Change capability

Change capability is the capacity of an organization to undertake deliberate change.

In plain terms

Every organization has some existing ability to carry out change, and every change draws on it. That ability is made of people, what they know, the practices they use, how decisions get governed, the systems available, and the conditions they work under. It is easy to overlook, because attention goes to the change in front of people rather than to the machinery running it, until a change fails for reasons that have nothing to do with that change.

How it works

Every change is undertaken by an organization that has some existing ability to undertake changes. That ability sets a practical limit on what any individual change can achieve, and it is rarely examined, because attention goes to the change in front of people rather than to the machinery running it.

Capability is not stable. It changes with or without anyone's involvement. People leave and their knowledge goes with them. Skills that are not used fade. Information about how the organization actually works drifts out of date, quietly, so that documentation describes a state that no longer exists. Practices lose their relevance as circumstances move. Systems and governance change. New constraints arrive.

Without renewal, capability erodes. An organization that was genuinely good at change five years ago is not necessarily good at it now, and nothing will have announced the decline. This is why doing nothing is not a neutral option.

The consequence for a single change is that its capability was largely determined before it began. A change cannot easily rise above the organization's ability to reason about change, keep reasoning connected, or check what happened. It can be a bit better than the average through effort and attention, but it inherits its starting conditions.

The consequence across changes is that capability is where compounding happens, or fails to. An organization that improves its capability after each change starts each subsequent one from a better position. An organization that does not repeats the same failures with different subject matter, which is a familiar pattern and rarely recognised as a capability problem.

Evolution acts on change capability through capability evolution.

Related

• Change capability is what Capability evolution acts on.
• The Evolution function of the Intent Loop is where capability is strengthened.

Referenced by

• Capability evolution