By Thomas Barker | Fellow
This column focuses on a broad range of practical academic issues from teaching and training to professional concerns, research, and technologies of interest to teachers, students, and researchers. Please send comments and suggestions to ttbarker@ualberta.ca.
Managing change is something that all technical writers will be part of, either because their publications departments undergo restructuring, or they are asked to contribute their communication expertise to the a change effort. Or, in the role of executives, publication managers or communication professionals may themselves lead change initiatives in their organization.
Whatever the writers’ role, knowing the basic elements of change can help you know what to; knowing the principles of technical communication can help you manage expectations in your favor. In this article we will address the change process itself and see how the work of technical writers suits them well for a slightly different role.
What Is the Change Process?
In its simplest form, the change process involves three broad phases: vision, implementation, and evaluation. The vision stage starts the ball rolling. Someone sees a better way to do business, a way out of a problem. This vision gets implemented through structural, organizational, political, and cultural realities. Finally the vision becomes “the new normal” and and the leadership can measure the success of the change initiative. But what happens along the way complicates this simple model.
Along the way leaders find that they have to engage other people, share visions, build coalitions, hold meetings, and do all the things leaders do to get from point A to point B. The starting point is usually the first item in the golden list: vision, coalition building, planning, doing, evaluating, institutionalizing.
John Kotter, writing in the Harvard Business Review, building on these three basic stages, identifies the following eight steps in the change process.
- Establishing a Sense of Urgency
- Forming a Powerful Guiding Coalition
- Creating a Vision
- Communicating the Vision
- Empowering Others to Act on the Vision
- Planning for and Creating Sort-Term Wins
- Consolidating Improvements and Producing Still More Change
- Institutionalizing New Approaches
The steps that Kotter outlines emphasize the role of communication in the change process. Unlike other human activity, communication records, reflects, and motivates. Communication is perfect for change processes where beliefs, values, and goals must be questioned and revised. As Malcolm Gladwell said, “Innovation—the heart of the knowledge economy—is fundamentally social.”
Understanding technical communication processes and practices can help writers navigate and enhance the change process.
Understanding Change Audiences
Technical writers are used to analyzing the informational needs of technical readers. What’s more, they are used to adjusting information to readers’ needs so that jobs get done efficiently and safely. Technical communication is about helping people work. Change communication is slightly different.
Unlike technical accomplishment, change rides on a current of belief and understanding. People resist change or, to put it more accurately, they resist being changed. Change occurs at very personal, cultural levels for some people. It occurs at the level of their beliefs: in how things are done, who should do them, and who is in control of the whole doing process.
Audience analysis has to shift from task orientation to motivation. What motivates the reader? What is the starting point and what is the goal? Why are things done this way and how can that be questioned? These are the audience analysis questions in change communication.
In change mode, the goal is not to reinforce activity, but to re-envision activity. In change mode, existing relationships with readers need to be reconsidered. Whatever functional relationships you had before needs to be rethought when you engage in coalition building.
The reactions that colleagues have typically had with you may be different now. You may have had minimal contact with procurement, but since the new department you are proposing requires supply expertise, you need to approach people you may not have ever spoken to before.
From a strategic perspective, you may face cultural issues, generational issues, as well as knowledge issues. Rhetorically, you have an ethics issue. How can you establish trust? How can you overcome the “I’m busy right now” dodge that can swamp a change initiative?
Understanding Change Planning
Technical communicators are planners. They plan documentation projects, and they plan corporate communication initiatives. They know that good planning leads to concrete results, and they know that following standard processes creates consistency and builds professional practices. Change communication planning is like this, but slightly different.
Planning change means inventing a vision-driven strategy and being able to shift given the feedback along the way. The key is to be agile, take feedback, and grow in the direction of positive results. The plan that cannot change is the plan that will most likely fail. The reason change plans can themselves adapt is that they need to be vision driven. Lack of a leader’s vision dooms the plan and any programs surrounding it.
Plans for change need to re-envision existing communication channels. How can newsletters, email updates, and progress meetings focus not on boring work accomplished, but on how the work did or did not contribute to the vision of change? How can reactions of those who might want to block change be analyzed as to whether they support the vision or not?
It’s not about what works, but about what contributes. It’s not about what sells, but about what moves the initiative forward. The mindset of vision means that planning should embody stages toward a clear goal; the mindset of “business as usual” means that visions, and the programs they create, die along the way.
Change communication means identifying existing visions and missions and shaping strategies, coalitions, teamwork, and other elements of implementation around that vision. Initiatives that fail do so because the clarifying vision did not drive every aspect of the implementation work.
Kotter talks about “short-term wins.” Short-term wins are events that, when planned well, embody the change vision and provide energy for continued change. Short-term wins result from short-term goals. Short-term goals need to be visible, measurable, and incontestable. If you have an employment satisfaction measure in your company, maybe a goal might be to tic it up a notch by the end of the next quarter. When resisters see that tic they might think twice about joining the coalition of “do nothings” or “foot draggers.” Short-term wins create good news that everybody likes to hear.
Making It Permanent
Technical writers know how to institutionalize knowledge. Reports, proposals, briefings, and white papers both contain and constitute the history of knowledge in organizations. These forms or genres of writing create a legacy of understanding and vision that can single-source the future. Change communication is slightly different.
Change communication focuses more on policies than on reports. Policies, in the form of political briefs, insurance standards, certification requirements, and performance reviews are where change comes to drive the future. The reason communication is so important in institutionalizing change is that it shifts the emphasis from the leader to the company.
In the project I’m working on with the Ministry of Human Services in Alberta, a change in the wellness culture in human services might be identified with the dynamic team of individuals that is currently driving the process. What happens when those leaders move on to other projects? Without some educational initiatives, revised insurance categories, or updated certification standards—not to mention legislation—the initiative is liable to become a beautiful memory.
Change communicators realize that success needs to live on in the corporate culture and in the system of beliefs in an industry. In the past, for example, occupational health and safety used to be seen as a cost drag, an unproductive effort, and a training nightmare. Now, especially in construction trades, health and safety are part of the very culture of work. Safety is your first hour on the job. What this means is that communication (reporting, meetings, training) is built into the culture of the workplace. Change isn’t a poster on the wall, it is the wall itself.
For the technical writer, audience analysis, communication planning, and reporting are second nature. Know the setting of information, know how information moves and supports work, and how it forms a knowledge culture is the bread and butter of the industry. These instincts serve well in a change setting. Change communication thrives on the beliefs of individuals who see a vision and take on a challenge. It builds on strategic planning that tics off real accomplishments. It lasts because the vision that sustained it gets built in to the structures of policy, evaluation, and reward. For technical writers who are not afraid to take on something slightly different, change communication provides a chance to envision, implement, and enshrine.
Reference
Kotter, John P. 1995. “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail.” Harvard Business Review, March-April.
