In today’s fast-evolving business environment, many organisations need help to keep up with constant changes, leading to missed opportunities and increased risks.

Without a strong change capability, your organisation may find itself overwhelmed by market shifts, technological advancements, and evolving customer expectations. 

This lack of adaptability can result in decreased competitiveness, lower employee morale, and ultimately, stagnation.

Developing robust change capability is the key to thriving in this dynamic landscape. 

By building the skills and frameworks necessary to navigate change effectively, your organisation can stay ahead of the curve, seize new opportunities, and foster a culture of continuous improvement. 

Our co-founders at the Agile Change Leadership Institute collectively have 50 years of experience in this space and are well-placed to guide you through what you must do. 

This blog post will guide you through understanding, assessing, and enhancing your change capability to ensure long-term success.

Understanding Change Capability - Change Management Capability Vs Change Leadership Capability

Change capability refers to the proficiency of an organisation or individual to effectively embrace, implement, and sustain changes within a workplace. 

This capability is pivotal as it dictates the agility with which a company can adapt to market shifts, technological advancements, and internal or external pressures. 

Change capability is not just about managing change reactively but proactively cultivating an environment where innovation and flexibility are at the core of the organisational culture.

To further dissect this concept, it’s essential to differentiate between change management capability and change leadership capability. 

While they are both critical, they serve distinct roles:

  • Change management capability focuses on the practical aspects of change—such as planning, implementing, and monitoring—which ensures the smooth execution of new strategies. 
  • Change leadership capability involves setting the vision and motivating people to buy into and deliver the change, which is crucial for transformative results. 

Both capabilities are integral to the successful adaptation and transformation of organisations. 

However, while change management ensures that changes are implemented efficiently and effectively, change leadership ensures that these changes are deeply embedded and sustained, enabling the organisation to meet future challenges head-on. 

Together, they create a comprehensive approach to navigating the complexities of change in any organisation.

Key Elements of Change Capability

Building robust change capability involves developing several key components that enable an organisation to adapt and thrive in a constantly changing environment. These elements include:

Adaptability is the ability to adjust to new conditions and respond effectively to changes. Organisations with high adaptability can pivot quickly in response to market shifts, technological advancements, and evolving customer needs. This involves fostering a flexible mindset and encouraging employees to embrace change rather than resist it.

Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from setbacks and maintain performance under pressure. Resilient organisations can withstand disruptions and continue to operate effectively, even in the face of significant challenges. Building resilience involves developing strong support systems, promoting mental and emotional well-being, and encouraging a positive attitude towards overcoming obstacles.

Continuous learning is the commitment to ongoing development and improvement. Organisations that prioritise continuous learning invest in training and development programs, encourage knowledge sharing, and create opportunities for employees to acquire new skills. This helps ensure that the workforce remains agile and capable of meeting future demands.

Agility refers to the ability to move quickly and easily. Agile organisations can rapidly implement changes, iterate on processes, and innovate in response to new opportunities. This involves adopting agile methodologies, such as Scrum or Kanban, and promoting a culture of experimentation and iterative improvement.

Collaboration is the ability to work effectively with others towards a common goal. Organisations that excel in collaboration break down silos, encourage cross-functional teamwork, and leverage diverse perspectives to drive innovation. Effective collaboration requires strong communication skills, mutual trust, and a shared sense of purpose.

Leadership is the ability to guide and influence others towards achieving a vision. Effective change leaders inspire and motivate their teams, communicate a clear vision for the future, and provide the support needed to navigate change. Strong leadership is essential for fostering a culture of change capability and ensuring that change initiatives are successful.

Innovation is the ability to generate and implement new ideas. Organisations that prioritise innovation encourage creative thinking, invest in research and development, and create an environment where experimentation is valued. Innovation drives continuous improvement and helps organisations stay ahead of the competition.

By developing these key elements, organisations can build a strong change capability that enables them to navigate the complexities of the modern business landscape. 

This holistic approach ensures that both the technical and human aspects of change are addressed, leading to more successful and sustainable outcomes.

Developing Your Change Capability Framework

A well-designed change capability framework provides the necessary foundation and guidance to develop and sustain the skills, processes, and mindsets essential for navigating change successfully.

A change capability framework needs to include the following elements: 

  • An organising structure for change management – this might be a governance model, a centre of excellence, or a centralised portfolio or internal consultancy.
  • Change management as a central construct in the learning and development systems (induction, internal courses, mentoring)
  • Change management as a central construct in the human resources systems (recruiting, performance management, and recognition)
  • Change as a cultural imprint within the leadership – lived values of innovation, agility, and of course, people
  • Common supporting toolkits, frameworks, processes and templates that enable people to carry out successful change
  • A multi-level framework that distinguishes between levels of capability (first-order skills, second-order and so forth, think Quinn’s master and novice distinction)

By incorporating these elements, a change capability framework provides a comprehensive roadmap for organisations to systematically develop and maintain their ability to adapt and thrive in a constantly evolving business landscape. 

It ensures that change capabilities are deeply ingrained within the organisation’s culture, processes, and systems, fostering a sustainable and resilient approach to change.

Assessing Your Current Change Capability

One of the best ways to assess your current change capability is to take our scorecards. They will help you assess:

  • How agile are your people’s mindsets 
  • The change capability of your leaders
  • The agile capability of your change managers 

These scorecards provide a comprehensive evaluation, enabling you to identify specific areas for improvement and potential Agile Change Courses to enhance your organisation’s overall change capability.

Should you buy or build change capability?

One of the early strategic decisions you need to make is whether you should ‘buy or build’. Building change capability in-house takes time – time to identify what change model and toolkit to use, time to introduce these, and time to proficiency. So for some companies, it is more effective to buy and use specialised recruiters to find change expertise. 

The two approaches can be used in tandem – you can ‘buy’ change capability by way of experienced change resources to cover the needs while you build change capability in the background. At a certain point, you have raised the level of change capability overall and you no longer require as many specialised resources.

In short, buying change capability is quick, high cost, and more even in quality. Building capability, while sustainable and lower cost, can take time.

Real-world Examples of Change Capability in Action

VMware is a cloud computing and virtualisation technology company that invited us to spend two days with the Global HR Leadership Team at their HR Summit in Palo Alto in 2019.

The challenge the HR team put to us was: 

We want to be more agile in our department, but…where and how do we start?

Across two days with these 100+ senior leaders, we introduced many new concepts and methods.

Some of the key lessons they learnt were:

  • They were guided out of their comfort zone to shift from just ‘supporting people through change’ to ‘navigating themselves and their teams through deep uncertainty and discomfort’.
  • They learned agile approaches through hands-on activities and tools that they could apply in their day-to-day work.
  • They conducted a ‘futurespective’ activity to envision their future state and create change leadership principles.
  • The leaders shared what they had learned in group coaching sessions, demonstrating the impact of embracing an agile mindset and new ways of working within HR.

Through envisioning their future state, creating change leadership principles, and adopting an agile mindset, they developed the capabilities necessary to lead their department through transformations effectively.

This also led to quicker recruiting processes, a culture of continuous learning, quicker curation of learning content for the whole organisation, and redefining the performance framework.

If you’d like to learn more about what went down in this session, check out our article about Building Agile Change Capability at VMware to learn more.

Our recommended courses to improve your change capability

How do you build change capability? Such a good question!

This is something that I tackled a few years ago in my first book Conversations of Change.  I stipulated that for an organisation, a leader, an individual to be capable of change there needed to be:

  • An organising structure for change management – this might be a governance model, a centre of excellence, or a centralised portfolio or internal consultancy.
  • Change management as a central construct in the learning and development systems (induction, internal courses, mentoring)
  • Change management as a central construct in the human resources systems (recruiting, performance management, and recognition)
  • Change as a cultural imprint within the leadership – lived values of innovation, agility, and of course, people
  • Common supporting toolkits, frameworks, processes and templates that enable people to carry out successful change
  • A multi-level framework that distinguishes between levels of capability (first order skills, second order and so forth, think Quinn’s master and novice distinction)

Here’s how we help companies build change capability using that framework. Or is it a ‘frahmwork’?!

An organising structure for change management – this might be a governance model, a centre of excellence, or a centralised portfolio or internal consultancy

We offer Change Management Office in a Box 

This builds change capability at an enterprise level by supporting change practice leads in setting up, or further growing, the change management office in their organisations. In turn, this improves enterprise change maturity. This program comprises learning clips and an enduring toolkit to set you up for success. It removed the guesswork by saving you hours of work and aligning your approach to industry best practice.

Change management as a central construct in the learning and development systems (induction, internal courses, mentoring)

It will come as little surprise that all our courses build change management capability and we use a variety of learning approaches to anchor contemporary change knowledge, skills and ability at all levels. Our clients and students tell us that our courses and the way we teach transform their leadership and change approaches, along with building confidence tackling highly disruptive times.

Change management as a central construct in the human resources systems (recruiting, performance management, and recognition)

Training is never enough, it is only one intervention. That’s why we offer Sustain the Change which helps you align your functions with your desired level of change capability.  We’ve found that embedding and sustaining change can take as much work in design as the initial lead up to and launch of go-live or installation of the new ways of working.That’s why we have created a unique Do It Yourself Tool Kit to help you embed change and agility. This kit will save you weeks of work and help make the change stick!

You can roll out the elements at your pace with timeframes to align with your organisation’s objectives. There’s also the ability to customise with your brand colours and fonts. The content is repeatable and scalable to ensure you achieve ROI on your change efforts.

Change as a cultural imprint within the leadership – lived values of innovation, agility, and of course, people

To support a culture of change maturity we focus on the Agile Mindset as the foundation of the way leadership thinks. Our 66 min online micro-credential is also offered as part of Change is Everybody’s Business.

Common supporting toolkits, frameworks, processes and templates that enable people to carry out successful change

When you purchase Change Management Office in a Box or the Agile Change Manager Certificate Program you get full sets of tools and templates you can plug and play right into your change practice. This creates a common language and consistency of approach.

A multi-level framework that distinguishes between levels of capability (first order skills, second order and so forth, think Quinn’s master and novice distinction)

One size doesn’t fit all, and there’s no point in overcooking the capability development.

We work with you to identify the level of capability for which audience (leaders, managers, all employees, change team) (6) and then offer specific courses.

Agile Mindset – foundation training for everyone

Agile Change Manager Certificate – for change and project practitioners

Agile Change Leader Certificate – for leaders

Leadership Disrupted – for leaders

Change is Everybody’s Business – line managers

But what’s the secret sauce of building change capability?

Promise not to tell?

Well… we’ve found the following design principles to be super effective:

1.  Make it safe to learn

2. Scaffold the knowledge

3. Enable immediate application

4. Encourage reflection and iteration

5. Make it real!

If you’d like to learn more about which option is best for your needs, please reach out to us either on 1300 959 496 or via our online contact form.