Why Identifying Risks Can Help Change Be Successful

Change Management

Mar 22

Anticipating possible obstacles helps you get ahead of them.

This post is part of our change lifecycle series covering six steps: finding your leaders, power mapping, the Cookie Monster moment, moving your needle, your capacity for disruption, and determining your risk. Read the previous series post about capacity for disruption here.

You’re in the process of undergoing a change initiative. You’ve created a vision, planned out strategies, and assigned roles and responsibilities. But before implementation begins, considering potential obstacles will make you better prepared to handle them.

According to Kelsey Miller, marketing specialist and contributor for Harvard Business School Online, “While it’s impossible to predict everything that might potentially go wrong with a project, taking the time to anticipate potential barriers and devise mitigation strategies before you get started is generally a good idea.”

Identifying possible issues requires speaking with employees to gauge concerns you may not have considered on your own. Sociologist and Forbes contributing writer Tracey Brower adds, “Change can cause fear or discomfort when people are asked to stretch out of their comfort zones.”

In order to effectively engage team members and reduce the likelihood of failure, some organizations choose to do a premortem. Cognitive psychologist Gary Klein says he created the method in order to “help my company cut down on problems when we performed projects.” The method allows team members to imagine that the project has been a complete failure and then spend two minutes determining reasons for why it failed. Each person then has the opportunity to share a different answer. Team members later develop mitigation steps for lowering the chance of a fiasco. According to Klein, “The pre-mortem method has a number of benefits besides identifying trouble spots in a plan, reducing overconfidence and promoting discoveries,” adding that it can “help create a culture of candor and trust.”

Having honest conversations about risks and the overall change process is crucial. Our Risk Assessment worksheet is a useful tool for structuring them, as it lays out a variety of considerations while addressing how much risk is associated with each step. In terms of deep commitment to the organization, it asks, “Are we anticipating disruption, managing resistance, and is our communication building informed commitment?” Stakeholders can then identify these topics as low, medium, or high risk depending on how well positioned they are to tackle them. This chart is just an example and needs to be customized for every company. Leaders need to decide what questions most need to be answered and who should be involved in answering them. That being said, a lot of these topics should be applicable to organizations of different sizes and spanning different industries.

Anticipating what might happen is not easy, but by investing in this important step, you can troubleshoot before problems arise and work to ensure a successful change initiative.