Much of the literature and advice on implementing business change focuses on knowing where you are going and making sure that you understand and communicate a consistent vision of the future. Indeed, I have looked at the importance of this in an earlier article in this series. This month's article, however, looks at the past and its often under-estimated importance in implementing change.

Clean sheets and blue skies

Business change projects tend to begin with a "visioning exercise", to determine where the organisation is going and what its objectives are. The output of this exercise is used as a guide to determine the changes that need to be made. Much is made of "starting with a clean sheet" or the clich?d "blue-sky thinking".

This approach has the benefit of allowing more radical changes to be made, facilitating (consultant clich? overload warning!) "thinking outside of the box" in an environment where "there are no sacred cows".

It is true that the proposed changes need to be freed from the constraints of the past, however there is far too much accumulated experience and knowledge in the existing processes to be ignored.

Experience and knowledge

Every view of the processes of a business is conceptualised, usually very highly so. The real processes that ensure that the job is carried out are largely informal and fill in all the gaps around any formalised procedures that are in place. These informal processes exist as a result of the cumulative experience and knowledge of the employees carrying them out. Every time minor problems occur, these informal processes are tweaked to ensure that the job gets done.

This knowledge and experience is not captured anywhere and is not even in the heads of the management team - it exists only in the heads of the employees involved in the process.

To start a change project without capturing this knowledge and experience is asking for trouble, either through getting it wrong or through disillusionment of the employees who see the proposed changes as being quite abstract to their day-to-day jobs.

Babies and bathwater

Any business going through a change project has usually been in business for some time. It is highly unlikely that they have always done everything wrong (otherwise they would not be here to be looking at a change project) or that the change involves an entirely new industry where none of this experience is relevant.

In the main they are likely to be getting most, if not all, of the basics right. To start with a "clean sheet" in this environment can be catastrophic. They are quite likely to "throw the baby out with the bathwater".

By this I mean that in addressing a particular desired change, they create more problems than they solve by replacing all of the things they used to do well, with new processes that pay no heed to the cumulative knowledge and experience held in the existing ones.

Physical and logical

At Feechan Consulting we use a method called PISO? (Process Improvement for Strategic Objectives) which was developed at the University of Sunderland. PISO? gets round this problem by first of all allowing the employees to map out their informal processes using a very flexible diagramming technique. The employees then take this "physical" view of their existing processes and remove all of the physical constraints, e.g. departments, documents, etc. leaving a "logical" view of the underlying processes to which the proposed changes are made. The final step involves these same employees re-introducing physical constraints to implement the proposed solution.

This approach captures the cumulative knowledge and experience held in the existing processes but by then removing the physical constraints and making the changes in a "logical" environment it allows for the degree of radical change possible in a "blue-sky" approach. You can find out more about PISO? at www.feechan.co.uk.

Glen Feechan is Chief Executive of Feechan Consulting Ltd (http://www.feechan.co.uk), a business consultancy specialising in business process improvement training and consultancy. Email Glen at glen@feechan.co.uk.

Glen is also the editor (and regular contributor) of Changing Business ezine (sign up at http://www.feechan.co.uk).