Holistic Approach to Change Management

Change is a pervasive and constant feature of modern business life. It can be said to be the single most important element of successful business management today. Ignoring or trivialising a changing trend can be costly. To remain competitive in increasingly aggressive markets, organisations and individuals have to embrace and adopt a positive attitude to change. In all business environments, managers and their employees are required to identify, lead and undergo unprecedented levels of change in order to sustain advantage in an increasing competitive and unforgiving world.

The Need for a Holistic Approach

The imperative to change the way organisations do business may be great but the success rate of change programmes is not so great. About 75 percent of all organisational change programmes failed, largely because employees felt left out of the process and end up lacking the motivation, skills and knowledge to adopt new systems and procedures.¹ A recent global survey of 500 companies by PricewaterhouseCoopers showed nine out of ten obstacles to corporate change were linked to the capabilities, attitudes or behaviours of people.² The same survey also found that the top ten success factors for change placed emphasis on people. Therefore, the barriers to successful change are usually people related rather than technical problems. This calls for a holistic approach to manage change successfully in dealing with the vagaries of human behaviours and emotions.