Hop on the bus!

🚌 My favorite metaphor is about change management as a bus journey (by leadership and workplace communication expert Merge Gupta-Sunderji). It reflects most of my transformation experience, having led change projects as diverse as cost-cutting, creating a company’s purpose, or accompanying a voluntary organizational redesign effort.

🔮 It also made me reflect on wishful thinking and common misconceptions. Some senior leaders I served in the past wished for change projects to resemble rowing a boat upstream at high speed. As I learned, rowing boats host 1, 2, 4 or 8 rowers.

While this might be identical to the number of board members, it does not represent a company’s or organization’s workforce.

A transformation project affects more than just senior leadership. It impacts most employees in some form or shape. Buy-in to the change is required.

The analogy of change management as a bus ride is brilliant.

Photo by Ina Carolino on Unsplash

Think about it: a bus is a regular means of transport.

Not everyone owns a car. Taking the bus helps people save money. Different people take the bus. The manager, the busy mother/father of three, and the older adult who wants to shop in the city center. The bus-riding population is symbolic of the employee mix in a modern organization.

⏱️ In addition, consider the pace of change. Most of the time, the speed of a transformation is much slower than anticipated. While those who initiate a change management project assume that the project team can complete it within 6 to 12 months, it usually takes longer. Again, this is my personal experience. Of course, the exception to the rule exists: when a transformation mastermind carefully designs the change project and factors in time for addressing bottlenecks and managing risk (negotiating with the worker’s council, the time required to hire new middle managers, comprehensive stakeholder management — to name a few), a shorter duration can be achieved.

👩🏻‍🏫 Sidenote: Masterminding a change project also requires identifying succinct success KPIs at the project’s onset and using (internal) data and benchmarks.

I didn’t come up with the image of a bus journey. LinkedIn expert Merge Gupta-Sunderji came up with this imagery. Her analogy helps change managers pitch to clients and manage expectations.

The speed at which a bus travels cannot be compared to that of a rowing boat.
🚌 When you ride a bus, there are bumps in the road.
🚏 The bus stops quite frequently.
👥 Passengers hop on, and others jump off.
☕️ The bus driver ends his shift, and a new one starts.

🚣‍♂️ A bus journey resembles a change management project much more than gliding on the River Thames or the Boston River in a lean, modern rowing boat.