it’s the the fluffy stuff, you know, it’s not really the financial, the operational, the structure, but actually what we’re learning now is it is all of those things, you know wrapped around. And I think when we fail to understand what the cultural norms are in both organisations.
We really can set ourselves up to fail and and that can look like lots of things in my experience, so it can be what are the leadership styles for for both organisations? Are they similar? Are they at odds?
Where are the opportunities for those to come together, you know, easily where we’re where are we going to need to spend more time to actually motivate either side to be a little bit more flexible in their in their approach?
It can even look like just that ways of work, ways of working. So post COVID obviously we’ve had a lot of organisations with a very high.
Flexible work model. If you’re a very flexible organisation and you’re acquiring an organisation that is not really gone to that you know COVID era, then you’re going to find a distinct cultural barrier straight off the bat because there is a very distinct way of working in an organisation. When you work from home a bit or you work in the office. So lots of those things are just not considered early enough in my experience and they’re just so critical.
Jen Frahm 6:31
Interesting. I was thinking about M and as and from the perspective of one of the areas that we know is neglected the most in change is the adoption post go live right we we tend to resource in the lead up and the during, but we reduce the resources post and I was thinking that in the space of mergers and acquisitions that’s probably where you see.
Amy Leighton 6:43
Hmm.
Jen Frahm 6:57
The most of your challenges emerges and is in the post.
What’s your experience in terms of, you know, if we’re to label it as resistance to change, maybe it’s, you know, it’s integration issues, where does change practise become really important post merger?
Amy Leighton 7:15
It’s a really interesting one because how AM and a sort of is structured typically, and this isn’t for nearly all organisations, but I would say majority follow this model is this kind of day zero, which is your what we would see in the change spaces, kind of your planning, your design, you know that kind of work then we have day one and then day 2 but interestingly day one is not just a day day one can actually spend.
36912 months and then Day 2.
Is our kind of crossover to what we would see is that hand over to BAU. So I think MNA is actually great in that design because it allows us as change managers to use the whole of that day one period as a structured implementation. So it’s not just a go live date and then walk away, it is a it’s already built into the process. So I think that actually lends itself better to change managers.
Jen Frahm 8:12
Yeah.
Amy Leighton 8:12
Project managers get very frustrated because they want to see a go live.
Turn the lights on date, but that just isn’t necessarily the case for M and a.
Jen Frahm 8:21
Interesting. Interesting. I love it when I learn as I’m doing these interviews right. So thank you. Thank you for that. OK, let’s this call out to agile frameworks or methodologies. I think they use the term and the White Paper.
Amy Leighton 8:26
None.
Jen Frahm 8:37
What’s your take on using agile change in M and as?
Amy Leighton 8:44
Yeah. So I think it has an absolute space in the M and a area. And you know, I think one thing I probably have learned is it’s probably fairly hard to go full agile in M and A because of the nature of of some of the you know regulatory components to it. But there are so many opportunities I think for for agile to be used in, in M and A and like the one thing that comes to mind straight off the bat is in that sort of planning space.
Now it’s virtually impossible to know everything about the.
Acquired entity before you start integration it just by the nature of the confidentiality components, there’s just no way that you can know everything. So Agile allows us to almost build planning iteratively as we learn a little bit more in those kind of ongoing discovery sprints, if you like. So, so planning, it’s got a real space and the obvious one Jen as well is around communication and engagement, so.
There’s no point building a huge big communication and engagement plan when you actually don’t know these people, yet you’ve not met them.
You have no understanding about their norms and how they operate, so having an agile approach to how you engage with them initially and that is ongoing communication built into feedback loops that you might actually have to set up. Agile gives us that beautifully to be able to do it iteratively in and in those kind of Sprint boxes if you like.
Jen Frahm 10:12
So it’s really about building the trust and confidence in the knowledge that you’re acquiring iteratively in something that’s really quite high pressure, right?
Amy Leighton 10:22
Absolutely.
And I think just having that ability to agile gives us that ability to be able to listen, to have that voice of the customer, which is the voice of our people. And you just don’t have that. I think if you take a really traditional waterfall approach, you would end up just churning out a bunch of, you know, rinse and repeat style communications that are not fit for purpose for the audience. And you know, at the end of the day, we want.
The incoming company to trust us, we need to give them a reason to trust us and I think building those those bite sized pieces as we learn more about them.
That actually helps us to build trust with them.
Jen Frahm 11:03
The thing that’s coming up for me that I’m kind of curious about, so you know, one of the the hallmarks the the foundation mindset principles of agile is that comfort with or recognition that failure is part of the process, right. And that we learn from failure.
I’m imagining that M and as are really, really high stakes, and if you’re an acquiring company, or rather if you’re the company being acquired and you’re seeing evidence of failure.
Amy Leighton 11:25
Yes.
Jen Frahm 11:36
Would how does that build trust? What’s what’s the relationship between that kind of agile mindset in M and as?
Or is that the limit? Is that one of the limits?
Amy Leighton 11:44
Great question. Yeah, I think that the building trust I think is about that transparency and that has always been a little bit tricky in M and a because if I’m honest in the M and a dance, the acquiring company has, you know, would the company that they’re acquiring with, you know, lots of promises about the great things of an organisation and those, those are all true.
But we all know that the reality of day-to-day sometimes doesn’t look quite as bright and shiny.
So I think you know setting those expectations up front about what the definition of failure is is really important. So failure might not be that we’re just going to, OK, sorry, this isn’t working. We’re all going to walk away. There might be that we’ve, we’ve attempted an approach at something and it’s not really resonating with you and your cultural norms. So we’re going to step back reevaluate.
Redesign and have and have another go at it, but I think having those conversations early with both both sides.
Is great because then that sets the the framework for OK those things are going to happen as we go through and that’s OK we don’t need to be concerned or lose trust as part of that.
Jen Frahm 12:59
In in some ways, I guess the the other element of you know, the agile mindset that’s speaking to me about this is the beginners mindset. It actually lends itself beautifully.
Because, again, you’re stepping away from. I’ve got expertise about this new this company we’re acquiring and into this space of. I wonder how might we, you know?
Amy Leighton 13:20
Yeah, absolutely. And look, we at Oracle, we take a bit of an approach of the 8020. So we have about an 80% formulated plan going into any given acquisition. But we always leave at least 20% and look to be honest, sometimes it’s 3040% of this is an element of unknown. And so we have to go into this with an open mind and be open to how we can flex to be adaptable and think about what is important for both sides.
Rather than just, you know, headlong in there where the experts we know everything you must conform.
And I think that’s that’s the biggest learning that I could take from the last sort of 10 years in this space is if you go into an M and a with the mindset of that, you are on the acquiring side, you are the expert, you’re going to lose people in the very, very first day because they’re already experts in their own space. So we need to kind of almost.
Give you know, give some kudos to their own legacy. You know they’re not coming in as, as people who know nothing.
Jen Frahm 14:28
What’s your advice to change practitioners who haven’t worked agile, who are picking up the White Paper and they’re seeing this and they’re they’re working on M and A, or they’re about to work on their first M and AA. What’s? Where’s their starting point, do you think?
Amy Leighton 14:34
OK.
Look, you know, I think one of the things that that White paper called out which and I think it’s something that acli also likes to to say, is that agile isn’t just for technology. Agile is for all kinds of change. But also I think we have moved away from that model of you must go full agile or not at all. So I guess my my advice would be.
Think about the things that would work for your organisation from an agile way and maybe build those into your planning initially.
Get comfortable with that with your organisation before you move on to something else and and that can be just starting with using agile. Kind of.
Thinking even if it’s just the thinking in some of your planning activities before you kind of take that next step I I think yeah the time has passed to just hold fast to the way that it’s always been done and agile gives us the opportunity to do things in a in a different more nimble way.
Jen Frahm 15:27
Yep.
Yeah, beautiful. So the White Paper, it calls for training middle managers as change leaders. So and. And I know this is something we’ve had conversations about in the past. And that building change capability. How critical do you see that in M and a work?
Amy Leighton 15:57
It’s extremely critical. I I I think that that older thinking of top down M and a leadership is not really fit for purpose in our in our kind of modern organisations and where I see it really working super well is when we have both sides. So both the acquiring and the acquired company almost give.
The keys to that middle management level to say I want you to help lead.
And own some of the activities and I want you to help bridge the gaps between the two companies. I think when we don’t empower that next level down in M and a quite often, it seems like decisions being made above me not for me and there is no, there’s no way you can build Co creation in if you don’t have that sort of team leader level engaged in terms of their training in that space.
They did call out training as as something specific. I don’t necessarily see that as getting all your team leaders in a classroom and.
Them how to lead? I think it is a lot about exposure and it is, you know by exposure to some of the decision making processes in that governance structure. That is how I think we we train them long term but you know just generally building change capability in team leaders is incredibly important. It’s something that you know in most organisations I’ve worked at.
When we have put time and effort into that, it pays off. You know very, very quickly.
Jen Frahm 17:28
OK. Well it’s it’s the BAU requirement, isn’t it? It’s not a change requirement. It’s BAU requirement for for leaders.
Amy Leighton 17:32
Absolutely.
Jen Frahm 17:38
They also mentioned that coaching and emotional intelligence as being key. How do you build that into M and a engagements? Is that a oh, it’s nice if it’s there or is it something you intentionally look to bolster?
Amy Leighton 17:55
Yeah, absolutely. Emotional intelligence is just so critical in organisations today and that’s in and out of the M and a space, but especially in the M and a space because there are so many emotions involved on both sides, you know, there are there’s lots of feelings of loss and, you know, lack of identity or loss of identity. And I think, you know, making sure that our leaders.
Ultimately, start with leading with empathy and understanding.
Can really pay off because that is where you can actually have AI think a genuine and authentic conversation about the fears on both sides. And ultimately we want this to work together. It it, you know that the people are the asset essentially in in most M and as it’s very rare I think to see, you know, an M and A where you’re just buying a product these days you you always typically the people come with the thing.
And so, you know, making sure our leaders have that that knowledge and expectation up front.
I think on both sides is is so it’s so incredibly important.
Jen Frahm 19:06
You were to add one thing to every M and a playbook.
That is from a change lens. What would it be?
Amy Leighton 19:15
Yes.
Ensure you engage, not just communicate. I can’t stress enough that the voice of the people, much like we talk about the voice of the customer in in other industries, the voice of the people is critical. And if you are just pushing communications out and not truly understanding that it needs to be a two way conversation, however, that might look for your organisation. Then you are missing you know.
A very important sort of building foundation of M and a work.
Jen Frahm 19:48
And I imagine I I know my experience on engagement is the advice is also it has to be continuous engagement, right? That it’s not just a one and done tick the box. Oh yes, we we had the two way conversation it’s actually the volume of engagement is far higher than you could ever imagine.
Amy Leighton 20:02
Yeah.
Far, far higher. And look that it’s a really tight rope balancing act if you like, because yes, there needs to be constant engagement and constant knowledge sharing about what’s coming next and what’s coming next. But you have to balance that with not completely saturating that incoming company because they’re coming in completely blind in many instances. They knew nothing about the deal until the day the deal was done.
So that can feel very jarring and jolting. So again, that’s where the agile component helps us, because then we can look at our engagement instead of blocks of things and we can tailor it, you know, depending on what phase of the integration people might be in and how they might be feeling and reacting and what’s important to them in that phase, so that it’s not just about the messages we want to send that we’re actually looking at it.
In the respect of how their journey is actually kind of taking place.
So I think that’s for me that is where agile is really just it’s proven itself to be so helpful and there’s no other way to describe it, to be honest.
Jen Frahm 21:13
You’ve mentioned a couple of times the perils of pushing comms out to people. What is another example of, you know, things that should be retired in merger and acquisition change work?
Amy Leighton 21:27
Look, I I already mentioned it, but I’m going to mention it again because I was brought up in the White Paper, but also I feel so passionate about it is that I really believe that the due diligence process does need to be updated for a more modern organisation and to place a greater emphasis on that cultural due diligence. If you want to call it due diligence. But it’s that cultural understanding.
I think if we could just do that better in, in more organisations, I think it would make that initial part of the integration.
So much more easier, so I I’d I’d love to see. It’s what I’d love to see retired is that we only focus on the finance operation or structure components that those very important don’t get me wrong, I’d like to see culture form an equal weighting with those other components.
Jen Frahm 22:02
OK.
Is there an example and I appreciate there’s often sensitivities about mergers and acquisitions, but I’m just wondering is there an example that you can share with the listeners?
Amy Leighton 22:29
Mm hmm.
Jen Frahm 22:30
About where agile change has really benefited you a day in the life of Amy. In in a previous M and a.
Amy Leighton 22:39
Yeah, absolutely. If I think back to one that I worked on a few years ago, so not not probably one of the ones I’ve already spoken about, the ones I’ve worked on now.
Agile allowed us to be really flexible when the situation changed quite quickly. So for this particular one I’m thinking of the structure of the the incoming company was a particular way and then probably a couple of weeks before it was all due to be sort of inked and signed. The structure of that company.
Quite fundamentally changed and so having a more agile approach in our planning that allowed us to really pivot quickly and to not be, you know, throwing out hands up, going Oh my God, what are we going to do? And I think if I if I look at the other ones I’ve worked on in different ways, the same thing has happened many times. So having an agile kind of foundation to our planning meant that if something did change.
Even if it wasn’t fundamental, we could respond to that adapt and move on and not have to start the whole planning process.
You know, from scratch again. So yeah, that that’s I think that the biggest one that I see over and over again.
Jen Frahm 23:54
Yeah. Interesting and exciting to hear. Exciting to hear. Speaking of exciting, what excites you about the direction that ACMP is heading with this White Paper?
Amy Leighton 24:06
I mean, I was, yeah, I was super excited to see that come out yesterday. I think it was. And like you, Jen, I was excited that agile is still front of mind. I think in the last 12 months and you know I’ve worked, I work as well in the the Gen AI space at Ore Con. So I am deeply in in that world at the moment. But I’m very cognizant of the fact that it can’t be all about AI. You know we we can’t just get rid of all the other things that we’ve always focused on just to be about AI.
So I was, you know, pleased to see that the White Paper gave just as much weighting to AI as it did to some of these other things that we know are really critically important. And I’d and I know that that’s where our industry’s going, that we’re going to continue to evolve. I think the White Paper really shows us that acnp are certainly acknowledging that. And it’s not just going to be all about AI, although there is a lot of mention of AI in the paper, but that’s to be understood as well in the current climate.
Jen Frahm 25:04
It is. It is very AI hyphy at the moment, isn’t it like?
Amy Leighton 25:09
It is.
Jen Frahm 25:11
And for the listeners, I’m going to link in the show notes where you can access that White paper from ACMP as well. If you haven’t seen it.
What would you love to see next, either from the profession or from clients in the M and a space?
Amy Leighton 25:29
Look, I have read lots and lots of external, you know, papers over the years and I feel like there’s a small byline in many of them that talks about the importance of change management, but nobody really goes into any level of detail. It feels like a lot of the kind of the big consultancies will often say, we know it’s really important. So we must put it in in the paper, but they’re not actually sure what that could look like.
So I think what I’d love to see in the future and maybe that’s something that I need to take, you know, some.
Responsibility for putting out there as well is is actually showing people what that looks like in reality so that people can contextualise when we say change we need. We need change management in the M and a space. What does that actually look like and how does that fit in with your traditional models of, you know, having a a change sponsor and and and a project manager and and leads? How does the change manager fit into that picture? I think.
If people could see that in context more, that would strengthen that role of the change manager in the M and a space. You know much, much.
More strongly.
Jen Frahm 26:36
Yeah. Nice. Nice on that. And perhaps in a similar vein.
For change practitioners who are moving into their first M&M and A, can you give us the name of three specific agile change tools that they would want to use?
Amy Leighton 26:56
Three specific adult change tools.
Jen Frahm 26:59
Would be useful.
Amy Leighton 27:00
Look I, which would be useful, so I think.
A Some some version of working out loud in terms of how you’re communicating your road map. So that’s that’s one thing that has been it’s difficult these days. I I acknowledge because people are quite often working in different locations. So be creative. I I think there’s mirror. There’s what like Microsoft whiteboard.
Lots of tools you can use now, but visualising that the road map of what’s coming, because I think people need to understand where I am now versus where I might be in in three months, six months, nine months.
I would say learning Nuggets, so building in some kind of bite sized learning nugget that makes sense for your organisation. That’s that’s incredibly important. Nobody wants to sit in the classroom and look, even at oracon we’ve not been able to totally get away from that for some topic.
There are some things that we still need to bring people together, but where we can actually create learning material that’s self-serve that people can look at, they can digest and they can come together to discuss like in a lean coffee, kind of a conversation. Very, very useful. What would be my third?
I love the change blast radius that you have in your playbook, actually, Jen, because I think sometimes when people think about, oh, I’ve got to do a stakeholder analysis, it’s like this long Excel spreadsheet. I’ve got to think about all of these different things sometimes just putting the change or the thing that’s happening in this Sprint at the heart and then understanding, OK, who’s the most the least and the like, minutely impacted in this Sprint?
Can just help to visualise that for the teams so we know where to kind of, you know look at our.
So that one, I think and it’s very usable for non change managers as well. That’s that’s one that we at orocon often give to our change leaders within the organisation because we know that it’s easy for them to visually pot people onto a onto a radius rather than having to to write lots of words.
Jen Frahm 29:06
100% I I think it’s a really underrated tool and I find that I use it when I do work in organisations in so many different ways that it’s actually really rich with flexibility. So I love that you introduced that.
This has been enormously helpful. Thank you, Amy, for coming in and in a relatively short amount of time, you have enriched all of us with the space of both mergers and acquisitions, but also agile change.
For the, for the listeners benefit, you’re going to be speaking at ACN. PS Global Connect in July. Is that correct?
Amy Leighton 29:48
I am indeed, yes. So myself and Nicola Lohman, also from Oregon, the enterprise change lead. We’re going to be speaking on now. Get ready for the title because it’s a bit long winded. I I I admit building the enterprise change office, embracing an agile mindset and the change experience. So very topical for today’s discussion, I think actually.
Jen Frahm 30:10
It is, it is, and I imagine that listeners can connect with you on LinkedIn as well. You’re you’re open to having more conversations about this. If people want to follow up. Yeah. Great. Great. I’m. I am also going to be speaking at Global Connect. And I think equally I have a long title as well. I don’t know what what’s were they encouraging long titles, but it was something about which leads back to the beginning of this conversation.
Amy Leighton 30:18
Absolutely yeah. Anytime.
Jen Frahm 30:35
My title is something about.
This this change is too complex for agile, a playful rebuttal because as we sort of said at the beginning, I was kind of perplexed that we were talking about agile methodology for mergers and acquisitions when agile methodologies really benefit all types of change. So that’s going to be the challenge on me at Global Connect to to unpack that for a little, for for the people.
Amy Leighton 30:45
Of it.
Excellent. Can’t wait to listen to that one.
Jen Frahm 31:05
Indeed, indeed. OK folks, there you have it. Hot off the press.
Amy’s take on mergers and acquisitions and agile change off the White Paper. If you’ve got anything that you want to share with us, please do. Any thoughts, we’d encourage any feedback on this because it’s a really, really interesting space to work in. But Amy Leishon, thank you so much for your time.
Amy Leighton 31:30
Thanks, Jen. Pleasure.
