That’s a question asked in a recent Fast Company article.
The article suggests, with some validity, that change comes too fast these days for traditional change management to keep up, especially now that change has been accelerated by AI. No question there.
The article starts out by claiming that:
Change management is a multibillion-dollar industry built on the fundamental claim that most people dislike change, and that someone needs to manage that resistance.
I don’t disagree that change leadership is about managing resistance, at least in part. (More on that in a minute.)
But they go on to say that because change doesn’t follow “a predictable model,” then whoosh, change management is obsolete – and oh by the way, “the old model never worked” anyway. They even quote the outdated, incorrect, and taken-out-of-context statistic that “change management projects have a failure rate of around 70%.”
That statistic is an urban (corporate?) myth that seems to keep resurrecting itself, even though multiple studies, going as far back as 2011, have found no supporting data.
Setting that inaccuracy aside, the article presupposes that corporate change is based on a rigid model requiring lengthy analysis, PowerPoint decks, fancy presentations, and a lot of what I call “communi-telling.” (You can read about that in my Substack articles here and here.)
And yeah, AI makes much of that impractical and obsolete, no question.
But what the article overlooks is that the approach it’s discussing has been impractical and obsolete for a long time. That top-down, ultra-planned style of change hasn’t been as bad as that mythical 70% failure rate number would suggest, but it’s also not been a lot of fun to execute (and yes, fun is an important quality when doing change – really, when doing anything.).
I will 100% agree (there’s a percentage I can get behind!) that the old change models have never been great, and are especially un-great in the AI age. AI can assist with, and therefore speed up, a lot of things that have to happen to manage change.
But here’s the thing: change management is not the same as change leadership, which the article didn’t address.
And change leadership is, and always will be, relevant. In fact, I’d say it’s even more relevant today, when change is hurtling at us (and through our companies and our lives) at greater and greater speeds. A January 2024 report from Accenture noted that the rate of change for 2023 was 33% – and that most CEOs expected it to be even higher in 2024. And I suspect they didn’t take the developing impact of AI into consideration back when those forecasts were being made; AI was still in the early stages of public availability at that point.
Traditional change management has needed a – let’s call it a “redesign” – for some time now. That said, we still need the ability to track what’s being changed, why, and how it’s being done – including those lovely things called “milestones” and “deadlines.” (I’m very fond of the Douglas Adams quote “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” Nonetheless, they’re necessary for a whole host of reasons!)
AI can absolutely help with that.
But we still need humans – leaders – to help their fellow humans, their teams, deal with the very real personal and professional impacts of change. AI can be sticky-sweetly sycophantic and supportive – a friend of mine says pretty much all the models are people-pleasers – but that’s not what people need to get through the challenges of change.
People need people, and in the AI boom, that can easily get overlooked.
Don’t.
Here’s the Accenture report.
And here’s the Fast Company article. I should add that I generally like FC articles; this one disappointed me.
Want to talk about change leadership? Drop me a note here
Photo credit: Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash.