Conduct a Change Risk Assessment

Every change initiative has its own unique risk profile. Bain has identified 30 specific risks that threaten to disrupt change efforts, things like poor sponsorship and change overload. These risks tend to occur with predictable patterns over the life cycle of a change. But only a handful of these risks determine success or failure at each stage. At the beginning of a change initiative, for instance, if the senior sponsors are not aligned with a clear assessment of the organization’s ability to deliver, they can’t make an informed decision to move to the next stage.

A risk assessment enables a company to understand its risk profile and identify the four or five risks that pose the biggest threats, the sequence in which they will arise and the tools that will be most effective for containing and managing each risk. A starting point for any risk assessment is understanding the failure modes of an organization-what it did well or poorly in executing past change initiatives. Building from there, leaders can identify the handful of risks that will be most relevant at each stage of the process for their organization, and the specific actions to mitigate them. That allows management teams to focus risk mitigation on the things that really matter.

Armed with a risk assessment, leaders can move to the next stage by creating a Heat Map to identify those people most affected at each stage of a change initiative and the potential trouble spots in the organization. A simple version of the heat map provided one key to the successful Merck-Millipore integration. Managers drew up a two-by-two chart representing all groups in the organization across two dimensions: their importance in achieving the integration goals and the degree of likely disruption they would experience from the upcoming change. That allowed the management team to focus on supporting the people most important to the future success of the firm who faced the greatest risk of serious dislocation. The management team set about clarifying roles, helping to set priorities and providing focused change management support for the integration to succeed.

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