CIOs cannot avoid change management as they are at the forefront of process and technology. Managing change, that too amidst resistance and organizational politics, has never been an easy task. It required specialized skills to handle. Successful changes were those where the change endeavors has overcome the resistance or have circumvented it. Without a strong sponsor and commitment from the top, change management could be a touch journey. Needless to say, traditionally the change management followed a top down approach. I call the traditional change management compulsive as it may not be acceptable to all initially and requires carefully crafted approach for its success.

The mindset, expectations and behavior patterns are changing rapidly for the consumer of service. What is true for Gen X may not be true for Gen Y. The same old techniques of change may not work well today. Today, business is more like an ecosystem and organizations are like communities. There is a need to adopt a different strategy by exploiting the strengths and weaknesses of existing environment.

Fortunately commoditization of IT and democratization of information has given us excellent opportunities to drive change management. My recent experiences with these concepts and using them in driving cultural change have been very encouraging. When we failed to drive a particular initiative through a compulsive change, we thought of changing the approach rather than trying harder with conventional approach. We collected feedback and views from end users as how they see a successful change and implemented those through iterative method. In addition we gave the power to end users to refine approach and play with the change. We experimented by combining the change with a lot of fun, empowerment and engagement and the results were very positive. The adaptation for change was very quick and evolutionary contrary to conventional approaches which were having limited success. I call it collaborative change where everyone can participate in a democratic fashion.

The concept of collaborative change revolves around basic instinct of humans to collaborate and be recognized. It gives the opportunity to the community to participate and provide inputs to change. With empowerment and engagement, the revolution starts from bottom and change becomes natural outcome. The role of the initiator or change manager is to channel the inputs towards a goal and initiate the debate on a particular change before executing it.

 Differences between compulsive and collaborative chang