We are joined by Sky Dow, a highly experienced Change Professional working at FTSE 250 companies, creator of the PULSE framework, and an author whose book on the two sides of change management is out later this year. Today she guides us through how change frameworks support organisational change capability, drawing on the Change Management Institute’s research on the Futures of Change and on decades of hands-on change delivery.
Change frameworks are something we all use, and have used for years, often without thinking about it. So the question at the heart of this session is a simple one: do frameworks give us better outcomes, or do they just give us a structure? For change managers, that is where the real value of learned ability lives. The Change Management Institute’s research puts it well, that traditional frameworks evolve into flexible approaches combining systems thinking, behavioural insight and design tailored to context, and that is exactly where change frameworks are heading.
What this session covers
The session works through four areas, each building on the last:
- The two sides of change management, the art and the science
- Where the common change frameworks sit across that spectrum
- The gaps those frameworks tend to leave behind
- How the PULSE framework is designed to address them
Can change frameworks help organisational change capability?
The two sides of change management
You may have heard of the two sides of change management, or the art and the science. One way to name them is managing change and change management.
Managing change: the art
This side is about managing people through change. It is the messy bit, the stuff that is not linear, the stuff you have to go back and learn a bit more about, and understand a bit more, before you can get people on board.
Change management: the science
This is the more scientific side: change impact assessments, business readiness and benefits realisation. It is the part that demonstrates you have moved from A to B, and done so in a way that shows real outcomes.
Where the traditional frameworks sit
Look closely at the frameworks most of us reach for and they tend to lean one way or the other. Some lean towards the scientific side, looking at structures, impacts and adoption rates once a new process is in place. Others focus on the emotional side of change:
- Kotter looks at creating a sense of urgency, building a coalition and securing quick wins, working through the emotion of change and how to get people on board.
- Bridges talks about endings, the neutral zone and new beginnings, with that feel of letting go of something, giving yourself time to settle, and starting again.
- McKinsey, Prosci and ADKAR carry a bit of both, with systems, structure, skills and staff sitting alongside a shared vision.
- Kubler-Ross remains the go to for showing the emotion people move through when they experience change.
How business change became the fluffy stuff
It is on the emotional side that business change picked up its label as the fluffy stuff. There is a story here of a workplace with business change objectives written on a whiteboard that read love and hugs. It gets a chuckle, but it also diminished the importance of business change, and made it the thing that was easily dispensable:
- When a project got tight on budget, the first thing to go was the change resource
- When a company faced hard times and looked at redundancies, the business change team was in the line of fire
The PULSE framework was built to balance both sides. It brings in the people element, but it also asks you to focus on the value add at an organisational level.
What PULSE stands for
PULSE stands for Purpose, Understand, Learn, Support and Embed. When it was first shared with a few change practitioner friends, the reaction was, you created another framework for change? There was some persuading to do, because we tend to treat frameworks as this step, then this step, then this step, and we know change does not work that way. So the design question was how to build flexibility and iteration into something people can follow, so they can reach a point, realise they have learned something new, and go back to revisit their purpose or adjust the support they have put in place.
Purpose  •  Understand  •  Learn  •  Support  •  Embed
- Purpose is for the times you walk into a project where there is already a solution but no one can quite tell you what the problem is. The solution is a new ERP, so what is the problem? We need something more efficient, yes, but what is the actual problem this is the only solution to?
- Understand builds on the saying, seek to understand before being understood. As Chris Voss puts it, people do not say no because they do not understand, they say no because they do not feel understood.
- Learn is a reminder that there is always something to learn as a practitioner, from engineering train paths to discovering accounting is not as boring as expected, as well as understanding what your stakeholders themselves need to learn.
- Support asks what support is needed and how bespoke it needs to be for your stakeholders to really embrace change.
- Embed takes on a slightly different flavour here. In a world where change is constant and we do not get to take a breath, embedding becomes a way of thinking rather than something you do to one change before moving to the next. It is about embedding the capability to change on a wide scale, not just making single changes stick.
Crucially, PULSE does not exclude other frameworks. There is so much good work out there, and the point is understanding where to use certain thinking. Kubler-Ross can help with the emotional side; other models help with the objective, benefits focused part. If you are stuck working out the purpose of a piece of work, there is a whole set of models and frameworks you can lean into. That is the whole reason for having a framework in the first place.
Three gaps in the traditional frameworks
Through decades of change roles, three gaps kept showing up in the frameworks on offer.
1. Bringing business change back to its purpose
We are moving people from A to B for a reason, not for the fun of it. The organisation has invested in something, and business change is how you get people to move from the old to the new, whether that is a system, a process or a set of behaviours.
2. Change capability at different levels
Early in a change career you might be assigned to a project as the change support, and that is your remit. But many of the challenges predate the project entirely, sitting at organisational level, while you are trying to fight fires at ground level. That raises the question of which processes should exist at an organisational level, what the golden thread is when you come to deliver, and how you loop back to organisational level once delivery is done.
3. How change practitioners protect their sanity
Many of us went into change management thinking we could change the world, that connecting with people and understanding where they are would make it easy. It is not. The person actually doing the work is missing from most frameworks. How many times do you come away thinking you felt like a therapist that day, after the number of people who spoke to you about worries, concerns and fears you were not prepared for?
Bringing business change back to its purpose
The challenge is demonstrating business change in a way that puts it where it will have the biggest impact. Take higher education, an industry shaped right now by government policy affecting student recruitment and by many institutions facing financial sustainability concerns. Those are external factors. Internally, AI is a huge game changer, to the point where there is arguably an existential question on the horizon for education. Richard Rumelt’s book Good Strategy Bad Strategy is a useful read here, because it helps change practitioners hold conversations at that organisational level.
The flow works like this. Internal and external factors and the outcomes, KPIs and benefits an organisation wants to drive feed into a strategy, ideally with a plan for the what, the how and the why. Out of that strategy spits a portfolio of programmes and projects, each with a business case built to hit the strategy and realise the benefits. It is at delivery, ideally, that the change practitioner gets involved, though sometimes you are called in at the last minute to do some comms and training. At some point the organisation has to accept the change, and that change to the business is driven and enabled by change practitioners with all their toolkits and facilitation skills. If we are not at the right level in the organisation, that is where things start to fall apart. The business change has to happen for the benefits to be realised, and for the golden thread to run from strategy all the way to demonstrating the strategy has been achieved. That makes us a key player, and this picture is genuinely useful when speaking with senior leaders about what business change is there to do.
Why do we need change anyway?
The golden thread: from factors and outcomes through to business change and benefits realisation
Business change and benefits management
This leads to benefits management. One practitioner shared that her team does not look at benefits, because if they start digging they will be held accountable for them, and business change is not accountable for them, so they stay at the level of outcomes. That is a maturity question. The consensus in the room was that business change and benefits management should be close bedfellows.
A benefit is a measurable thing, which is where it can get scary: where is the data, how do I get the baseline? But business change does not have to find the baseline itself. It can facilitate the discussion with the people who know what the baseline is or how to find it. That means:
- Benefits mapping and benefits realisation planning
- Facilitating conversations to identify the business owners who will experience a benefit and are comfortable to own it
Where the culture is not right, a missed benefit becomes a question of who to blame, and everyone backs away.
Change at different levels
The second gap, change capability at different levels, shows up as three buckets that emerge from practice:
- Supporting the business through hands-on support with senior leadership, facilitating workshops and running sponsor assessments
- Growing our capability by training a team on skills such as benefits management
- Providing the tools by getting the toolkit and templates ready for your team and anyone else who is interested
Providing the tools is taking on a different flavour now, because you can prompt AI for a bespoke change impact assessment template tailored to your industry and your stakeholders. AI is going to revolutionise how we manage and deliver change. Despite the books declaring change management is dead, that view does not hold up.
Change at all levels: for the organisation, the team, the individual, and portfolios, programmes and projects
Mapping those levels across the PULSE phases shows where the practical work sits, from change maturity assessments and building supporting structures, through sponsor and leadership training, to the sponsor assessments, benefits register, reports and dashboards, prioritisation matrix and change heat maps that make up the toolkit.
PULSE for your organisation: supporting the business, growing capability and providing the tools across the five phases
Looking at familiar activities through a different lens
The point of PULSE here is to look at familiar activities through a slightly different lens. Change impact dashboards are a good example. It is possible to build one, move on, and have no one ever ask for it again, because it was a tick box exercise. The organisation wanted to know what change was happening, so a dashboard got built and that was that. What was missing was the purpose:
- What did they actually want to understand?
- Were they shown how to use and improve it?
- Above all, was it embedded so that no decision gets made without referring to it?
The same questions apply to maturity assessments. We love to do them, but do you need a score when the team can already tell you what is wrong and wants to start fixing it? People say the assessment proves improvement, but are people on the ground actually feeling that improvement, and what needs to be embedded for the organisation to genuinely mature?
Supporting the practitioner
The third gap, supporting the practitioner, came from personal experience. Across the PULSE phases it maps to an aligned role and remit, self awareness, capability, your team and fulfilment.
PULSE for the practitioner: aligned role and remit, self awareness, capability, your team and fulfilment
It is worth working through what you are there to do at the start of an engagement:
- Terms of engagement need to be specific and agreed with the sponsor, which helps you earn a seat at the table early
- You need self-awareness about how you prefer to work, so you do not schedule an intensive workshop from nine to ten when you are still waking up
- You need to be good to yourself so you can be at your best when facilitating change
- Knowing your own capability, and where to get support, matters too, and this is where the Change Management Institute comes in, with its breadth of resources and its community
There is fulfilment in this work. It might sound cheesy, but loving what you do becomes possible once you have done the work on yourself, so you are not stressed about the stakeholder you know will give you a grilling. Those moments build confidence, and confidence is where the fulfilment comes from.
So, do frameworks give us better outcomes?
Coming back to the original question, a framework supports organisational change capability when it can balance both sides: the art of managing people and seeking to understand before being understood, and the muddier waters of benefits management and what it means for an organisation to have a highly skilled business change function. Add a focus on what change needs to happen at different levels, and a focus on the practitioner as the enabler of better change across the organisation, and you are onto a winner. PULSE was built to address those three gaps, and it was piloted at the University of Derby on a Computer Aided Facilities Management project, where an older workforce fearful of new technology meant a lot of time was spent in the understand, learn and support parts. Its success there led to a case study with Sums Consulting, which supports the higher education sector.
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