Challenges: #1 Organisational Inertia

Do you know what your top challenges are in realising the potential value from your projects? One of the biggest identified is organisational inertia; after all, the structures, behaviours and processes that successfully support your operation today probably aren't going to lend themselves to what is required tomorrow and shifting attention to learn about something new when still needing to run the operation can leave people tired and disengaged.

To overcome inertia, existing structures, behaviours and processes need to be changed or removed entirely; the expectation that resource will simply move to and, importantly, sustain new way of working because of the success of something new is unlikely to succeed. The change must be managed end to end, until such point as it is business-as-usual. Kotter notes that “new approaches are fragile and subject to regression, declaring the war won can be catastrophic until changes sink deeply into a company’s culture”.

Does this sound like a familiar challenge - how are you overcoming it?