Change Readiness Essentials For Project Success

Change Capacity: How to Build It Before You Need It Following my post on change fatigue, I got a few messages asking about proactive solutions. The answer? Deliberately building change capacity before you need it. At one time I was working on successfully implementing a major tech transformation while adapting to regulatory changes and updating the staffing model. Our secret wasn't better project management—it was intentionally building change capacity across three dimensions: 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗶𝘃𝗶𝗱𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆: We invested in resilience training for all employees, teaching practical techniques for managing uncertainty. Research from MIT shows this approach reduces resistance by up to 32%. 𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆: We established "change champions"—not just to communicate but to protect team bandwidth and raise the red flag when implementation timing and sequence needed to be negotiated. 𝗢𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘇𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆: Most crucially, we implemented a "change absorption index"—a simple measure of how much change each user group was processing at any time. When a unit approached 80% of their maximum capacity, new initiatives were automatically sequenced. 📊 Quick Change Capacity Audit: - Do people know where to direct their concerns about change overload? - Can managers successfully negotiate implementation timing? - Does your organization measure and track change absorption? - Are change initiatives deliberately sequenced or randomly deployed? The potential ROI is there: imagine faster implementation times and higher adoption rates when change isn't saturated. In today's environment, change capacity isn't just a nice-to-have—it's the difference between organizations that thrive through disruption and those that merely survive. How is your organization deliberately building change capacity? Have you established formal mechanisms or is it still managed ad hoc? #ChangeManagement #OrganizationalResilience #TransformationLeadership #ChangeCapacity

Not going to lie - I have a handful of failed legal tech implementations and legal tech projects under my belt. If you're in legal ops and you haven't had the same happen to you, you likely haven't been doing it long enough. My biggest lesson? Don't overlook the importance of change management. Whether you're tackling a CLM implementation or shifting the way legal services are delivered at your company, change management is going to be key to the success of any legal operations initiative. Here are a few change management specific tips I've learned along the way: - Focus on the people We all know it at this point - legal professionals are resistant to change. You have to make sure you're not only explaining the why but also proactively addressing concerns before they arise. - Know how you're going to measure success You can't show quantifiable impact without knowing what success looks like. Ensure you have a clear definition of what success looks like - including what KPIs and KRIs you'll track, how you'll track them, and where the data is going to come from. - Don't skip UAT and Training It's easy to assume that because you understand something it's going to be easy and intuitive for everyone else. Being neurodivergent, I know that's rarely the case. Even for smaller initiatives, ensure you run a UAT group and build training materials that are right sized for the project (and support folks of all different learning types) - Take feedback as a gift and use it to iterate Legal ops is not set it and forget it. Don't wait until you've hit your KRI(s) for success - you should be leveraging feedback loops during the change management process to actively identify friction points and refine the change strategy as you go. Fellow legal ops pros - what else would you add? #legaloperations #legalops #legalinnovation #legaltech

Big goals are cheap. Readiness is expensive. When pressure hits, you don’t perform at your best, you default to your systems. In manufacturing, outcomes track to your lowest level of preparation: messy data, ad-hoc change control, unclear ownership, no drill, no result. 𝐁𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐫𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐬: • Clear owners, roles, and decision rights for every critical path. • Clean, connected data with governance baked in. • Change control with instant rollback and auditable history. • Runbooks + simulations + drills (tabletop today, real world tomorrow). • Leading indicators tied to actions, not 'feel-good' KPIs. • Post-mortems that change the process, not just the slide deck. Ambition sets direction. Readiness sets altitude. If you want more wins (more uptime, faster deployments, real ROI), then invest in the habits, scaffolding, and practice that catch you when things wobble. Set the goal. Then over-prepare for the moment you’ll fall back on. The reason? Readiness isn't a box you check; it's the muscles you build ( Strategic, Cultural, Operational, and Technological). If these pillars aren’t solid, your next big move might just crumble under pressure. So, the big question is... are you truly ready? 𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝 𝐢𝐭: https://lnkd.in/eu6i5JkA ******************************************* • Visit www.jeffwinterinsights.com for access to all my content and to stay current on Industry 4.0 and other cool tech trends • Ring the 🔔 for notifications!

70% of change initiatives fail. But yours doesn’t have to. I’ve led 35+ corporations through change with a 100% success rate over 30 years. Here’s one of the biggest reasons why. Success in change isn’t about having the perfect plan. It’s about avoiding the traps that cause failure. 🔵 My 2 Biggest Discoveries: 1️⃣ Companies Fail for the Same Reasons At the start of each project, I ask the management team to list the causes of failure from past change projects. When we review the lists, we always see the same problems repeated. The first few times, I was surprised. But after seeing it in every organization, the conclusion was clear: ➨ Organizations are not learning from their past mistakes. 2️⃣ The “Inhibitors of Change” When I analyzed the failure lists from over 100 change projects, the same issues appeared again and again: resistance, derailment factors, misalignment, lack of momentum, etc. This leads to my second discovery: ➨ There are a limited number of Inhibitors that consistently cause change efforts to fail. I spent two years identifying and classifying these Inhibitors and developing counterstrategies to overcome them. I call this the Inhibitors Strategy. Since then, every change project I lead includes an Inhibitors Strategy. With 35+ corporations transformed and a 100% success rate, I believe this is the key to successful change in large organizations. 🔵 3 Components of an Inhibitors' Strategy Identify Past Inhibitors ↳ Spot specific derailment factors ↳ Document forms of resistance ↳ Analyze where momentum was lost Plan Countermeasures ↳ Create a countermeasure for each Inhibitor ↳ Build feedback loops into your action plan ↳ Include safeguards from the start Overcoming Inhibitors ↳ Design strategies that counter derailment factors ↳ Build systems to spot Inhibitors during implementation ↳ Add countermeasures to your 3-month action plan Remember: your strategies are created by the best minds in your organization. Yet 70% of change projects still fail. I can’t say the Inhibitors Strategy is the only reason for our 100% success rate. But it’s a big part of it. 👉 The secret to success in organizational change isn’t better project management. It’s removing the Inhibitors of Change. Make the reasons for your past failures the foundation for success in your next change effort. What Inhibitors have you seen derail change in your organization? _____________   ♻️ 𝐑𝐞𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭 to help other organizations succeed in their change effort 🔔 𝐅𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰 Jacques Fischer for strategies to  ↳ Manage change  ↳ Evolve the culture  ↳ Improve leadership  ↳ Develop high-performance organizations 𝑴𝒂𝒌𝒆 𝒀𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝑵𝒆𝒙𝒕 𝑪𝒉𝒂𝒏𝒈𝒆 𝑰𝒏𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒗𝒆 𝒂 𝑺𝒖𝒄𝒄𝒆𝒔𝒔 #humanresources #hr #culturechange #changemanagement