CASE STUDY
Healthcare System Masters the Overwhelm of Too Much Change
Challenge
The executives of a major provincial healthcare system were acutely aware that too much change was going on in their organization. They were concerned about burnout among their clinical and administrative staff, failure in their key change initiatives, and the integrity of their operations with so many changes underway.
They initially counted over 200 hundred initiatives! Through a sorting and prioritization process, they reduced the number to 58, which was still an overwhelming number of projects to undertake with success.
The leaders engaged Being First to help them manage capacity by further reducing and streamlining the number of initiatives, developing expertise in leading change, and establishing a system to manage the number of changes as an embedded leadership process and skill
Solution
We partnered directly with the CEO who was deeply concerned and supportive of this effort. We provided an assessment of their change history to pin-point the patterns and risk factors in how they were currently leading change. We reviewed the results – which were all sub-par – with the senior leadership team as a part of their introductory training in Conscious Change Leadership.
The leaders’ insights prompted them to commit to a three-fold process: 1) further reduce the number of initiatives they were asking of the organization; 2) design an Enterprise Change Agenda system to manage how projects got determined, prioritized, sequenced, paced, resourced, and monitored across the organization; and 3) up-level the approach to leading change on their existing priority projects.
After training the senior leaders, we trained the change leaders and project teams of their current initiatives and supported them to learn, tailor, and apply The Change Leader’s Roadmap methodology, which the organization licensed. We coached them to build an effective Enterprise Change Agenda system for managing capacity in their organization.
Working with the director of change, we designed a process to:
Results
- Reduced the number of initiatives to 32, and then further clustered into 8 sub-categories to be bettered managed.
- Improved leadership sponsorship, communications, and engagement on all projects.
- Dramatic reduction in change leadership risk factors.
- Reduced stress in the organization.
- Improved success on projects, with greater adoption and sustainment of results.
- Saved millions of dollars in what would have been failed change efforts.
- Created system-tailored best change practices that were supported by the CEO and all senior executives.
- Significantly improved ability to manage the quantity of change, their capacity load, and ensure greater results.
