case study on management change

Netflix Change Management Case Study

Netflix is one of the world’s leading internet television networks with over 100 million members in 190 countries. It has a wide variety of award-winning original programming, documentaries, TV shows and feature films. 

Netflix offers a subscription services to its users to watch all its content online. Now Netflix is producing its own content and also adding quality content of other producers for its users. It has become one of the popular online video streaming web portals and been on first top 50 websites globally.

But Netflix transformed itself and it embraced change with ever changing technology and business market.

What is Netflix successfully change story? How it happened and what challenges it faced to cope with change?

For this questions, we are presenting here Netflix change management case study.

This case study will explore how Netflix has successfully managed change in the past and present. It will also provide recommendations for other businesses on how to approach change management.

The story of Netflix change management

Netflix is a streaming service for movies and TV shows. It has a library of over 200,000 titles that you can watch on your phone, tablet, computer, or TV. You can also download shows to watch offline. Netflix offers a variety of plans, including a basic plan that starts at $7.99/month and a premium plan that starts at $11.99/month.

Netflix was founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph. They started the company with the intention of offering a DVD-by-mail service. In 2007, they introduced streaming, which allowed instant streaming of TV shows and movies on your computer. In 2013, they introduced the concept of ” binge watching” with the release of House of Cards, which all episodes of the first season were released at once so that viewers could watch them all in one sitting. In 2015, they launched their own production company, Netflix Originals, which produces movies and TV shows that are only available on Netflix. 

Netflix has undergone several changes since it was founded. The most notable change was the introduction of streaming in 2007, which changed the way people watched TV and movies.

Netflix made two big changes since its started business. First, it introduced the subscription option in 1999 to store DVD rental. This option allows users to rent unlimited DVD rental without late fees. It was a drastic change in the business model of Netflix.

The second big change was happened in 2007, when it launched an online video streaming service. It was a highly disruptive change which completely revolutionalized the concept of watching movies and Tv shows online. Consumers also welcomed this change because this change was the need of time. Because everyone was using smartphone, laptops and computers and trend of going to cinema to watch a movie was on decline. Netflix also used social media and present its content to reach out their customers.  

Netflix’s Change Management Process 

Netflix’s change management process is a model for other organizations to follow. The company has a dedicated team that is responsible for managing change. This team works closely with Netflix’s engineers and product managers to ensure that changes are made in a controlled and safe manner. Netflix has also implemented a series of mechanisms to help prevent and mitigate the impact of changes. For example, all changes are assessed for risk before they are implemented. Netflix also conducts regular post-change reviews to identify any issues that may have arisen from the change. As a result of these measures, Netflix has been able to successfully manage change while minimizing disruptions to its business.

How Netflix manages organizational change forces

There are many factors that affect organizational change . But primarily these are two broad forces of organizational change: a) external and b)internal. Among the external forces there were rapid changes in technology, globalisation, social media etc. These all external factors led to organizational change at Netflix. .For instance, people’s expectation and behaviour, likes and dislikes in terms of watching content was changing due to new technology. New tools, techniques were also affecting business of movies watching and TV shows. But Netflix managed all those forces of change and responded in a big way to meet expectations of its consumers.

There were also internal forces of organizational change like new skills of employees and employees expectations, need of change in work environment, cost of business model etc. Netflix taken all these factors into consideration before going to execute change. And that’s the reason behind their successfully implementation of change.

How Netflix Uses Data to Drive Change 

Netflix’s data team is made up of over 800 people, including statisticians, analysts, and engineers. Their mission is simple: “to help Netflix understand its business and the world.” To do this, they collect and process tons of data every day. This data comes from a variety of sources, including things like clickstream data (what you watch and when you watch it), surveys, social media activity, third-party research, and more. 

Once all this data is collected, it’s organized and stored in a massive data warehouse. This is where things start to get really interesting. The team then uses a combination of qualitative analysis (looking at the meaning behind the numbers) and quantitative analysis (using statistical models to draw conclusions) to glean insights from the data. These insights are then used to inform everything from what new shows to green-light to which actors should star in them. 

For example, let’s say the team notices that a lot of people who watch Stranger Things also tend to watch You. They might then use this information to suggest Stranger Things to people who haven’t watched it yet or recommend You to people who have finished Stranger Things and are looking for something similar. This is just one small example of how Netflix uses data to drive change within its business. 

It’s clear that data plays a big role in everything Netflix does. From deciding which new shows to produce to suggesting content for individual users, data is at the heart of the company’s decision-making process. And as our watching habits continue to be tracked and analyzed, we can expect even more personalized recommendations and a more tailored streaming experience overall.

Learning from drastic changes

In order to maintain a successful business, it is important to occasionally review your company’s methods and make changes where necessary. This is especially true in today’s ever-changing marketplace. Netflix, a leading provider of streaming video content, knows this well. In 2011, the company made a drastic change to its business model that upset many of its customers. However, thanks to careful planning and execution, the change was ultimately successful and resulted in increased profits for the company.

The introduction of drastic changes can be a difficult process, but with proper planning and execution, it can be successful. Netflix provides a great example of how to successfully navigate a major change. By carefully considering the needs of its customers and taking the time to properly execute its plans, the company was able to weather the storm and come out stronger than ever before.

Final Words

Netflix is a great example of change management. Business organizations can learn from Netflix change management case study to keep up with the latest changes and trends. Netflix has been successful in managing change by using data to drive their decisions. There are multiple lessons for other business entities that how Netflix capitalised on its human resources and rightly understood needs of modern-day customers.

About The Author

Tahir Abbas

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Five Case Studies of Transformation Excellence

November 03, 2014  By  Lars Fæste ,  Jim Hemerling ,  Perry Keenan , and  Martin Reeves

In a business environment characterized by greater volatility and more frequent disruptions, companies face a clear imperative: they must transform or fall behind. Yet most transformation efforts are highly complex initiatives that take years to implement. As a result, most fall short of their intended targets—in value, timing, or both. Based on client experience, The Boston Consulting Group has developed an approach to transformation that flips the odds in a company’s favor. What does that look like in the real world? Here are five company examples that show successful transformations, across a range of industries and locations.

VF’s Growth Transformation Creates Strong Value for Investors

Value creation is a powerful lens for identifying the initiatives that will have the greatest impact on a company’s transformation agenda and for understanding the potential value of the overall program for shareholders.

VF offers a compelling example of a company using a sharp focus on value creation to chart its transformation course. In the early 2000s, VF was a good company with strong management but limited organic growth. Its “jeanswear” and intimate-apparel businesses, although responsible for 80 percent of the company’s revenues, were mature, low-gross-margin segments. And the company’s cost-cutting initiatives were delivering diminishing returns. VF’s top line was essentially flat, at about $5 billion in annual revenues, with an unclear path to future growth. VF’s value creation had been driven by cost discipline and manufacturing efficiency, yet, to the frustration of management, VF had a lower valuation multiple than most of its peers.

With BCG’s help, VF assessed its options and identified key levers to drive stronger and more-sustainable value creation. The result was a multiyear transformation comprising four components:

• A Strong Commitment to Value Creation as the Company’s Focus. Initially, VF cut back its growth guidance to signal to investors that it would not pursue growth opportunities at the expense of profitability. And as a sign of management’s commitment to balanced value creation, the company increased its dividend by 90 percent.
• Relentless Cost Management. VF built on its long-known operational excellence to develop an operating model focused on leveraging scale and synergies across its businesses through initiatives in sourcing, supply chain processes, and offshoring.
• A Major Transformation of the Portfolio. To help fund its journey, VF divested product lines worth about $1 billion in revenues, including its namesake intimate-apparel business. It used those resources to acquire nearly $2 billion worth of higher-growth, higher-margin brands, such as Vans, Nautica, and Reef. Overall, this shifted the balance of its portfolio from 70 percent low-growth heritage brands to 65 percent higher-growth lifestyle brands.
• The Creation of a High-Performance Culture. VF has created an ownership mind-set in its management ranks. More than 200 managers across all key businesses and regions received training in the underlying principles of value creation, and the performance of every brand and business is assessed in terms of its value contribution. In addition, VF strengthened its management bench through a dedicated talent-management program and selective high-profile hires. (For an illustration of VF’s transformation roadmap, see the exhibit.)

The results of VF’s TSR-led transformation are apparent. 1 1 For a detailed description of the VF journey, see the 2013 Value Creators Report, Unlocking New Sources of Value Creation , BCG report, September 2013. Notes: 1 For a detailed description of the VF journey, see the 2013 Value Creators Report, Unlocking New Sources of Value Creation , BCG report, September 2013. The company’s revenues have grown from $7 billion in 2008 to more than $11 billion in 2013 (and revenues are projected to top $17 billion by 2017). At the same time, profitability has improved substantially, highlighted by a gross margin of 48 percent as of mid-2014. The company’s stock price quadrupled from $15 per share in 2005 to more than $65 per share in September 2014, while paying about 2 percent a year in dividends. As a result, the company has ranked in the top quintile of the S&P 500 in terms of TSR over the past ten years.

A Consumer-Packaged-Goods Company Uses Several Levers to Fund Its Transformation Journey

A leading consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) player was struggling to respond to challenging market dynamics, particularly in the value-based segments and at the price points where it was strongest. The near- and medium-term forecasts looked even worse, with likely contractions in sales volume and potentially even in revenues. A comprehensive transformation effort was needed.

To fund the journey, the company looked at several cost-reduction initiatives, including logistics. Previously, the company had worked with a large number of logistics providers, causing it to miss out on scale efficiencies.

To improve, it bundled all transportation spending, across the entire network (both inbound to production facilities and out-bound to its various distribution channels), and opened it to bidding through a request-for-proposal process. As a result, the company was able to save 10 percent on logistics in the first 12 months—a very fast gain for what is essentially a commodity service.

Similarly, the company addressed its marketing-agency spending. A benchmark analysis revealed that the company had been paying rates well above the market average and getting fewer hours per full-time equivalent each year than the market standard. By getting both rates and hours in line, the company managed to save more than 10 percent on its agency spending—and those savings were immediately reinvested to enable the launch of what became a highly successful brand.

Next, the company pivoted to growth mode in order to win in the medium term. The measure with the biggest impact was pricing. The company operates in a category that is highly segmented across product lines and highly localized. Products that sell well in one region often do poorly in a neighboring state. Accordingly, it sought to de-average its pricing approach across locations, brands, and pack sizes, driving a 2 percent increase in EBIT.

Similarly, it analyzed trade promotion effectiveness by gathering and compiling data on the roughly 150,000 promotions that the company had run across channels, locations, brands, and pack sizes. The result was a 2 terabyte database tracking the historical performance of all promotions.

Using that information, the company could make smarter decisions about which promotions should be scrapped, which should be tweaked, and which should merit a greater push. The result was another 2 percent increase in EBIT. Critically, this was a clear capability that the company built up internally, with the objective of continually strengthening its trade-promotion performance over time, and that has continued to pay annual dividends.

Finally, the company launched a significant initiative in targeted distribution. Before the transformation, the company’s distributors made decisions regarding product stocking in independent retail locations that were largely intuitive. To improve its distribution, the company leveraged big data to analyze historical sales performance for segments, brands, and individual SKUs within a roughly ten-mile radius of that retail location. On the basis of that analysis, the company was able to identify the five SKUs likely to sell best that were currently not in a particular store. The company put this tool on a mobile platform and is in the process of rolling it out to the distributor base. (Currently, approximately 60 percent of distributors, representing about 80 percent of sales volume, are rolling it out.) Without any changes to the product lineup, that measure has driven a 4 percent jump in gross sales.

Throughout the process, management had a strong change-management effort in place. For example, senior leaders communicated the goals of the transformation to employees through town hall meetings. Cognizant of how stressful transformations can be for employees—particularly during the early efforts to fund the journey, which often emphasize cost reductions—the company aggressively talked about how those savings were being reinvested into the business to drive growth (for example, investments into the most effective trade promotions and the brands that showed the greatest sales-growth potential).

In the aggregate, the transformation led to a much stronger EBIT performance, with increases of nearly $100 million in fiscal 2013 and far more anticipated in 2014 and 2015. The company’s premium products now make up a much bigger part of the portfolio. And the company is better positioned to compete in its market.

A Leading Bank Uses a Lean Approach to Transform Its Target Operating Model

A leading bank in Europe is in the process of a multiyear transformation of its operating model. Prior to this effort, a benchmarking analysis found that the bank was lagging behind its peers in several aspects. Branch employees handled fewer customers and sold fewer new products, and back-office processing times for new products were slow. Customer feedback was poor, and rework rates were high, especially at the interface between the front and back offices. Activities that could have been managed centrally were handled at local levels, increasing complexity and cost. Harmonization across borders—albeit a challenge given that the bank operates in many countries—was limited. However, the benchmark also highlighted many strengths that provided a basis for further improvement, such as common platforms and efficient product-administration processes.

To address the gaps, the company set the design principles for a target operating model for its operations and launched a lean program to get there. Using an end-to-end process approach, all the bank’s activities were broken down into roughly 250 processes, covering everything that a customer could potentially experience. Each process was then optimized from end to end using lean tools. This approach breaks down silos and increases collaboration and transparency across both functions and organization layers.

Employees from different functions took an active role in the process improvements, participating in employee workshops in which they analyzed processes from the perspective of the customer. For a mortgage, the process was broken down into discrete steps, from the moment the customer walks into a branch or goes to the company website, until the house has changed owners. In the front office, the system was improved to strengthen management, including clear performance targets, preparation of branch managers for coaching roles, and training in root-cause problem solving. This new way of working and approaching problems has directly boosted both productivity and morale.

The bank is making sizable gains in performance as the program rolls through the organization. For example, front-office processing time for a mortgage has decreased by 33 percent and the bank can get a final answer to customers 36 percent faster. The call centers had a significant increase in first-call resolution. Even more important, customer satisfaction scores are increasing, and rework rates have been halved. For each process the bank revamps, it achieves a consistent 15 to 25 percent increase in productivity.

And the bank isn’t done yet. It is focusing on permanently embedding a change mind-set into the organization so that continuous improvement becomes the norm. This change capability will be essential as the bank continues on its transformation journey.

A German Health Insurer Transforms Itself to Better Serve Customers

Barmer GEK, Germany’s largest public health insurer, has a successful history spanning 130 years and has been named one of the top 100 brands in Germany. When its new CEO, Dr. Christoph Straub, took office in 2011, he quickly realized the need for action despite the company’s relatively good financial health. The company was still dealing with the postmerger integration of Barmer and GEK in 2010 and needed to adapt to a fast-changing and increasingly competitive market. It was losing ground to competitors in both market share and key financial benchmarks. Barmer GEK was suffering from overhead structures that kept it from delivering market-leading customer service and being cost efficient, even as competitors were improving their service offerings in a market where prices are fixed. Facing this fundamental challenge, Barmer GEK decided to launch a major transformation effort.

The goal of the transformation was to fundamentally improve the customer experience, with customer satisfaction as a benchmark of success. At the same time, Barmer GEK needed to improve its cost position and make tough choices to align its operations to better meet customer needs. As part of the first step in the transformation, the company launched a delayering program that streamlined management layers, leading to significant savings and notable side benefits including enhanced accountability, better decision making, and an increased customer focus. Delayering laid the path to win in the medium term through fundamental changes to the company’s business and operating model in order to set up the company for long-term success.

The company launched ambitious efforts to change the way things were traditionally done:

• A Better Client-Service Model. Barmer GEK is reducing the number of its branches by 50 percent, while transitioning to larger and more attractive service centers throughout Germany. More than 90 percent of customers will still be able to reach a service center within 20 minutes. To reach rural areas, mobile branches that can visit homes were created.
• Improved Customer Access. Because Barmer GEK wanted to make it easier for customers to access the company, it invested significantly in online services and full-service call centers. This led to a direct reduction in the number of customers who need to visit branches while maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction.
• Organization Simplification. A pillar of Barmer GEK’s transformation is the centralization and specialization of claim processing. By moving from 80 regional hubs to 40 specialized processing centers, the company is now using specialized administrators—who are more effective and efficient than under the old staffing model—and increased sharing of best practices.

Although Barmer GEK has strategically reduced its workforce in some areas—through proven concepts such as specialization and centralization of core processes—it has invested heavily in areas that are aligned with delivering value to the customer, increasing the number of customer-facing employees across the board. These changes have made Barmer GEK competitive on cost, with expected annual savings exceeding €300 million, as the company continues on its journey to deliver exceptional value to customers. Beyond being described in the German press as a “bold move,” the transformation has laid the groundwork for the successful future of the company.

Nokia’s Leader-Driven Transformation Reinvents the Company (Again)

We all remember Nokia as the company that once dominated the mobile-phone industry but subsequently had to exit that business. What is easily forgotten is that Nokia has radically and successfully reinvented itself several times in its 150-year history. This makes Nokia a prime example of a “serial transformer.”

In 2014, Nokia embarked on perhaps the most radical transformation in its history. During that year, Nokia had to make a radical choice: continue massively investing in its mobile-device business (its largest) or reinvent itself. The device business had been moving toward a difficult stalemate, generating dissatisfactory results and requiring increasing amounts of capital, which Nokia no longer had. At the same time, the company was in a 50-50 joint venture with Siemens—called Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN)—that sold networking equipment. NSN had been undergoing a massive turnaround and cost-reduction program, steadily improving its results.

When Microsoft expressed interest in taking over Nokia’s device business, Nokia chairman Risto Siilasmaa took the initiative. Over the course of six months, he and the executive team evaluated several alternatives and shaped a deal that would radically change Nokia’s trajectory: selling the mobile business to Microsoft. In parallel, Nokia CFO Timo Ihamuotila orchestrated another deal to buy out Siemens from the NSN joint venture, giving Nokia 100 percent control over the unit and forming the cash-generating core of the new Nokia. These deals have proved essential for Nokia to fund the journey. They were well-timed, well-executed moves at the right terms.

Right after these radical announcements, Nokia embarked on a strategy-led design period to win in the medium term with new people and a new organization, with Risto Siilasmaa as chairman and interim CEO. Nokia set up a new portfolio strategy, corporate structure, capital structure, robust business plans, and management team with president and CEO Rajeev Suri in charge. Nokia focused on delivering excellent operational results across its portfolio of three businesses while planning its next move: a leading position in technologies for a world in which everyone and everything will be connected.

Nokia’s share price has steadily climbed. Its enterprise value has grown 12-fold since bottoming out in July 2012. The company has returned billions of dollars of cash to its shareholders and is once again the most valuable company in Finland. The next few years will demonstrate how this chapter in Nokia’s 150-year history of serial transformation will again reinvent the company.

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Our diverse, global teams bring deep industry and functional expertise and a range of perspectives that question the status quo and spark change. BCG delivers solutions through leading-edge management consulting, technology and design, and corporate and digital ventures. We work in a uniquely collaborative model across the firm and throughout all levels of the client organization, fueled by the goal of helping our clients thrive and enabling them to make the world a better place.

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Home » Change Management » Amazon: The Ultimate Change Management Case Study

Amazon: The Ultimate Change Management Case Study

Amazon’s innovations have helped it become extremely successful, making it an excellent change management case study.

Since it was formed, Amazon has innovated across countless areas and industries, including:

• Warehouse automation
• The web server industry
• Streaming video and on-demand media
• Electronic books

Considering that Amazon started as an online bookstore, these accomplishments are quite impressive.

Examining Amazon as a change management highlights a few important business lessons:

• Innovation fuels success, especially in today’s digital economy
• Speed is the ultimate weapon
• Those who resist organizational change can easily get left behind

Below, we’ll examine some of Amazon’s changes … and hopefully discover a few reasons why it has become so successful.

Let’s get started.

Below are 10 ways Amazon has changed its business, transforming itself far beyond a mere online bookseller.

In no particular order…

1. Amazon Web Services

When Amazon Web Services (AWS) started out, most developers didn’t take it seriously.

A decade later, it was the go-to cloud server company in the world.

In fact, Bezos has even said that AWS was the biggest part of the company.

Since it has more capacity than its nearest 14 competitors combined, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.

2. Whole Foods

After acquiring Whole Foods , Amazon began making changes to the grocery store chain.

A few of these include:

• Adding Amazon products to the shelves
• Integrating Whole Foods and Amazon Prime
• Internal restructuring

Other programs include food delivery from Whole Foods, rewards for customers using Amazon credit cards, and discounts for Prime members.

3. Delivery

Amazon has drastically innovated product delivery.

For instance, customers with Prime memberships can enjoy free two-day delivery.

In certain cities , Prime members can also get free same-day or one-day delivery.

And with its drone delivery program on the horizon, customers may be able to receive orders in 30 minutes or less .

4. Warehouse Automation

Amazon warehouses have undergone major technological transformations.

Currently, Amazon warehouses uses robots to collect and transport many of its products.

In coming years, though, even more of the company’s 200,000+ warehouse workers could be replaced by robots .

In 2016 alone, it increased robot workers by 50% .

5. TV and Prime Video

Another innovation of the former bookseller is its foray into TV, movies, and video.

Amazon began by selling videos and DVDs. Now it streams, rents, and sells digital copies of videos.

On top of that, the company has joined YouTube, Netflix, and other tech giants by producing its own movies and TV shows.

6. Amazon in Other Countries

Change managers would also be interested in how Amazon adapts itself to other countries’ economies.

In India, for instance, Amazon has been forced to adopt unique measures.

These include:

• Using mom-n-pop stores as delivery locations
• Hiring bicycle or motorcycle couriers for last-mile deliveries
• Creating mobile tea carts that serve tea and teach business owners about e-commerce

These types of innovations are necessary to succeed in other countries.

Failure to adapt to these changes often proves disastrous, which is a major reason why Google China failed .

7. Amazon Go

Amazon isn’t just an online retailer … it has now opened up physical grocery stores.

However, as with all of its business ventures, it aims to disrupt, transform, and dominate retail grocery stores.

In this case, Amazon wants to create grocery stores with zero clerks .

Amazon Go is a venture that promises no checkout lines, no hassle, and ultra-convenience.

8. Kindle and E-Books

Everyone knows that Kindle has been one of Amazon’s biggest innovations.

This product has single-handedly revolutionized the book publishing industry.

For better or for worse, Kindle has changed the way books are read, sold, and distributed.

Some estimates have placed Kindle e-book revenue at over half a billion dollars per year.

9. Affiliate Marketing

Early on in Amazon’s career, it opened its doors to online sales associates.

Members of Amazon Associates can earn revenue by sending web visitors to the sales giant.

According to Amazon, there are over 900,000 global members – all working to promote the company’s products and online presence.

10. Blue Origin

Technically speaking, Blue Origin is a different company from Amazon.

However, it’s worth noting that Amazon and Jeff Bezos can hardly be separated.

Without the famous founder’s extreme drive and vision, Amazon wouldn’t be what it is today.

And without his willingness to innovate, he never would have founded Blue Origin.

Like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Blue Origin literally aims for the stars.

Its mission and goal – “millions of people living and working in space.”

Conclusion: Amazon Proves that Change Drives Success

It’s safe to say that Amazon’s defining trait has been its willingness to change.

What started as an online bookstore has become a multi-industry behemoth.

It has crushed companies that don’t innovate … it has revolutionized several industries … and it shows no signs of slowing.

The biggest lesson from this change management case study?

Innovation and change drive success .

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The Most Successful Approaches to Leading Organizational Change

• Deborah Rowland,
• Michael Thorley,
• Nicole Brauckmann

A closer look at four distinct ways to drive transformation.

When tasked with implementing large-scale organizational change, leaders often give too much attention to the what of change — such as a new organization strategy, operating model or acquisition integration — not the how — the particular way they will approach such changes. Such inattention to the how comes with the major risk that old routines will be used to get to new places. Any unquestioned, “default” approach to change may lead to a lot of busy action, but not genuine system transformation. Through their practice and research, the authors have identified the optimal ways to conceive, design, and implement successful organizational change.

Management of long-term, complex, large-scale change has a reputation of not delivering the anticipated benefits. A primary reason for this is that leaders generally fail to consider how to approach change in a way that matches their intent.

• Deborah Rowland is the co-author of  Sustaining Change: Leadership That Works , Still Moving: How to Lead Mindful Change , and the Still Moving Field Guide: Change Vitality at Your Fingertips . She has personally led change at Shell, Gucci Group, BBC Worldwide, and PepsiCo and pioneered original research in the field, accepted as a paper at the 2016 Academy of Management and the 2019 European Academy of Management. Thinkers50 Radar named as one of the generation of management thinkers changing the world of business in 2017, and she’s on the 2021 HR Most Influential Thinker list. She is Cambridge University 1st Class Archaeology & Anthropology Graduate.
• Michael Thorley is a qualified accountant, psychotherapist, executive psychological coach, and coach supervisor integrating all modalities to create a unique approach. Combining his extensive experience of running P&L accounts and developing approaches that combine “hard”-edged and “softer”-edged management approaches, he works as a non-executive director and advisor to many different organizations across the world that wish to generate a new perspective on change.
• Nicole Brauckmann focuses on helping organizations and individuals create the conditions for successful emergent change to unfold. As an executive and consultant, she has worked to deliver large-scale complex change across different industries, including energy, engineering, financial services, media, and not-for profit. She holds a PhD at Faculty of Philosophy, Westfaelische Wilhelms University Muenster and spent several years on academic research and teaching at University of San Diego Business School.

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Chapter 21 - Organizational Change Management in SRE

• Table of Contents
• Foreword II
• 1. How SRE Relates to DevOps
• Part I - Foundations
• 2. Implementing SLOs
• 3. SLO Engineering Case Studies
• 4. Monitoring
• 5. Alerting on SLOs
• 6. Eliminating Toil
• 7. Simplicity
• Part II - Practices
• 9. Incident Response
• 10. Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure
• 11. Managing Load
• 12. Introducing Non-Abstract Large System Design
• 13. Data Processing Pipelines
• 14. Configuration Design and Best Practices
• 15. Configuration Specifics
• 16. Canarying Releases
• Part III - Processes
• 17. Identifying and Recovering from Overload
• 18. SRE Engagement Model
• 19. SRE: Reaching Beyond Your Walls
• 20. SRE Team Lifecycles
• 21. Organizational Change Management in SRE
• Appendix A. Example SLO Document
• Appendix B. Example Error Budget Policy
• Appendix C. Results of Postmortem Analysis
• About the Editors

Organizational Change Management in SRE

By Alex Bramley, Ben Lutch, Michelle Duffy, and Nir Tarcic with Betsy Beyer

In the introduction to the first SRE Book , Ben Treynor Sloss describes SRE teams as “characterized by both rapid innovation and a large acceptance of change,” and specifies organizational change management as a core responsibility of an SRE team. This chapter examines how theory can apply in practice across SRE teams. After reviewing some key change management theories, we explore two case studies that demonstrate how different styles of change management have played out in concrete ways at Google.

Note that the term change management has two interpretations: organizational change management and change control. This chapter examines change management as a collective term for all approaches to preparing and supporting individuals, teams, and business units in making organizational change. We do not discuss this term within a project management context, where it may be used to refer to change control processes, such as change review or versioning.

SRE Embraces Change

More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus claimed change is the only constant. This axiom still holds true today—especially in regards to technology, and particularly in rapidly evolving internet and cloud sectors.

Product teams exist to build products, ship features, and delight customers. At Google, most change is fast-paced, following a “launch and iterate” approach. Executing on such change typically requires coordination across systems, products, and globally distributed teams. Site Reliability Engineers are frequently in the middle of this complicated and rapidly shifting landscape, responsible for balancing the risks inherent in change with product reliability and availability. Error budgets (see Implementing SLOs ) are a primary mechanism for achieving this balance.

Introduction to Change Management

Change management as an area of study and practice has grown since foundational work in the field by Kurt Lewin in the 1940s. Theories primarily focus on developing frameworks for managing organizational change. In-depth analysis of particular theories is beyond the scope of this book, but to contextualize them within the realm of SRE, we briefly describe some common theories and how each might be applicable in an SRE-type organization. While the formal processes implicit in these theoretical frameworks have not been applied by SRE at Google, considering SRE activities through the lens of these frameworks has helped us refine our approach to managing change. Following this discussion, we will introduce some case studies that demonstrate how elements of some of these theories apply to change management activities led by Google SRE.

Lewin’s Three-Stage Model

Kurt Lewin’s “unfreeze–change–freeze” model for managing change is the oldest of the relevant theories in this field. This simple three-stage model is a tool for managing process review and the resulting changes in group dynamics. Stage 1 entails persuading a group that change is necessary. Once they are amenable to the idea of change, Stage 2 executes that change. Finally, when the change is broadly complete, Stage 3 institutionalizes the new patterns of behavior and thought. The model’s core principle posits the group as the primary dynamic instrument, arguing that individual and group interactions should be examined as a system when the group is planning, executing, and completing any period of change. Accordingly, Lewin's work is most useful for planning organizational change at the macro level.

McKinsey’s 7-S Model

McKinsey’s seven S’s stand for structure, strategy, systems, skills, style, staff, and shared values. Similar to Lewin’s work, this framework is also a toolset for planned organizational change. While Lewin’s framework is generic, 7-S has an explicit goal of improving organizational effectiveness. Application of both theories begins with an analysis of current purpose and processes. However, 7-S also explicitly covers both business elements (structure, strategy, systems) and people-management elements (shared values, skills, style, staff). This model could be useful for a team considering change from a traditional systems administration focus to the more holistic Site Reliability Engineering approach.

Kotter’s Eight-Step Process for Leading Change

Time magazine named John P. Kotter’s 1996 book Leading Change (Harvard Business School Press) one of the Top 25 Most Influential Business Management Books of all time . Figure 21-1 depicts the eight steps in Kotter’s change management process.

Kotter’s process is particularly relevant to SRE teams and organizations, with one small exception: in many cases (e.g., the upcoming Waze case study), there’s no need to create a sense of urgency. SRE teams supporting products and systems with accelerating growth are frequently faced with urgent scaling, reliability, and operational challenges. The component systems are often owned by multiple development teams, which may span several organizational units; scaling issues may also require coordination with teams ranging from physical infrastructure to product management. Because SRE is often on the front line when problems occur, it is uniquely motivated to lead the change needed to ensure products are available 24/7/365. Much of SRE work (implicitly) embraces Kotter’s process to ensure the continued availability of supported products.

The Prosci ADKAR Model

The Prosci ADKAR model focuses on balancing both the business and people aspects of change management. ADKAR is an acronym for the goals individuals must achieve for successful organizational change: awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement.

In principle, ADKAR provides a useful, thoughtful, people-centric framework. However, its applicability to SRE is limited because operational responsibilities quite often impose considerable time constraints. Proceeding iteratively through ADKAR’s stages and providing the necessary training or coaching requires pacing and investment in communication, which are difficult to implement in the context of globally distributed, operationally focused teams. That said, Google has successfully used ADKAR-style processes for introducing and building support for high-level changes—for example, introducing global organizational change to the SRE management team while preserving local autonomy for implementation details.

Emotion-Based Models

The Bridges Transition Model describes people’s emotional reactions to change. While a useful management tool for people managers, it’s not a framework or process for change management. Similarly, the Kübler-Ross Change Curve describes ranges of emotions people may feel when faced with change. Developed from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s research on death and dying, 1 it has been applied to understanding and anticipating employee reactions to organizational change. Both models can be useful in maintaining high employee productivity throughout periods of change, since unhappy people are rarely productive.

The Deming Cycle

Also known as the Plan-Do-Check-Act (or PDCA) Cycle, this process from statistician Edward W. Deming is commonly used in DevOps environments for process improvements—for example, adoption of continuous integration/continuous delivery techniques. It is not suited to organizational change management because it does not cover the human side of change, including motivations and leadership styles. Deming’s focus is to take existing processes (mechanical, automated, or workflow) and cyclically apply continuous improvements. The case studies we refer to in this chapter deal with larger, organizational changes where iteration is counterproductive: frequent, wrenching org-chart changes can sap employee confidence and negatively impact company culture.

How These Theories Apply to SRE

No change management model is universally applicable to every situation, so it’s not surprising that Google SRE hasn’t exclusively standardized on one model. That said, here’s how we like to think about applying these models to common change management scenarios in SRE:

• Kotter’s Eight-Step Process is a change management model for SRE teams who necessarily embrace change as a core responsibility.
• The Prosci ADKAR model is a framework that SRE management may want to consider to coordinate change across globally distributed teams.
• All individual SRE managers will benefit from familiarity with both the Bridges Transition Model and the Kübler-Ross Change Curve , which provide tools to support employees in times of organizational change.

Now that we’ve introduced the theories, let’s look at two case studies that show how change management has played out at Google.

Case Study 1: Scaling Waze—From Ad Hoc to Planned Change

Waze is a community-based navigation app acquired by Google in 2013. After the acquisition, Waze entered a period of significant growth in active users, engineering staff, and computing infrastructure, but continued to operate relatively autonomously within Google. The growth introduced many challenges, both technical and organizational.

Waze’s autonomy and startup ethos led them to meet these challenges with a grassroots technical response from small groups of engineers, rather than management-led, structured organizational change as implied by the formal models discussed in the previous section. Nevertheless, their approach to propagating changes throughout the organization and infrastructure significantly resembles Kotter’s model of change management. This case study examines how Kotter’s process (which we apply retroactively) aptly describes a sequence of technical and organizational challenges Waze faced as they grew post-acquisition.

The Messaging Queue: Replacing a System While Maintaining Reliability

Kotter’s model begins the cycle of change with a sense of urgency . Waze’s SRE team needed to act quickly and decisively when the reliability of Waze’s message queueing system regressed badly, leading to increasingly frequent and severe outages. As shown in Figure 21-2 , the message queueing system was critical to operations because every component of Waze (real time, geocoding, routing, etc.) used it to communicate with other components internally.

As throughput on the message queue grew significantly, the system simply couldn’t cope with the ever-increasing demands. SREs needed to manually intervene to preserve system stability at shorter and shorter intervals. At its worst, the entire Waze SRE team spent most of a two-week period firefighting 24/7, eventually resorting to restarting some components of the message queue hourly to keep messages flowing and tens of millions of users happy.

Because SRE was also responsible for building and releasing all of Waze’s software, this operational load had a noticeable impact on feature velocity—when SREs spent all of their time fighting fires, they hardly had time to support new feature rollouts. By highlighting the severity of the situation, engineers convinced Waze’s leadership to reevaluate priorities and dedicate some engineering time to reliability work. A guiding coalition of two SREs and a senior engineer came together to form a strategic vision of a future where SRE toil was no longer necessary to keep messages flowing. This small team evaluated off-the-shelf message queue products, but quickly decided that they could only meet Waze’s scaling and reliability requirements with a custom-built solution.

Developing this message queue in-house would be impossible without some way to maintain operations in the meantime. The coalition removed this barrier to action by enlisting a volunteer army of developers from the teams who used the current messaging queue. Each team reviewed the codebase for their service to identify ways to cut the volume of messages they published. Trimming unnecessary messages and rolling out a compression layer on top of the old queue reduced some load on the system. The team also gained some more operational breathing room by building a dedicated messaging queue for one particular component that was responsible for over 30% of system traffic. These measures yielded enough of a temporary operational reprieve to allow for a two-month window to assemble and test a prototype of the new messaging system.

Migrating a message queue system that handles tens of thousands of messages per second is a daunting task even without the pressure of imminent service meltdown. But gradually reducing the load on the old system would relieve some of this pressure, affording the team a longer time window to complete the migration. To this end, Waze SRE rebuilt the client libraries for the message queue so they could publish and receive messages using either or both systems, using a centralized control surface to switch the traffic over.

Once the new system was proven to work, SRE began the first phase of the migration: they identified some low-traffic, high-importance message flows for which messaging outages were catastrophic. For these flows, writing to both messaging systems would provide a backup path. A couple of near misses, where the backup path kept core Waze services operating while the old system faltered, provided the short-term wins that justified the initial investment.

Mass migration to the new system required SRE to work closely with the teams who use it. The team needed to figure out both how to best support their use cases and how to coordinate the traffic switch. As the SRE team automated the process of migrating traffic and the new system supported more use cases by default, the rate of migrations accelerated significantly .

Kotter’s change management process ends with instituting change . Eventually, with enough momentum behind the adoption of the new system, the SRE team could declare the old system deprecated and no longer supported. They migrated the last stragglers a few quarters later. Today, the new system handles more than 1000 times the load of the previous one, and requires little manual intervention from SREs for ongoing support and maintenance.

The Next Cycle of Change: Improving the Deployment Process

The process of change as a cycle was one of Kotter’s key insights. The cyclical nature of meaningful change is particularly apparent when it comes to the types of technical changes that face SRE. Eliminating one bottleneck in a system often highlights another one. As each change cycle is completed, the resulting improvements, standardization, and automation free up engineering time. Engineering teams now have the space to more closely examine their systems and identify more pain points, triggering the next cycle of change.

When Waze SRE could finally take a step back from firefighting problems related to the messaging system, a new bottleneck emerged, bringing with it a renewed sense of urgency : SRE’s sole ownership of releases was noticeably and seriously hindering development velocity. The manual nature of releases required a significant amount of SRE time. To exacerbate an already suboptimal situation, system components were large, and because releases were costly, they were relatively infrequent. As a result, each release represented a large delta, significantly increasing the possibility that a major defect would necessitate a rollback.

Improvements toward a better release process happened incrementally, as Waze SRE didn’t have a master plan from square one. To slim down system components so the team could iterate each more rapidly, one of the senior Waze developers created a framework for building microservices. This provided a standard “batteries included” platform that made it easy for the engineering organization to start breaking their components apart. SRE worked with this developer to include some reliability-focused features—for example, a common control surface and a set of behaviors that were amenable to automation. As a result, SRE could develop a suite of tools to manage the previously costly parts of the release process. One of these tools incentivized adoption by bundling all of the steps needed to create a new microservice with the framework.

These tools were quick-and-dirty at first—the initial prototypes were built by one SRE over the course of several days. As the team cleaved more microservices from their parent components, the value of the SRE-developed tools quickly became apparent to the wider organization. SRE was spending less time shepherding the slimmed-down components into production, and the new microservices were much less costly to release individually.

While the release process was already much improved, the proliferation of new microservices meant that SRE’s overall burden was still concerning. Engineering leadership was unwilling to assume responsibility for the release process until releases were less burdensome.

In response, a small coalition of SREs and developers sketched out a strategic vision to shift to a continuous deployment strategy using Spinnaker , an open source, multicloud, continuous delivery platform for building and executing deployment workflows. With the time saved by our bootstrap tooling, the team now was able to engineer this new system to enable one-click builds and deployments of hundreds or thousands of microservices. The new system was technically superior to the previous system in every way, but SRE still couldn’t persuade development teams to make the switch. This reluctance was driven by two factors: the obvious disincentive of having to push their own releases to production, plus change aversion driven by poor visibility into the release process.

Waze SRE tore down these barriers to adoption by showing how the new process added value. The team built a centralized dashboard that displayed the release status of binaries and a number of standard metrics exported by the microservice framework. Development teams could easily link their releases to changes in those metrics, which gave them confidence that deployments were successful. SRE worked closely with a few volunteer systems-oriented development teams to move services to Spinnaker. These wins proved that the new system could not only fulfill its requirements, but also add value beyond the original release process. At this point, engineering leadership set a goal for all teams to perform releases using the new Spinnaker deployment pipelines.

To facilitate the migration, Waze SRE provided organization-wide Spinnaker training sessions and consulting sessions for teams with complex requirements. When early adopters became familiar with the new system, their positive experiences sparked a chain reaction of accelerating adoption . They found the new process faster and less painful than waiting for SRE to push their releases. Now, engineers began to put pressure on dependencies that had not moved, as they were the impediment to faster development velocity—not the SRE team!

Today, more than 95% of Waze’s services use Spinnaker for continuous deployment, and changes can be pushed to production with very little human involvement. While Spinnaker isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, configuring a release pipeline is trivial if a new service is built using the microservices framework, so new services have a strong incentive to standardize on this solution.

Lessons Learned

Waze’s experience in removing bottlenecks to technical change contains a number of useful lessons for other teams attempting engineering-led technical or organizational change. To begin with, change management theory is not a waste of time! Viewing this development and migration process through the lens of Kotter’s process demonstrates the model’s applicability. A more formal application of Kotter’s model at the time could have helped streamline and guide the process of change.

Change instigated from the grass roots requires close collaboration between SRE and development, as well as support from executive leadership. Creating a small, focused group with members from all parts of the organization—SRE, developers, and management—was key to the team’s success. A similar collaboration was vital to instituting the change. Over time, these ad hoc groups can and should evolve into more formal and structured cooperation, where SREs are automatically involved in design discussions and can advise on best practices for building and deploying robust applications in a production environment throughout the entire product lifecycle.

Incremental change is much easier to manage. Jumping straight to the “perfect” solution is too large a step to take all at once (not to mention probably infeasible if your system is about to collapse), and the concept of “perfect” will likely evolve as new information comes to light during the change process. An iterative approach can demonstrate early wins that help an organization buy into the vision of change and justify further investment. On the other hand, if early iterations don’t demonstrate value, you’ll waste less time and fewer resources when you inevitably abandon the change. Because incremental change doesn’t happen all at once, having a master plan is invaluable. Describe the goals in broad terms, be flexible, and ensure that each iteration moves toward them.

Finally, sometimes your current solutions can’t support the requirements of your strategic vision. Building something new has a large engineering cost, but can be worthwhile if the project pushes you out of a local maxima and enables long-term growth. As a thought experiment, figure out where bottlenecks might arise in your systems and tooling as your business and organization grow over the next few years. If you suspect any elements don’t scale horizontally, or have superlinear (or worse, exponential) growth with respect to a core business metric such as daily active users, you may need to consider redesigning or replacing them.

Waze’s development of a new in-house message queue system shows that it is possible for small groups of determined engineers to institute change that moves the needle toward greater service reliability. Mapping Kotter’s model onto the change shows that some consideration of change management strategy can help provide a formula for success even in small, engineering-led organizations. And, as the next case study also demonstrates, when changes promote standardizing technology and processes, the organization as a whole can reap considerable efficiency gains.

Case Study 2: Common Tooling Adoption in SRE

SREs are opinionated about the software they can and should use to manage production. Years of experience, observing what goes well and what doesn’t, and examining the past through the lens of the postmortem, have given SREs a deep background coupled with strong instincts. Specifying, building, and implementing software to automate this year’s job away is a core value in SRE. In particular, Google SRE recently focused our efforts on horizontal software. Adoption of the same solution by a critical mass of users and developers creates a virtuous cycle and reduces reinvention of wheels. Teams who otherwise might not interact share practices and policies that are automated using the same software.

This case study is based on an organizational evolution, not a response to a systems scaling or reliability issue (as discussed in the Waze case study). Hence, the Prosci ADKAR model (shown in Figure 21-3 ) is a better fit than Kotter’s model, as it recognizes both explicit organizational/people management characteristics and technical considerations during the change.

Problem Statement

A few years ago, Google SRE found itself using multiple independent software solutions for approximately the same problem across multiple problem spaces: monitoring, releases and rollouts, incident response, capacity management, and so on.

This end state arose in part because the people building tools for SRE were dissociated from their users and their requirements. The tool developers didn’t always have a current view of the problem statement or the overall production landscape—the production environment changes very rapidly and in new ways as new software, hardware, and use cases are brought to life almost daily. Additionally, the consumers of tools were varied, sometimes with orthogonal needs (“this rollout has to be fast; approximate is fine” versus “this rollout has to be 100% correct; okay for it to go slowly”).

As a result, none of these long-term projects fully addressed anyone’s needs, and each was characterized by varying levels of development effort, feature completeness, and ongoing support. Those waiting for the big use case—a nonspecific, singing-and-dancing solution of the future—waited a long time, got frustrated, and used their own software engineering skills to create their own niche solution. Those who had smaller, specific needs were loath to adopt a broader solution that wasn’t as tailored to them. The long-term, technical, and organizational benefits of more universal solutions were clear, but customers, services, and teams were not staffed or rewarded for waiting. To compound this scenario, requirements of both large and small customer teams changed over time.

What We Decided to Do

To scope this scenario as one concrete problem space, we asked ourselves: What if all Google SREs could use a common monitoring engine and set of dashboards, which were easy to use and supported a wide variety of use cases without requiring customization?

Likewise, we could extend this model of thinking to releases and rollouts, incident response, capacity management, and beyond. If the initial configuration of a product captured a wide representation of approaches to address the majority of our functional needs, our general and well-informed solutions would become inevitable over time. At some point, the critical mass of engineers who interact with production would outgrow whatever solution they were using and self-select to migrate to a common, well-supported set of tools and automation, abandoning their custom-built tools and their associated maintenance costs.

SRE at Google is fortunate that many of its engineers have software engineering backgrounds and experience. It seemed like a natural first step to encourage engineers who were experts and opinionated about specific problems—from load balancing to rollout tooling to incident management and response—to work as a virtual team, self-selected by a common long-term vision. These engineers would translate their vision into working, real software that would eventually be adopted across all of SRE, and then all of Google, as the basic functions of production.

To return to the ADKAR model for change management, the steps discussed so far—identifying a problem and acknowledging an opportunity—are textbook examples of ADKAR’s initiating awareness step. The Google SRE leadership team agreed on the need ( desire ) and had sufficient knowledge and ability to move to designing solutions fairly quickly.

Our first task was to converge upon a number of topics that we agreed were central, and that would benefit greatly from a consistent vision: to deliver solutions and adoption plans that fit most use cases. Starting from a list of 65+ proposed projects, we spent multiple months collecting customer requirements, verifying roadmaps, and performing market analysis, ultimately scoping our efforts toward a handful of vetted topics.

Our initial design created a virtual team of SRE experts around these topics. This virtual team would contribute a significant percentage of their time, around 80%, to these horizontal projects. The idea behind 80% time and a virtual team was to ensure we did not design or build solutions without constant contact with production. However, we (maybe predictably) discovered a few pain points with this approach:

• Coordinating a virtual team—whose focus was broken by being on-call regularly, across multiple time zones—was very difficult. There was a lot of state to be swapped between running a service and building a serious piece of software.
• Everything from gathering consensus to code reviews was affected by the lack of a central location and common time.
• Headcount for horizontal projects initially had to come from existing teams, who now had fewer engineering resources to tackle their own projects. Even at Google, there’s tension between delegating headcount to support the system as is versus delegating headcount to build future-looking infrastructure.

With enough data in hand, we realized we needed to redesign our approach, and settled on the more familiar centralized model. Most significantly, we removed the requirement that team members split their time 80/20 between project work and on-call duties. Most SRE software development is now done by small groups of senior engineers with plenty of on-call experience, but who are heads-down focused on building software based on those experiences. We also physically centralized many of these teams by recruiting or moving engineers. Small group (6–10 people) development is simply more efficient within one room (however, this argument doesn’t apply to all groups—for example, remote SRE teams). We can still meet our goal of collecting requirements and perspectives across the entire Google engineering organization via videoconference, email, and good old-fashioned travel.

So our evolution of design actually ended up in a familiar place—small, agile, mostly local, fast-moving teams—but with the added emphasis on selecting and building automation and tools for adoption by 60% of Google engineers (the figure we decided was a reasonable interpretation of the goal of “ almost everyone at Google”). Success means most of Google is using what SRE has built to manage their production environment.

The ADKAR model maps the implementation phase of the change project between the people-centric stages of knowledge and ability . This case study bears out that mapping. We had many engaged, talented, and knowledgeable engineers, but we were asking people who had been focused on SRE concerns to act like product software development engineers by focusing on customer requirements, product roadmaps, and delivery commitments. We needed to revisit the implementation of this change to enable engineers to demonstrate their abilities with respect to these new attributes.

Implementation: Monitoring

To return to the monitoring space mentioned in the previous section, Chapter 31 in the first SRE book described how Viceroy—Google SRE’s effort to create a single monitoring dashboard solution suitable for everyone—addressed the problem of disparate custom solutions. Several SRE teams worked together to create and run the initial iteration, and as Viceroy grew to become the de facto monitoring and dashboarding solution at Google, a dedicated centralized SRE development team assumed ownership of the project.

But even when the Viceroy framework united SRE under a common framework, there was a lot of duplicated effort as teams built complex custom dashboards specific to their services. While Viceroy provided a standard hosted method to design and build visual displays of data, it still required each team to decide what data to display and how to organize it.

The now-centralized software development team began a second parallel effort to provide common dashboards, building an opinionated zero-config system on top of the lower-level “custom” system. This zero-config system provided a standard set of comprehensive monitoring displays based on the assumption that a given service was organized in one of a handful of popular styles. Over time, most services migrated to using these standard dashboards instead of investing in custom layouts. Very large, unique, or otherwise special services can still deploy custom views in the hosted system if they need to.

Returning to the ADKAR model, the consolidation of monitoring tools at Google began as a grassroots effort, and the resulting improvements in operational efficiencies provided a quantifiable basis ( awareness and desire ) to initiate a broader effort: SRE self-funded a software development team to build production management tooling for all of Google.

Designing a migration of interdependent pieces is often more complicated than a blank-sheet design. But in real life, the hardest engineering work ends up being the evolution of many small/constrained systems into fewer, more general systems—without disturbing already running services that many customers depend on. In the meantime, alongside the existing systems, new small systems are added—some of which eventually surprise us by growing into large systems. There is an intellectual attraction to starting anew with the big design, only backing into constraints that are really necessary, but the migration of systems and teams turns out to be the most difficult work by far .

Designing horizontal software requires a lot of listening to prospective end users, and, in many ways, the tasks of building and adoption look much like the role of a product manager. In order for this effort to achieve success, we had to make sure that we absorbed and prioritized priorities. Meeting customer needs—of both SREs and other production users—was also a critical element of success. It is important to acknowledge that the move toward common tooling is still a work in progress. We iterated on the structure and staffing of the teams building our shared technologies to better enable meeting customer needs, and we added product management and user experience talent (addressing missing knowledge ).

In the past year or two, we have seen uptake of these SRE-designed and -built products across a broad swath of teams at Google. We have learned that to achieve success, the cost of migration (from older, fragmented but specialized solutions) needs to be small relative to the net benefits of the new common solution. Otherwise, the migration itself becomes a barrier to adoption. We continue to work with the individual teams building these products to reinforce the behaviors needed to delight customers with the common solutions the teams are delivering.

One common theme we discovered across horizontal software development projects was that no matter how good new software and products were, the cost of migration—away from something that was already working to something new—was always perceived as very high. Despite the allure of easier management and less specific deep knowledge, the costs of migrating away from the familiar (with all its warts and toil) were generally a barrier. In addition, individual engineers often had a similar internal monologue: “I’m not improving or changing the system; I’m swapping out one working piece for another working piece.” ADKAR describes this resistance as the “knowledge-to-ability gap.” On the human side, in order to recognize and embrace change, people need time, coaching, and training in new tools and skills. On the technical side, implementing change requires understanding adoption costs and including work to minimize these costs as part of the launch process.

As a result, migration costs need to be nearly zero (“just recompile and you pick up new $thing”) and the benefits need to be clear (“now you’re protected from $foo vulnerability”) to the team, to individuals, and to the company.

SRE commonly used to build products that we committed to in a “best effort” way, meaning that the amount of time we gave the product fit into the cracks between everything else we were doing (managing primary services, capacity planning, dealing with outages, etc.). As a result, our execution was not very reliable; it was impossible to predict when a feature or service would be available. By extension, consumers of our products had less trust in the end result since it felt perpetually delayed and was staffed by a rotating cast of product managers and individual engineers. When individual SREs or SRE teams built tools for their own use, the focus was on solving individual problems to reduce the cost of maintaining SLOs for supported systems. In endeavoring to build common tooling for most use cases at Google, we needed to shift the focus to measuring the success of this effort in terms of product adoption.

Owing to both our organizational culture and our wealth of resources, we approached this project in a bottom-up, rather than top-down, fashion. Instead of mandating that users migrated to our new monitoring system, we sought to win over users by demonstrating that our new offering was better than existing solutions.

Over time, we learned that how we conducted our development process would inform how potential internal users perceived the end result. These projects gained real traction only when staffed by production-experienced engineers 100% dedicated to building software, with schedules and support identical to the rest of Google’s software development. Building common software transparently, like clockwork, with great communication (“We’ll have X done by Y date”), greatly improved the speed of migration to the new system. People already trusted the new system because they could observe how it was developed from an early stage. Perceptions of how the sausage is made turned out to be more important than we anticipated from the get-go . Our initial thought that “if you build something great, people will naturally flock to it” didn’t hold true. Rather, these projects had to be clearly defined, well advertised in advance, evaluated against a multitude of user cases (targeted to the grumpiest adopters first), leaps and bounds better than existing options, and adoptable with little to no effort.

The more consumers you have for common tooling and adoption, the more time you actually have to spend doing things other than writing code. This may sound obvious in retrospect, but clear end goals, believable dates, regular updates, and constant contact with consumers is paramount. Often skeptical consumers will ask, “If my current one-off shell script works okay, do I really need this?” Adoption of common software or processes is analogous to reliability as a feature—you may build the best thing in the world, but if people don’t adopt it (or can’t use it if it’s not reliable), it’s not useful to anyone. Having a plan for adoption—from champions to beta testers to executive sponsors to dedicated engineers who understand the importance of minimizing barriers to adoption—is both the end goal and the starting point when it comes to building and adopting common tools and practices.

This is because adoption drives a network effect: as the scale and reach of common software tools increases, incremental improvements to those tools are more valuable to the organization. As the value of the tools increases, development effort dedicated to them also tends to increase. Some of this development effort naturally goes toward further reducing migration costs, incentivizing greater adoption. Broad adoption encourages building organization-wide improvements in a consistent, product-like fashion, and justifies staffing full teams to support the tools for the long term. These tools should be characterized by rapid development, feature stability, common control surfaces, and automatable APIs.

When it comes to measuring the impact of such efforts, we can ask questions similar to the following:

• How quickly can a new product developer build and manage a world-scale service?
• Enabled by common tools and practices, how easily can an SRE in one domain move to another domain?
• How many services can be managed with the same primitives, as end-to-end user experiences versus separate services?

These are all possible and highly valuable ways to measure impact, but our first measurement must be adoption.

As demonstrated by the Waze and horizontal software case studies, even within a single company, SRE change management may need to tackle a variety of problem spaces and organizational context. As a result, there’s likely no single formal model of change management that will neatly apply to the spectrum of changes any given organization may tackle. However, these frameworks, particularly Kotter’s eight-step process and the Prosci ADKAR model, can provide useful insights for approaching change. One commonality across any change necessary in an environment as dynamic as SRE is constant reevaluation and iteration. While many changes may start organically in a grassroots fashion, most can benefit from structured coordination and planning as the changes mature.

1 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families (New York: Scribner, 1969).

Chapter 20 - SRE Team Lifecycles

Copyright © 2018 Google, Inc. Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Case study: examining failure in change management

Journal of Organizational Change Management

ISSN : 0953-4814

Article publication date: 21 February 2020

Issue publication date: 22 April 2020

This case study aims to shed light on what went wrong with the introduction of new surgical suture in a Dutch hospital operating theatre following a tender. Transition to working with new surgical suture was organized in accordance with legal and contractual provisions, and basic principles of change management were applied, but resistance from surgeons led to cancellation of supplies of the new suture.

Design/methodology/approach

Researchers had access to all documents relevant to the tendering procedure and crucial correspondence between stakeholders. Seventeen in-depth, 1 h interviews were conducted with key informants who were targeted through maximum variation sampling. Patients were not interviewed. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and analysed by discourse analysis. A trial session and workshop were participatively observed. A cultural psychological perspective was adopted to gain an understanding of why certain practices appear to be resistant to change.

For the cardiothoracic surgeons, suture was more than just stitching material. Suture as a tactile element in their day-to-day work environment is embedded within a social arrangement that ties elements of professional accountability, risk avoidance and direct patient care together in a way that makes sense and feels secure. This arrangement is not to be fumbled with by outsiders.

Practical implications

By understanding the practical and emotional stakes that medical professionals have in their work, lessons can be learned to prevent failure of future change initiatives.

Originality/value

The cultural psychological perspective adopted in this study has never been applied to understanding failed change in a hospital setting.

• Operating theatre
• Cultural psychological perspective
• Failed change
• Surgical suture

Graamans, E. , Aij, K. , Vonk, A. and ten Have, W. (2020), "Case study: examining failure in change management", Journal of Organizational Change Management , Vol. 33 No. 2, pp. 319-330. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOCM-06-2019-0204

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2020, Ernst Graamans, Kjeld Aij, Alexander Vonk and Wouter ten Have

Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode .

Introduction

In the Netherlands, and more broadly in Europe, the cost of health care is rising and is expected to continue to rise ( Jenkner and Leive, 2010 ; Mot et al. , 2016 ). In light of this development, the challenge for those managing healthcare institutions is to spend smartly and cut costs where possible, while at the same time meeting changing patient demands (e.g. Dent and Pahor, 2015 ; Thistlethwaite and Spencer, 2008 ). The fact that managing the work and practices of medical professionals has always been difficult (e.g. Andri and Kyriakidou, 2014 ; Kennerley, 1993 ; Kirkpatrick et al. , 2005 ) adds to the complexity of meeting this challenge. Furthermore, health workers increasingly are held accountable for and are expected to be transparent about the outcomes of their work (e.g. Exworthy et al. , 2019 ; Genovese et al. , 2017 ). Although this trend is generally expected to lead to improved results, for medical professionals it also creates a sense of being under constant scrutiny. The emotions and feelings that are triggered in these kinds of processes have a substantial impact, which is acknowledged by both management practitioners and social scientists working in health care (e.g. Kent, 2006 ; Mark, 2005 ; Sebrant, 2014 ). In this case study, emotions and feelings are addressed by adopting a specific cultural psychological perspective. Cultural psychologists Paul Voestermans and Theo Verheggen (2013) call for more detailed psychological investigations into how people acquire embodied skills and mannerisms that are in line with professional demands, preferences and tastes. When emotions and feelings are felt or displayed, this is seen as an indication that something “real” is at stake that deeply involves professionals into their group, department or speciality. This paper demonstrates that this deep involvement can affect the success or failure of a change initiative, in this case the introduction of new surgical suture material in the operating theatre. This affective aspect may be underestimated in change management or only addressed in rather abstract fashion; by prematurely explaining resistance to change with the help of notions as professional autonomy, entitlement, stubbornness, culture and so on. The epistemological problem of discursively turning a descriptive label into an explanation or operational determinant of behaviour has been addressed particularly by discursive psychologists (e.g. Potter and Wetherell, 1987 , 1995a ) and cultural psychologists (e.g. Valsiner, 2014 ; Verheggen, 2005 ; Verheggen and Baerveldt, 2007 ). Although the concerns in this paper are practical and empirical, they can be traced back to the same problem. In management practice, and especially in the management of medical professionals, certain abstract characterizations of behaviour and change resistance can become problematic when they are no longer just employed as general, imprecise descriptions, but are reified and employed as stopgaps. As such, they preclude deeper and more detailed investigations into what is at stake for the people behind these abstractions. The added value of the approach adopted in this case study is that it does not need the reification and superimposition of notions such as shared values, culture or even professional autonomy, but allows for more holistic, or contextualized investigations into the social patterning of behaviour within professional groups or specialities. Truly delving into the tenacity of certain medical professional practices goes further than positing professional autonomy or entitlement as a cause, for instance. Earlier, this particular cultural psychological approach has successfully been adopted to describe psychological dynamics within the boardroom of a large healthcare organization ( Graamans et al. , 2014 ) and, more recently, to better understand and contribute to more effective interventions against the culturally embedded practice of female circumcision ( Graamans et al. , 2019a , 2019b ).

The case: resistance to new surgical suture in the operating theatre of a Dutch hospital

At the end of 2014, a large university hospital in the Netherlands launched a procurement tender exercise for surgical suture material. The rationale for hospital management to initiate this procedure was cost-cutting and standardization. The award criteria were focussed on the most economically advantageous tender. There were different suppliers on the market that were able to produce and deliver high-quality surgical suture material for a lower price than was currently being paid. Consequently, the tender was awarded to a new supplier. The top managers and purchasing manager who initiated the tender trod carefully and implemented this relatively small-scale change initiative according to some basic change management principles (e.g. Kotter, 2012 ): they built a guiding coalition that incorporated renowned medical specialists, they consulted department heads and they communicated the change to surgeons through different channels. Furthermore, it was recorded in the tender that the new supplier should provide value-adding services such as e-learning modules for surgeons, facilitate lengthy trial-use periods and offer workshops and support to the operating theatre. Hospital management conceived this first initiative as a test case for more extensive cost-cutting operations that were to follow. This project was supposed to be relatively easy, both in scale and in complexity. However, in the preparations ahead of the trial phase, a concern was raised by the cardiac surgeons to one part of the tender package involving sutures specifically used for cardiac surgery. Nevertheless, surgeons were forced to participate in testing the products supplied in the whole tender, including those products used in their specific specialities. Meanwhile, the initiators of the project felt that careful preparations of the testing phase had been made.

So, what went wrong? In mid-2015 – when this research project started – hospital management eventually met with fierce resistance from some of the hospital's cardiothoracic surgeons. They adamantly refused to work with the new suture material. The resistance took the form of surgeons expressing anger at management, stockpiling their own supplies of surgical suture, refusing to operate, holding managers accountable for patient deaths that could arise from use of the new suture and threatening to go to the press if such a thing indeed were to happen. Hospital management had anticipated some resistance, but not of this intensity. The end result was that the contract was eventually cancelled for sutures specifically used in cardiac surgery.

This research paper sets out to answer the following question: why are some medical professional practices so difficult to change, and what can we learn from this failed test case?

Theoretical background

As mentioned earlier, to better understand the entrenched nature of professional practices and the emotional stakes involved, we adopted a particular cultural psychological perspective. Following Voestermans' and Verheggen's approach ( 2013 ), we explicitly take the position that people are embodied and expressive beings who over time attune their emotions, feelings, preferences and tastes to the groups they belong to. People naturally feel more compelled to act in accordance with these preferences than to act upon abstract ideas, rules and protocols superimposed upon them from outside their group. Evidently, medical professionals are not exempt from feeling more compelled to act in accordance with these preferences just because they are a highly educated group of people. To the contrary, as a result of being members of their professional group for so long – through medical school, surgical residency, PhD studies and so on – they have learned to coordinate their actions on the basis of complex sets of agreements, conventions and arrangements that characterize their professional group.

Whereas agreements are easy to articulate, such as taking an oath, Voestermans and Verheggen (2013) reserve the term “arrangement” for the way members of exclusive and often elite groups coordinate their behaviour almost automatically within their own specifically cultivated environments, following deeply embodied patterns. These patterns and practices are group-typical due to the mutual attunement of emotions, feelings, preferences and taste that has taken place over time. The resulting automaticity makes that they do not need articulation, whereas practices based on agreements do. Evidently, medical professionals have practices founded on highly specialized scholarship and evidence-based research. But it is a mistake to think of their work as a purely cognitive, rather mechanistic affair. These practices are enacted and reenacted in the minutest interactions on an ongoing basis, and get more refined over time, until at one point they are felt and experienced more than that they are talked about . It is predicted that groups formed on the basis of such arrangements are particularly difficult to change. The apprehension that is triggered by attempts to change even the smallest element of such an arrangement is immediately felt.

Data collection

Data collection took place in a year starting from mid-2015. In total, 17 in-depth interviews were conducted that each lasted approximately 1 h. The respondents were targeted through maximum variation sampling until saturation was achieved and are listed in Table I . Patients were excluded beforehand. The interviews were audio-recorded after verbal consent was given. All but one interviewee agreed to be audio-recorded. This interviewee was comfortable, though, with the interviewer (EG) taking notes. The interviews were transcribed and anonymized. Apart from formal interviewing, extensive informal conversations on the topic took place with surgeons from different medical specialities.

Field notes were made on the observations of a trial session and a workshop facilitated by the new supplier. These notes were divided into four categories: observational notes, theoretical notes, methodological notes and reflective notes ( Baarda et al. , 2013 ).

Data analysis

To gain an understanding of the different positions people can take up in relation to the introduction of new surgical suture and underlying social arrangements, the interview transcripts were analysed by means of discourse analysis following the example and guidelines of critical psychologist Carla Willig (1998 , 2008) . Her particular approach to discourse analysis was chosen because it allows for a discursive psychological reading of the interview transcripts whereby interviewees as active agents justify, blame, excuse, request or obfuscate to achieve some objective: the “action orientation” of talking ( Edwards and Potter, 1992 , 2001 ; Potter and Wetherell, 1995b ). Her approach also allows for a more Foucauldian, or post-structuralist reading whereby inferences are made on how the discourses interviewees draw upon delimit and facilitate behavioural opportunities and experience ( Davies and Harré, 1990 , 1999 ; Henriques et al. , 1984 ; Parker, 1992 ). The latter approach assumes that discourses, on the one hand, and practices, on the other, are closely tied and reinforce each other. Discourse from this perspective is not so much a matter of talking about things, but is conceived as an expressive practice in itself. Conceptualized as such discourses can hint at underlying social arrangements in which certain practices, such as operating with tangible surgical suture material, are performed. To come to such a conclusion with a greater amount of certainty, we contend, the inferences made on the basis of discourse analysis must always be triangulated with data from participant observations and cross-checked with key informants.

In October 2017, the findings were tentatively fed back to the management board in a plenary session and to department heads in several individual conversations. Extensive peer debriefing sessions within our multi-disciplinary research team in which both the medical professional and managerial perspectives were represented by its members took place to help with cross-checking and interpreting the data.

Conducting discourse analysis ( Willig, 2008 ) on the interview transcripts revealed several discourses that interviewees drew upon when they talked about the transition to working with the new surgical suture and surgical suture more generally. The main constructions, discourses and implications in relation to the interviewees themselves – in discourse analytic terms called “subject positions” – are summarized in Table II .

Economic/managerial discourse

We are confronted with an enormous challenge. We have to drastically cut costs. This was an important test case, because more and bigger cuts are pending. This appeared to us as an easy win. However, … [1] . (Head of operating theatres)

Not only with surgical suture, but in general medical specialists resist change. That is because these suppliers have a powerful and very effective sales force. It is what we call vendor lock-in . (Purchasing manager)

I get that those boys [cardiothoracic surgeons] … what they are doing is very precise and technical. And surgical suture and needles are of crucial importance. On the other hand, there are always these sentiments. I mean, there are many medical centres, also abroad, where cardiothoracic surgeons suture with XXX [brand name of new supplier] and it is not turned into a complicated affair. But you cannot take away these sentiments just like that. We took note of these feelings, and nudged our staff to give it [the new surgical suture] a try and comply as much as possible. But to be honest, according to me at cardiac surgery there is a lot of emotion involved surrounding suture, … and it is not working for me. (Department head, surgery)

The initiator – the manager that came up with the idea to supposedly cut costs – does not know that suture curls and curls more-or-less depending on the brand. He does not know whether needles are round or angular. And he doesn't care. But for my work this is very relevant. It has nothing to do with professional autonomy. (Cardiothoracic surgeon)

One might argue with this cardiothoracic surgeon that this is exactly what the notion of professional autonomy refers to; in this case, the autonomy to decide for yourself, as a medical professional, which materials to work with. But that is not the point this cardiothoracic surgeon is making per se . Apparently, in the daily jargon of healthcare managers, the notion of professional autonomy is employed as a stopgap explanation for resistance so often that this surgeon anticipated its negative connotation related to changing surgical suture and change more general. For him at least, the superimposition of professional autonomy as an explanation does not do justice to how he relates to the issue of changing surgical suture. For him it is not an abstract affair, but genuinely felt, both in a tactile and in an emotional sense. Also note that academic definitions of professional autonomy (conceptual) do not always correspond to how such notions are employed in daily usage (performative). The cardiothoracic surgeons spoken to frequently drew upon a competitive/professional discourse in relation to surgical suture, enriched with examples and in far less abstract manner than those that posited professional autonomy as the main cause of change resistance.

Competitive/professional discourse

He [Roger Federer] goes down in the history books as the best professional tennis player ever. And that is because he has spent endless hours on the court practising and refining his skills. His tennis racket has become a natural extension of his arm. His tennis racket is his instrument. My instrument is my suture … suture and needles. (Cardiothoracic surgeon)

I didn't just go to medical school. After that I have done my residency, with a Ph.D., et cetera . All in all an extra 10 years. Everything that you are supposed to do, I did that, to become the best possible professional and to be able to deliver the best possible care for the patient. This is not some quick course. This is really … six years of medical school and then postgraduate for another six years. That isn't nothing. You have to be motivated, driven and persistent. And you hope to end up working for an institution that enables you to profess your passion. (Cardiothoracic surgeon)

It is important to note that the cardiothoracic surgeons quoted here did not exclusively drew upon this competitive/professional discourse that implies sacrifice, persistence and drive. But when they did, they challenged the economic/managerial discourse without actually talking about finances. In a way, to put it bluntly, money from this perspective should not be an object, or, at least, it should never be a priority.

Discourse on patient care

Let's say … I am going to operate your father with XXX [brand name of new supplier], but I am not used to working with that suture. It curls more and the needles go blunt quicker and the needles are square and therefore more difficult to position in the needle holder. So I need to focus more and I need to stress … I need to work [with the utmost precision]. Well, I am curious whether that manager would let me operate on his father. (Cardiothoracic surgeon)

Surgical suture was constructed as a lifeline on which the cardiothoracic surgeon relies on behalf of the patient. Replacing surgical suture is perceived as an unacceptable potential cause of failure. So whereas the competitive/professional discourse places the concerns and aspirations of the medical professional front and centre, this discourse on patient care places the concerns of the patient front and centre by means of the medical professional as his advocate. Implicit in both discourses, though, is that money should not be an object. As such, these discourses are counter-discourses to the economic/managerial discourse that legitimizes replacing surgical suture by that of a cheaper brand.

Discourse on safety and quality

So many things can go wrong. So changing surgical suture presents an additional risk. We prefer to operate a patient's heart only once and then never again. (Cardiothoracic surgeon)

If medical specialists use the argument of safety, patient safety, then you are finished. As an executive it is over. You start thinking, what if he is right; and I force him to work with this suture and something goes horribly wrong. He only has to say: “I told you it wasn't safe!” And then you, as an executive, are gone. Of course, you have to challenge and not be naive, but ultimately it is a show stopper … that safety argument. Another factor was, that my colleague in the Executive Board and I are not [cardiothoracic] surgeons. So we could not weigh in from our own experience. (Chairman of the Board)

The best of the best: being part of an elite professional group

Those boys [cardiothoracic surgeons] – or men I should say – are so bloody good in what they do. And you [as a nurse operating theatre] also want to be part of that, to pass cum laude . They stand for their profession, each time they give it a hundred and ten percent. And they perform procedures that no one else dares to perform. For us it is a joy to assist them. You share in the pride and get into that special workflow. (Nurse, operating theatre)

Well, our group of cardiac surgeons consists of individuals with a unique history at this hospital. They are not known to be particularly dynamic or flexible. Let's keep it at that. So, to get them on board with our plans requires some extra effort on our part. (Chairman of the Board)

I have studied and practiced endlessly. And we [other cardiothoracic specialists] frequently consult one another. But sometimes when I have to decide fast, during a very complex operation, medicine is almost more like an art-form. I feel when something might go wrong and I anticipate what to do. And when someone later asks me: “Why did you do this or that?”, of course I will formulate an answer, but in reality I acted upon the experience I have and on what I have learned from my mentors. In these moments everyone in my team knows what to do. I do not even have to tell them. However, I cannot accept that someone who has no idea what we are doing, decides that I have to work with that suture. (Cardiothoracic surgeon)

The prediction that deeply embodied practices that are learned over time through mentorship, explicit instruction and implicit attunement of the senses are not to be changed by outsiders in a pick-and-choose manner (e.g. Voestermans and Verheggen, 2013 ) is confirmed by this surgeon.

As Willig noted: “It is important to examine the relationship between a source's and a recipient's discursive frames in order to understand the impact of a message” ( 1998 , p. 385). This paper is not intended as a reproach to either hospital management or those working within the cardiac surgery department. On the one hand, hospital management was faced with the challenge of cutting costs and making the provision of good health care sustainable. On the other hand, cardiothoracic surgeons were trying to keep the environment of the operation room as controlled and predictable as possible. They do not want any additional risks, especially if they feel that the risks have been imposed upon them. Just the fact that the new surgical suture had slightly different qualities – on which everyone agreed – made it an unacceptable change for the surgeons. Both perspectives make sense and, surprisingly, almost all research participants were able to eloquently elaborate on the opposing perspectives. However, it appeared as if the emotions and feelings that were immediately triggered within particular arrangements prevented the research participants from acting upon those insights. The result was a power struggle, and eventually management gave in to the cardiac surgeons by accepting a different supplier.

The failure described probably could have been prevented if those who initiated the change and implemented the transition had accounted for the particular social arrangements in which surgeons from different specialities operate. It could probably also have been prevented if the emotions and feelings that were expressed were acted upon in a timely manner, instead of being dismissed by implicitly juxtaposing emotional expression against rational decision-making. Cardiothoracic surgeons constitute a group with a distinct history and responsibility and to whom surgical suture is a crucial tool. Suture as a tactile element in their day-to-day work environment is embedded within a complex social arrangement that ties elements of risk avoidance, professional accountability and direct patient care together in a way that feels secure. The feelings triggered within this arrangement are genuinely felt and, therefore, are as real as the financial cost of surgical suture and evidence-based standards of its quality. These feelings need to be accounted for with the same managerial fervour. For hospital management this means that in planning a consistent overall approach to change in their institution, they must consider exceptions to that approach. It might be an uncomfortable message, but managers here to some extent reached the limits of changeability; the thinnest of sutures used to operate on people's hearts are beyond their reach, so to speak.

There are other aspects that need to be accounted for, that fall beyond the immediate scope of this research, but which nonetheless need to be mentioned to give a more complete picture. First, the main channel by which hospital management communicated about the tendering procedure, the verification process, the actual introduction, trial sessions and workshops was by email. One surgeon confided that he was too busy to systematically go through his emails and, due to a recent reorganization, had lost his personal secretary. The annoyances arising from different cost-cutting operations were thus accumulating. Secondly, although hospital management assumed that it had adequately communicated about and during the transition to new suture, some surgeons felt being presented with a fait accompli . Management had failed to ensure that the surgeons had received the necessary communications, and the surgeons did not acknowledge that they had indeed received them. This led to miscommunication and to further polarization. This was especially relevant because cardiothoracic surgeons had previously mentioned their concerns about the use of specific cardiac surgical sutures and were nevertheless then confronted with the new suture. The surgeons felt overpowered and had the impression of not being listened to. This resulted in some cardiothoracic surgeons deciding to present hospital management with a fait accompli in return by framing suture as a life-or-death matter and making the management responsible for the possibility of bad results that could be related to the sutures. Lastly, because of this escalation, emotions ran even higher, and interviewees on both sides frequently blamed each other for not having their facts straight. Change practitioners would do well to acknowledge these emotions and feelings, without dismissing them or juxtaposing them against reason and facts. It is a big mistake to view addressing feelings and emotions as simply the “soft” side of change management (see also: Steigenberger, 2015 ) or to superimpose labels on them too quickly.

In conclusion, we have demonstrated that even if all basic principles of change management have been applied in the usual way, procedures may escalate to an emotional level, eventually leading to a counterproductive deadlock. These emotions and feelings should be anticipated by thorough communication between all parties involved. Should they still arise, these emotions need to be accounted for and acted upon bilaterally in a non-judgemental and empathic manner to make informed decisions about pushing forward with a change initiative and, if so, guide its further implementation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Respondents targeted through maximum variation sampling

Summary discursive constructions, discourses and subject positions

The quotations are translated as the interviews were conducted in Dutch.

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Acknowledgements

We thank all research subjects, on both sides of the aisle, for their participation in this case study on a topic that involves them deeply into their professional groups. Also, we thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on an earlier draft.

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What is Change Management? Earn an MBA to be a Change Manager!

Published: May 6, 2024

One of the most challenging aspects of leadership is managing people. Employees are the heart and soul of a business, the ones who keep the wheels turning day-to-day. But people are also complex beings, and many of them do not like change.  

So, as a leader, how do you handle implementing change in the workplace? A process called change management can help.

What is Change Management?

Change management is a structured process that organizations follow to implement change effectively. This process typically encompasses five key steps: preparing the organization for change, planning, implementation, embedding the change, and review.

The goal of the change management process is to minimize resistance to change among stakeholders to ensure a smooth transition and achieve the desired outcomes. When applied correctly, these steps can ensure your organization remains resilient, competitive, and compliant with both external and internal pressures.

This process can be used to respond to change in a wide variety of situations. Improving business outcomes, adapting to customer needs and/or market dynamics, and embracing innovation and technological advancements are all situations in which change management can be effective, along with adjusting operations to comply with regulatory changes, going through a merger or acquisition, or responding to a crisis.

Breaking Down the Change Management Process

Let’s take a closer look at the five stages of the change management process, which are designed to guide organizations through the transformation from the current state to the desired future state:

Preparing the Organization for Change

During this first stage, the leader communicates the upcoming change to affected employees. They must articulate a clear and compelling case for change, explaining why it is necessary and how it aligns with the organization’s vision and goals. Building a coalition of support – champions who can influence and garner support across the organization – can further help the organization to prepare for the change initiative, as will sharing a strategic vision that provides a clear direction and end goal.

Once the leader has laid the groundwork for change, they must prepare a detailed roadmap that sets clear objectives, timelines, and roles, as well as strategies to manage employee feedback and possible resistance. Updating or creating new policies and procedures to support the change is essential, as is allocating the necessary resources, such as time, budget, and personnel. It’s also important that the leader assess potential risks and develop contingency and communications plans. A robust change management plan will enhance the likelihood of a successful outcome.

Implementation

In this step, the plans from the previous step are put into action. This phase is often the most challenging as it involves moving from theory to practice. As changes are implemented, it’s crucial to monitor and assess their impact on the organization and adjust course as needed. Continued open communication with all stakeholders is vital to keep everyone informed; consider regular updates which can help maintain engagement and manage expectations. However, the focus during this phase is on achieving the desired outcomes of the change initiative, ensuring that the new ways of working are adopted and that the organization transitions smoothly to the new state.

Embedding the Change

For change to be lasting, it must become ingrained in the organization. This involves strengthening new behaviors, integrating them into company culture, and aligning them with existing processes and practices. It may require ongoing training and support, along with positive reinforcement, such as recognizing and rewarding individuals and teams that exhibit the desired behaviors. To ensure that the changes are clearly understood and accepted as standard practice within the organization, leaders should update job roles, performance criteria, and even the organizational structure to align with the new ways of working.

The final step in the change management process is to evaluate your outcomes against the objectives set during the planning phase. Leaders should reflect on what worked well and what didn’t, make any necessary adjustments, and document lessons learned. Continuous monitoring helps sustain the change and builds a foundation for future changes.

These five steps are cyclical and iterative, ensuring the change management process is dynamic and responsive to the organization’s needs and external influences.

What is the Role of a Change Manager?

A change manager ensures that organizational projects and initiatives achieve their objectives efficiently and effectively. This role closely collaborates with senior leaders and project teams to manage the people side of change, including changes to business processes, systems, and technology. 

They are responsible for developing strategies that facilitate change, managing the change process from conception through to execution, and ensuring that the changes achieve their intended outcomes without disrupting the organization’s operations. 

To be successful, a change manager needs a blend of specific skills. Strong leadership and communication skills are paramount, as the role involves coordinating with various stakeholders, from top management to the employees affected by the change. The ability to manage and mitigate resistance to change is also critical, as is the skill to articulate the benefits and reasons for the changes to all involved parties. 

Additionally, change managers must be strategic thinkers who can anticipate potential challenges and devise effective solutions. Their role is not just to oversee the change but to ensure that it aligns with the organization’s overall strategy and goals, thereby enhancing its performance and competitiveness in the market.

Earn an MBA to be a Change Manager

One way to effectively prepare to be a change manager in the business world is by obtaining a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree. An MBA program equips students with the comprehensive knowledge, skills, and mindset they need to excel as effective change managers in today’s dynamic business environment. 

UoPeople’s MBA program is perfect for working adults who want to prepare for leadership positions. Our curriculum includes strategic management, operations, finance, and marketing. This broad perspective ensures that when graduates become change managers, they will consider the implications of change across the entire organization and align change initiatives with the company’s strategic objectives.

UoPeople’s courses in leadership and organizational behavior hone the interpersonal and leadership skills essential for managing and leading change. Additionally, our coursework emphasizes critical thinking and problem-solving skills via hands-on learning. Case studies, projects, and discussions mimic real-world business challenges to help future change managers anticipate challenges, think strategically, and devise effective solutions.

Benefits and Challenges of Change Management

The biggest benefit of the change management process is arguably the improvement of overall organizational efficiency. Effective change management streamlines processes, enabling an organization to adapt to new changes, which in turn leads to improved operational efficiency. 

In addition, a change management process that effectively manages employee feedback and mitigates resistance will result in more engaged employees . Going forward, your employees will be more likely to embrace change, contribute to the smooth transition of processes, and drive the organization toward achieving its objectives with greater zeal. 

Of course, no change process comes without challenges. Some of the difficulties that could arise during a change initiative include a lack of executive support, communication issues, and difficulty implementing new technology. Any of these roadblocks can effectively derail a change process, so the change manager must use the five steps listed above to ensure a smooth process.  

Change, the only constant, is inevitable in the business world, and companies must have strong leaders with the skill set necessary to lead change processes. An MBA will prepare change managers to lead initiatives that address the complexities of business and human dynamics. 

UoPeople students are equipped with the necessary tools to lead and implement change successfully. As these graduates step into the world, they carry with them the vision to foresee change, the strategy to plan for it, and the fortitude to see it through. Thus, an MBA from UoPeople is not merely a degree; it is a commitment to future-oriented leadership in an ever-evolving business world.

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Case Study: Implementing Change Management in PMO

Incorporating Change Management into IT Project Management Processes within a multi-national wireless communication organisation. We were tasked with developing and implementing a Change Management Strategy & Framework to support the current Project Team with; improving end–user adoption levels, increasing system utilization, involving end-user throughout the project process. To develop a Change Management Blueprint to enable project team members to duplicate a refined Change Managed process across various areas within the organisation. Create Change Management templates, ensuring standardisation of tools used across the teams and providing tools to assess people risks and mitigation, Pre- and post-project awareness, commitment and adoption levels.

• IT Leadership: Medium Impact
• SBPM: High Impact
• Project Managers: High Impact
• Business Analysts: Medium Impact
• Rest of IT: Low Impact
• Initial Change Management Duration: 12 Months
• Actual Change Management Duration: 15 Months
• Size of Change: Medium Scale
• Change Management Resourcing: Senior Change Consultant

The Results

• 100% Completion of CM strategy & framework, CM blueprint, and CM reporting template
• 100% Alignment to project management, PMO & governance structures
• 100% Integration into the POL process (Project Online)
• 70% Change Management adoption by Project Managers
• 80% Improvement in project communications over four pillars
• 7x Project Managers skilled in change management principles
• 50x Communication sets developed and distributed

The Approach

In implementing this change, it was necessary to understand the current way of working within the EMEA IT Team: Agile (Design for Adoption).

Gain understanding of governance structures within the IT area: Various measurements and systems used.

Incorporating these into a logical Change Management Methodology using a combination of approaches:

• Lean Change Management (to align with Agile)
• Prosci (including ADKAR)

The following steps were taken to achieve an aligned and knowledgeable team:

• Development of Change Management strategy
• Alignment of a framework & blueprint
• Create and define various templates, assessments and training artefacts to support and enable the team
• Articulate and document a benefit & measurement approach
• Align approach and outcomes with PMO
• Change management reporting templates developed to encompass a high level feedback report

Lessons from the Frontline

• IT teams are under great pressure to deliver to their customer – the business. It’s easy to forget about the person at the end of the chain, actually using the new system or following a new process.
• IT teams need to evolve in such a way that “People” are as much a focus as a project plan. It is about putting  First Things First, and spending time understanding the change, the impact of the change and benefit to the organisation and individuals.
• A perfect system can be developed, an adopted system must be earned.

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Analytics transformation in wealth management

The wealth management industry is typically seen as embodying old-fashioned values and providing discrete, tailored services. These attributes remain valuable parts of the business, but for many clients, they are no longer sufficient. In a highly connected world, people want faster and more convenient offerings and a cutting-edge digital experience. Amid rising competition, established wealth managers need to keep pace with new offerings as they retain the values that set them apart.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by Anutosh Banerjee , Fumiaki Katsuki , Vishal Kaushik, Aditya Saxena, Sanchit Suneja, and Renny Thomas .

Wealth managers are unlikely to be able to serve modern clients effectively without a digitized operating model. This will support advisory and non-advisory activities and service everchanging investment preferences. Some leading managers are building modular data and IT architectures, which enable smart decision-making, personalization at scale, and more extensive product offerings. 1 For an in-depth look at how some of these elements are being developed in an overall banking context, see our collection “ Building the AI bank of the future ,” May 2021, mckinsey.com. The changes are also helping them meet their regulatory obligations, boosting the productivity of relationship managers (RMs), and lifting compressed margins.

For wealth managers interested in pursuing these benefits, this article lays out the potential of deploying advanced analytics and offers a playbook of measures that wealth managers should consider including in a digital transformation.

The case for advanced analytics

Meeting the needs of today’s customers requires a business model that is at the same time efficient and adaptable to individual clients. Wealth managers are finding success with two approaches:

• Serve clients across the wealth continuum on a flat-fee advisory basis. Instead of the still-prevalent product-focused model, wealth managers need to build in pricing flexibility aligned to clients’ needs at every stage of their lives. An increasingly common pricing model is for clients to negotiate a flat fee based on the value of their investments. To maintain revenues with this model, wealth managers need to create new efficiencies and ensure RMs are more productive, which means spending more time with clients.
• Embrace personalization aligned to client life stages and goals. Today’s customers are increasingly dissatisfied with a one-size-fits-all service model, so wealth managers should consider transitioning to needs-based personalization. This requires RMs to get comfortable with a wider range of solutions, from the simplest products to complex higher-yielding investments (private markets, venture capital, pre-IPO, and structured products). In addition, RMs must be equipped to help clients make complex investment decisions, supported by analytics.

In today’s context, each of these goals is achievable only with advanced capabilities in data and analytics, especially targeting relationship management.

Focus on relationship management

Modernization can be game changing when it targets the role of RMs. Based on conversations with industry participants, we estimate that RMs typically spend 60 to 70 percent of their time on non-revenue-generating activities, amid rising regulatory and compliance obligations (Exhibit 1). One reason is that most still work with legacy IT systems or even spreadsheets. As clients demand more engagement and remote channel options, that needs to change.

A few leading wealth managers are using technology to provide RMs with the tools to serve clients more efficiently and effectively. Some have taken a zero-based approach, rebuilding their tech stacks and embracing advanced analytics to inform more personalized services. By providing targeted solutions, these firms have been able to boost revenues and reduce operational costs.

Clear benefits of being more client focused

The benefits of digitization are relevant in most markets, but the potential to leverage digitization to achieve a significant performance uplift is especially great in regions where wealth managers have not yet seized the opportunity. In Asia, for example, many wealth managers still need to fully embrace digital ways of working (Exhibit 2). We estimate that IT-based transformations could create some $40 billion to $45 billion of incremental value for wealth managers serving high-net-worth individuals in Asia, equating to roughly 25 basis points on a wealth pool of $17 trillion. 2 Wealth management penetration in the region is 35 to 40 percent, but for the purposes of the calculation, we assume 100 percent of high-networth individuals’ personal financial assets (investable assets of more than $1 million).

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Drilling down in the potential gains from data and analytics, we see benefits in three key areas: acquisition and onboarding, engagement and deepening of client relationships, and servicing and retention.

Acquisition and onboarding. Basic acquisition and onboarding applications include client discovery, risk profiling, account opening, and onboarding. RMs and investment teams can use analytics for lead generation, share-of-wallet modeling, and automated proposals. There are also multiple applications in investment management, risk, and compliance, including social-profile checking, anti-money-laundering and know your customer, and fraud protection.

How analytics creates sustainable impact: Two examples from Asia

One leading Asian wealth manager deployed an analytics-led program to produce granular client insights that enabled it to offer responsive, timely, and personalized services to client microsegments. The bank leveraged personalization at scale to boost assets under management by 30 to 40 percent per client in six to eight months.

A second wealth manager created the position of chief investment officer to inform a bankwide view of asset classes and geographies. The CIO used analytics to link product selection to the “house view,” ensuring consistency across model portfolios.

Engagement and deepening. Client-focused applications include personalized research, portfolio management, and notifications. RMs and investment teams can implement client clustering, propensity modeling, recommendation engines, and digital performance management (see sidebar “How analytics creates sustainable impact: Two examples from Asia”). In investment management, risk, and compliance, there are opportunities to de-bias investment decisions, data analysis, and trade execution.

Servicing and retention. Client-related applications include portfolio simulations and optimization, as well as self-execution of trades. RMs can leverage applications such as churn predictors and work planners, while investment management, risk, and compliance can scale up portfolio planning and trade surveillance.

A playbook for analytics-driven wealth management

Early success stories are encouraging, but they are the exception rather than the rule. More often, firms have started the transformation journey but have faltered along the way. Common reasons include a lack of ownership at senior levels and budgetary or strategic restraints that prevent project teams from executing effectively.

The challenges of transforming service models are significant but not insurmountable. Indeed, as analytics use cases become more pervasive, implementation at scale becomes more achievable. In the following paragraphs, we present five ingredients of an analytics-based transformation (Exhibit 3). These can be supported by strong leadership, a rigorous focus on outcomes, and a willingness to embrace new ways of working. Indeed, managers who execute effectively will get ahead of the competition and be much more adept in meeting client needs.

Set a leadership vision

Analytics-driven transformations are often restricted to narrow silos occupied by a few committed experts. As a result, applications fail to pick up enough momentum to make a real difference to performance. Conversely, if support for change programs comes from the top and is guided by an outcomes-driven approach, the business can break away from entrenched operating norms and reset for structural change. With that in mind, executive teams should communicate a vision that can be cascaded through the business. They should also create a safe environment, or sandbox, for business lines to experiment before scaling.

Plot the change journey

Wealth managers have applied advanced analytics to achieving different objectives. Some have found that the application of advanced analytics to business problems delivers significant value and enables them to make better decisions faster and more consistently. Others are using data and advanced analytics to improve sales and marketing, inform investment decision-making, and boost RM productivity.

Any plan for data-driven change must fit the organization’s business model. Implementation will vary based on the technical feasibility, data accuracy and accessibility, time to impact, scalability, and availability of funds. The first few use cases will set the mood and direction, so careful thought is required ahead of action.

One common impediment to scaling is the lack of a single metric to describe impact, which makes it hard for tech teams to communicate benefits. Still, there are workarounds. Financial key performance indicators (KPIs) can show flows across key mandates or volumes of advisory, rather than execution-driven assets under management. Nonfinancial metrics can focus on cross-sell ratios, increased client retention, number of RMs trained, or adoption rates for solutions. Other helpful evaluations include customer satisfaction scores, new trust-based RM-client relationships, time to market, and cultural shifts. Progress on these measures will boost organizational conviction that transformation is beneficial.

The value of personal advice: Wealth management through the pandemic

Build a strong foundation, leading with technology.

Data and technology together form the backbone that supports analytics-led transformation. A strong analytics backbone requires a rigorous standard of data management, coupled with informed decisions about the IT applications and systems to employ.

A digital approach to client-centric servicing

A leading bank created a digital and analytics-powered application that ingests internal and external data points, enabling it to identify “hidden affluence” among its clients.

Another bank combined demographic data with information from client conversations to generate real-time product recommendations and facilitate cross-selling. To continuously train the recommendation engine, the bank built a central data lake—consolidated, centralized storage for raw, unstructured, semistructured, and structured data from multiple sources—so the system has an ever-growing set of data to work from. It then pushed product recommendations through multiple client channels.

A leading investment bank continuously scrapes more than 2,000 financial news sources and more than 800 blogs, stock message sites, and social-media platforms. This exercise helped to enrich the data used by the analytics engine to assess sentiment and inform insights on stocks, bonds, commodities, countries, currencies, and cryptocurrencies.

Wealth managers are routinely in touch with their clients offline. These interactions elicit significant information about client preferences and requirements, but the information is often stored on paper or in RMs’ heads. To mine this knowledge fully, wealth managers must capture it digitally and convert it into a structured format that can be processed to create insights and personalized services (see sidebar “A digital approach to client-centric servicing”). In doing so, they need to put systems in place to ingest, store, and organize the data in line with regulatory obligations while ensuring the data are accurate, available, and accessible.

On the technology side, some leading wealth managers use natural-language processing to analyze text and voice data and identify personalized triggers and insights. Others are building feedback loops across channels to train artificial intelligence algorithms. Technologies can also be applied to processes: robotic process automation, for example, can replace routine manual labor and mental processing in regulatory compliance, risk assessment, reporting, and query management.

Deployment of data-driven decision-making requires scalable, adaptable, and resilient core technology components—a unified data and technology stack that connects across IT activities. 3 Sven Blumberg, Rich Isenberg, Dave Kerr, Milan Mitra, and Renny Thomas, “ Beyond digital transformations: Modernizing core technology for the AI bank of the future ,” April 2021, McKinsey.com. This will enable managers to adopt a tech-first approach to designing customer journeys.

In building data and IT architecture, wealth managers require a basic tool kit with four key components:

• a rationalized IT stack to create a common front-and back-end platform and a unified resource for mobile and web applications
• a scalable data platform with modular data pipelines and application-programming-interface (API)-based microservices for building and deploying analytics solutions at scale
• a semi-autonomous lab environment to enable experimentation, coupled with an at-scale factory environment for production of analytics solutions
• a highly scalable distributed network on the cloud to respond to variable demand for data storage and processing

In parallel to assembling these components, banks must consolidate data from across geographies and business lines. This will enable analysts to elicit insights based on the maximum amount of information. Some leading players first experiment in a sandbox environment and work with external partners to acquire the necessary skills, after which they scale up incrementally.

Build the team and prioritize change management

It is not easy to scale and sustain analytics impact. Organizational silos and cultural resistance are common inhibiting factors, while the vital role that RMs play in forming and maintaining relationships must be adapted to the new environment. Indeed, RMs must be front and center of the transformation process. For this, organizations need effective team building and change management.

Team building. A productive approach to team building is to create cross-functional squads with a range of talents (Exhibit 4). Product owners and designers should be responsible for ensuring that the team meets the needs of its clients (RMs or end clients) and stays focused on delivering value. Data scientists and data engineers implement use cases and check that insights are generated as data are ingested—a minimal-viable-product (MVP) approach. IT architects and software engineers, meanwhile, build the slick interfaces and back-end systems that deliver insights to clients across channels.

How three Asian wealth managers engaged clients and boosted RM productivity

A leading private bank deployed machine learning to generate next-best conversation ideas. It built propensity models and analyzed customer clusters to identify anchor clients and learn from transaction patterns.

Another private bank built a digital workbench that enables RMs to serve clients via a single platform. The workbench was integrated with a centrally hosted recommendation engine that provides personalized recommendations based on life events and transaction data.

A third private bank used explanatory and predictive modeling to identify “moments of truth.” These informed RM coverage and outreach strategy, which helped the bank develop initiatives to support growth and focus RMs on high-value activities.

A core objective should be to explore analytics and AI use cases that boost RM productivity (see sidebar “How three Asian wealth managers engaged clients and boosted RM productivity”). To that end, the squad should embed business and channel management teams so that ideas are aligned with RM client services. Several firms have found that involving RMs and other domain experts in squads leads to significant improvements in data interpretation and modeling.

In many cases, assembling productive squads will require new talent. In particular, banks will need data scientists to be responsible for building analytics software and data engineers to scope and build data pipelines and data architecture. Translators, who act as conduits between the business and technology teams, will be critical for ensuring that squads understand business needs. Finally, squads need IT skill sets to ensure that analytics and digital solutions are compatible with core data and technology stacks.

The best approach to talent acquisition is to take baby steps: get one squad right, foster RM adoption, and then gradually expand capabilities as use cases multiply and are scaled up. Some of the required skill sets are in high demand, so outsourcing may be a realistic early option. In the longer term, however, it makes sense to build internally.

Change management. Relationship managers should be encouraged to embrace analytics and convinced that new applications lead to better services and higher levels of performance. Change management strategies can help. Examples include creating teams of “influencers,” running capability-building sessions, developing change narratives that generate widespread excitement, redefining roles, and aligning performance with financial or nonfinancial awards.

Institutionalize new ways of working

Analytics-driven transformation at scale should be predicated on collaboration, team self-steering, and an iterative approach to problem-solving—elements of the so-called agile approach, which originated in software development. In running agile sprints, it pays to keep business needs in sight, accepting that failure is part of the process. Two-week sprints are usually sufficient to get pilots up and running, and the aim should be to produce an MVP with every sprint.

Wealth managers can apply these basic principles via four process disciplines:

• Inspect and adapt. Daily check-ins will ensure that teams identify roadblocks, such as product backlogs, and maintain their focus on goals.
• Engage end users. Sprint reviews with end users, stakeholders, and sponsors enable teams to gather feedback and bake in recommendations.
• Embed a sense of unity and purpose. Teams should hold retrospectives to incorporate learnings.
• Institutionalize support infrastructure. Agile tooling (for example, Confluence, Jira, and Zeplin) will facilitate experimentation and support remote working where necessary.

Organizations using agile operating models must embrace flexible learning. This is a departure from traditional waterfall-based approaches, in which decision-making occurs at the beginning of each project. In agile, capability building and a relentless focus on change management will be vital elements of optimizing the program. To cement the relationship between innovation and growth, leading firms also assign KPIs to application rollouts, and they reward decision makers based on the value created.

Most wealth managers would say they have already embarked on an analytics journey; many have begun deploying digital applications in various aspects of their businesses. Often, however, the whole system is less than the sum of its parts, and people remain attached to established ways of working. To make a leap forward, wealth managers should commit to bold agendas that will support the scaling up of analytics-driven approaches.

Anutosh Banerjee is a partner in McKinsey’s Singapore office, where Vishal Kaushik and Aditya Saxena are associate partners; Fumiaki Katsuki is a partner in the Hanoi office; and Sanchit Suneja is an associate partner in the Mumbai office, where Renny Thomas is a senior partner.

The authors wish to thank Tiffany Kwok and Charu Singhal for their contributions to this article.

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• Published: 08 May 2024

A meta-analysis on global change drivers and the risk of infectious disease

• Michael B. Mahon   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9436-2998 1 , 2   na1 ,
• Alexandra Sack 1 , 3   na1 ,
• O. Alejandro Aleuy 1 ,
• Carly Barbera 1 ,
• Ethan Brown   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0827-4906 1 ,
• Heather Buelow   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3535-4151 1 ,
• David J. Civitello 4 ,
• Jeremy M. Cohen   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9611-9150 5 ,
• Luz A. de Wit   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3045-4017 1 ,
• Meghan Forstchen 1 , 3 ,
• Fletcher W. Halliday 6 ,
• Patrick Heffernan 1 ,
• Sarah A. Knutie 7 ,
• Alexis Korotasz 1 ,
• Joanna G. Larson   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1401-7837 1 ,
• Samantha L. Rumschlag   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3125-8402 1 , 2 ,
• Emily Selland   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4527-297X 1 , 3 ,
• Alexander Shepack 1 ,
• Nitin Vincent   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8593-1116 1 &
• Jason R. Rohr   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8285-4912 1 , 2 , 3   na1  

Nature ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Infectious diseases

Anthropogenic change is contributing to the rise in emerging infectious diseases, which are significantly correlated with socioeconomic, environmental and ecological factors 1 . Studies have shown that infectious disease risk is modified by changes to biodiversity 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , climate change 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , chemical pollution 12 , 13 , 14 , landscape transformations 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 and species introductions 21 . However, it remains unclear which global change drivers most increase disease and under what contexts. Here we amassed a dataset from the literature that contains 2,938 observations of infectious disease responses to global change drivers across 1,497 host–parasite combinations, including plant, animal and human hosts. We found that biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, climate change and introduced species are associated with increases in disease-related end points or harm, whereas urbanization is associated with decreases in disease end points. Natural biodiversity gradients, deforestation and forest fragmentation are comparatively unimportant or idiosyncratic as drivers of disease. Overall, these results are consistent across human and non-human diseases. Nevertheless, context-dependent effects of the global change drivers on disease were found to be common. The findings uncovered by this meta-analysis should help target disease management and surveillance efforts towards global change drivers that increase disease. Specifically, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, managing ecosystem health, and preventing biological invasions and biodiversity loss could help to reduce the burden of plant, animal and human diseases, especially when coupled with improvements to social and economic determinants of health.

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Towards common ground in the biodiversity–disease debate

Biological invasions facilitate zoonotic disease emergences

Measuring the shape of the biodiversity-disease relationship across systems reveals new findings and key gaps

Data availability.

All the data for this Article have been deposited at Zenodo ( https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8169979 ) 52 and GitHub ( https://github.com/mahonmb/GCDofDisease ) 53 .

Code availability

All the code for this Article has been deposited at Zenodo ( https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8169979 ) 52 and GitHub ( https://github.com/mahonmb/GCDofDisease ) 53 . R markdown is provided in Supplementary Data 1 .

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Acknowledgements

We thank C. Mitchell for contributing data on enemy release; L. Albert and B. Shayhorn for assisting with data collection; J. Gurevitch, M. Lajeunesse and G. Stewart for providing comments on an earlier version of this manuscript; and C. Carlson and two anonymous reviewers for improving this paper. This research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (DEB-2109293, DEB-2017785, DEB-1518681, IOS-1754868), National Institutes of Health (R01TW010286) and US Department of Agriculture (2021-38420-34065) to J.R.R.; a US Geological Survey Powell grant to J.R.R. and S.L.R.; University of Connecticut Start-up funds to S.A.K.; grants from the National Science Foundation (IOS-1755002) and National Institutes of Health (R01 AI150774) to D.J.C.; and an Ambizione grant (PZ00P3_202027) from the Swiss National Science Foundation to F.W.H. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

Author information

These authors contributed equally: Michael B. Mahon, Alexandra Sack, Jason R. Rohr

Authors and Affiliations

Department of Biological Sciences, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

Michael B. Mahon, Alexandra Sack, O. Alejandro Aleuy, Carly Barbera, Ethan Brown, Heather Buelow, Luz A. de Wit, Meghan Forstchen, Patrick Heffernan, Alexis Korotasz, Joanna G. Larson, Samantha L. Rumschlag, Emily Selland, Alexander Shepack, Nitin Vincent & Jason R. Rohr

Environmental Change Initiative, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

Michael B. Mahon, Samantha L. Rumschlag & Jason R. Rohr

Eck Institute of Global Health, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

Alexandra Sack, Meghan Forstchen, Emily Selland & Jason R. Rohr

Department of Biology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

David J. Civitello

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Jeremy M. Cohen

Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

Fletcher W. Halliday

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Institute for Systems Genomics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

Sarah A. Knutie

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Contributions

J.R.R. conceptualized the study. All of the authors contributed to the methodology. All of the authors contributed to investigation. Visualization was performed by M.B.M. The initial study list and related information were compiled by D.J.C., J.M.C., F.W.H., S.A.K., S.L.R. and J.R.R. Data extraction was performed by M.B.M., A.S., O.A.A., C.B., E.B., H.B., L.A.d.W., M.F., P.H., A.K., J.G.L., E.S., A.S. and N.V. Data were checked for accuracy by M.B.M. and A.S. Analyses were performed by M.B.M. and J.R.R. Funding was acquired by D.J.C., J.R.R., S.A.K. and S.L.R. Project administration was done by J.R.R. J.R.R. supervised the study. J.R.R. and M.B.M. wrote the original draft. All of the authors reviewed and edited the manuscript. J.R.R. and M.B.M. responded to reviewers.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jason R. Rohr .

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended data fig. 1 prisma flowchart..

The PRISMA flow diagram of the search and selection of studies included in this meta-analysis. Note that 77 studies came from the Halliday et al. 3 database on biodiversity change.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Summary of the number of studies (A-F) and parasite taxa (G-L) in the infectious disease database across ecological contexts.

The contexts are global change driver ( A , G ), parasite taxa ( B , H ), host taxa ( C , I ), experimental venue ( D , J ), study habitat ( E , K ), and human parasite status ( F , L ).

Extended Data Fig. 3 Summary of the number of effect sizes (A-I), studies (J-R), and parasite taxa (S-a) in the infectious disease database for various parasite and host contexts.

Shown are parasite type ( A , J , S ), host thermy ( B , K , T ), vector status ( C , L , U ), vector-borne status ( D , M , V ), parasite transmission ( E , N , W ), free living stages ( F , O , X ), host (e.g. disease, host growth, host survival) or parasite (e.g. parasite abundance, prevalence, fecundity) endpoint ( G , P , Y ), micro- vs macroparasite ( H , Q , Z ), and zoonotic status ( I , R , a ).

Extended Data Fig. 4 The effects of global change drivers and subsequent subcategories on disease responses with Log Response Ratio instead of Hedge’s g.

Here, Log Response Ratio shows similar trends to that of Hedge’s g presented in the main text. The displayed points represent the mean predicted values (with 95% confidence intervals) from a meta-analytical model with separate random intercepts for study. Points that do not share letters are significantly different from one another (p < 0.05) based on a two-sided Tukey’s posthoc multiple comparison test with adjustment for multiple comparisons. See Table S 3 for pairwise comparison results. Effects of the five common global change drivers ( A ) have the same directionality, similar magnitude, and significance as those presented in Fig. 2 . Global change driver effects are significant when confidence intervals do not overlap with zero and explicitly tested with two-tailed t-test (indicated by asterisks; t 80.62  = 2.16, p = 0.034 for CP; t 71.42  = 2.10, p = 0.039 for CC; t 131.79  = −3.52, p < 0.001 for HLC; t 61.9  = 2.10, p = 0.040 for IS). The subcategories ( B ) also show similar patterns as those presented in Fig. 3 . Subcategories are significant when confidence intervals do not overlap with zero and were explicitly tested with two-tailed one sample t-test (t 30.52  = 2.17, p = 0.038 for CO 2 ; t 40.03  = 4.64, p < 0.001 for Enemy Release; t 47.45  = 2.18, p = 0.034 for Mean Temperature; t 110.81  = −4.05, p < 0.001 for Urbanization); all other subcategories have p > 0.20. Note that effect size and study numbers are lower here than in Figs. 3 and 4 , because log response ratios cannot be calculated for studies that provide coefficients (e.g., odds ratio) rather than raw data; as such, all observations within BC did not have associated RR values. Despite strong differences in sample size, patterns are consistent across effect sizes, and therefore, we can be confident that the results presented in the main text are not biased because of effect size selection.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Average standard errors of the effect sizes (A) and sample sizes per effect size (B) for each of the five global change drivers.

The displayed points represent the mean predicted values (with 95% confidence intervals) from the generalized linear mixed effects models with separate random intercepts for study (Gaussian distribution for standard error model, A ; Poisson distribution for sample size model, B ). Points that do not share letters are significantly different from one another (p < 0.05) based on a two-sided Tukey’s posthoc multiple comparison test with adjustment for multiple comparisons. Sample sizes (number of studies, n, and effect sizes, k) for each driver are as follows: n = 77, k = 392 for BC; n = 124, k = 364 for CP; n = 202, k = 380 for CC; n = 517, k = 1449 for HLC; n = 96, k = 355 for IS.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Forest plots of effect sizes, associated variances, and relative weights (A), Funnel plots (B), and Egger’s Test plots (C) for each of the five global change drivers and leave-one-out publication bias analyses (D).

In panel A , points are the individual effect sizes (Hedge’s G), error bars are standard errors of the effect size, and size of the points is the relative weight of the observation in the model, with larger points representing observations with higher weight in the model. Sample sizes are provided for each effect size in the meta-analytic database. Effect sizes were plotted in a random order. Egger’s tests indicated significant asymmetries (p < 0.05) in Biodiversity Change (worst asymmetry – likely not bias, just real effect of positive relationship between diversity and disease), Climate Change – (weak asymmetry, again likely not bias, climate change generally increases disease), and Introduced Species (relatively weak asymmetry – unclear whether this is a bias, may be driven by some outliers). No significant asymmetries (p > 0.05) were found in Chemical Pollution and Habitat Loss/Change, suggesting negligible publication bias in reported disease responses across these global change drivers ( B , C ). Egger’s test included publication year as moderator but found no significant relationship between Hedge’s g and publication year (p > 0.05) implying no temporal bias in effect size magnitude or direction. In panel D , the horizontal red lines denote the grand mean and SE of Hedge’s g and (g = 0.1009, SE = 0.0338). Grey points and error bars indicate the Hedge’s g and SEs, respectively, using the leave-one-out method (grand mean is recalculated after a given study is removed from dataset). While the removal of certain studies resulted in values that differed from the grand mean, all estimated Hedge’s g values fell well within the standard error of the grand mean. This sensitivity analysis indicates that our results were robust to the iterative exclusion of individual studies.

Extended Data Fig. 7 The effects of habitat loss/change on disease depend on parasite taxa and land use conversion contexts.

A) Enemy type influences the magnitude of the effect of urbanization on disease: helminths, protists, and arthropods were all negatively associated with urbanization, whereas viruses were non-significantly positively associated with urbanization. B) Reference (control) land use type influences the magnitude of the effect of urbanization on disease: disease was reduced in urban settings compared to rural and peri-urban settings, whereas there were no differences in disease along urbanization gradients or between urban and natural settings. C) The effect of forest fragmentation depends on whether a large/continuous habitat patch is compared to a small patch or whether disease it is measured along an increasing fragmentation gradient (Z = −2.828, p = 0.005). Conversely, the effect of deforestation on disease does not depend on whether the habitat has been destroyed and allowed to regrow (e.g., clearcutting, second growth forests, etc.) or whether it has been replaced with agriculture (e.g., row crop, agroforestry, livestock grazing; Z = 1.809, p = 0.0705). The displayed points represent the mean predicted values (with 95% confidence intervals) from a metafor model where the response variable was a Hedge’s g (representing the effect on an infectious disease endpoint relative to control), study was treated as a random effect, and the independent variables included enemy type (A), reference land use type (B), or land use conversion type (C). Data for (A) and (B) were only those studies that were within the “urbanization” subcategory; data for (C) were only those studies that were within the “deforestation” and “forest fragmentation” subcategories. Sample sizes (number of studies, n, and effect sizes, k) in (A) for each enemy are n = 48, k = 98 for Virus; n = 193, k = 343 for Protist; n = 159, k = 490 for Helminth; n = 10, k = 24 for Fungi; n = 103, k = 223 for Bacteria; and n = 30, k = 73 for Arthropod. Sample sizes in (B) for each reference land use type are n = 391, k = 1073 for Rural; n = 29, k = 74 for Peri-urban; n = 33, k = 83 for Natural; and n = 24, k = 58 for Urban Gradient. Sample sizes in (C) for each land use conversion type are n = 7, k = 47 for Continuous Gradient; n = 16, k = 44 for High/Low Fragmentation; n = 11, k = 27 for Clearcut/Regrowth; and n = 21, k = 43 for Agriculture.

Extended Data Fig. 8 The effects of common global change drivers on mean infectious disease responses in the literature depends on whether the endpoint is the host or parasite; whether the parasite is a vector, is vector-borne, has a complex or direct life cycle, or is a macroparasite; whether the host is an ectotherm or endotherm; or the venue and habitat in which the study was conducted.

A ) Parasite endpoints. B ) Vector-borne status. C ) Parasite transmission route. D ) Parasite size. E ) Venue. F ) Habitat. G ) Host thermy. H ) Parasite type (ecto- or endoparasite). See Table S 2 for number of studies and effect sizes across ecological contexts and global change drivers. See Table S 3 for pairwise comparison results. The displayed points represent the mean predicted values (with 95% confidence intervals) from a metafor model where the response variable was a Hedge’s g (representing the effect on an infectious disease endpoint relative to control), study was treated as a random effect, and the independent variables included the main effects and an interaction between global change driver and the focal independent variable (whether the endpoint measured was a host or parasite, whether the parasite is vector-borne, has a complex or direct life cycle, is a macroparasite, whether the study was conducted in the field or lab, habitat, the host is ectothermic, or the parasite is an ectoparasite).

Extended Data Fig. 9 The effects of five common global change drivers on mean infectious disease responses in the literature only occasionally depend on location, host taxon, and parasite taxon.

A ) Continent in which the field study occurred. Lack of replication in chemical pollution precluded us from including South America, Australia, and Africa in this analysis. B ) Host taxa. C ) Enemy taxa. See Table S 2 for number of studies and effect sizes across ecological contexts and global change drivers. See Table S 3 for pairwise comparison results. The displayed points represent the mean predicted values (with 95% confidence intervals) from a metafor model where the response variable was a Hedge’s g (representing the effect on an infectious disease endpoint relative to control), study was treated as a random effect, and the independent variables included the main effects and an interaction between global change driver and continent, host taxon, and enemy taxon.

Extended Data Fig. 10 The effects of human vs. non-human endpoints for the zoonotic disease subset of database and wild vs. domesticated animal endpoints for the non-human animal subset of database are consistent across global change drivers.

(A) Zoonotic disease responses measured on human hosts responded less positively (closer to zero when positive, further from zero when negative) than those measured on non-human (animal) hosts (Z = 2.306, p = 0.021). Note, IS studies were removed because of missing cells. (B) Disease responses measured on domestic animal hosts responded less positively (closer to zero when positive, further from zero when negative) than those measured on wild animal hosts (Z = 2.636, p = 0.008). These results were consistent across global change drivers (i.e., no significant interaction between endpoint and global change driver). As many of the global change drivers increase zoonotic parasites in non-human animals and all parasites in wild animals, this may suggest that anthropogenic change might increase the occurrence of parasite spillover from animals to humans and thus also pandemic risk. The displayed points represent the mean predicted values (with 95% confidence intervals) from a metafor model where the response variable was a Hedge’s g (representing the effect on an infectious disease endpoint relative to control), study was treated as a random effect, and the independent variable of global change driver and human/non-human hosts. Data for (A) were only those diseases that are considered “zoonotic”; data for (B) were only those endpoints that were measured on non-human animals. Sample sizes in (A) for zoonotic disease measured on human endpoints across global change drivers are n = 3, k = 17 for BC; n = 2, k = 6 for CP; n = 25, k = 39 for CC; and n = 175, k = 331 for HLC. Sample sizes in (A) for zoonotic disease measured on non-human endpoints across global change drivers are n = 25, k = 52 for BC; n = 2, k = 3 for CP; n = 18, k = 29 for CC; n = 126, k = 289 for HLC. Sample sizes in (B) for wild animal endpoints across global change drivers are n = 28, k = 69 for BC; n = 21, k = 44 for CP; n = 50, k = 89 for CC; n = 121, k = 360 for HLC; and n = 29, k = 45 for IS. Sample sizes in (B) for domesticated animal endpoints across global change drivers are n = 2, k = 4 for BC; n = 4, k = 11 for CP; n = 7, k = 20 for CC; n = 78, k = 197 for HLC; and n = 1, k = 2 for IS.

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Mahon, M.B., Sack, A., Aleuy, O.A. et al. A meta-analysis on global change drivers and the risk of infectious disease. Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07380-6

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Houston’s flood problems offer lessons for cities trying to adapt to a changing climate

Professor Emeritus of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering, University of Michigan

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Scenes from the Houston area looked like the aftermath of a hurricane in early May after a series of powerful storms flooded highways and neighborhoods and sent rivers over their banks north of the city.

Hundreds of people had to be rescued from homes, rooftops and cars, according to The Associated Press. Huntsville registered nearly 20 inches of rain from April 29 to May 4, 2024.

Floods are complex events, and they are about more than just heavy rain. Each community has its own unique geography and climate that can exacerbate flooding. On top of those risks, extreme downpours are becoming more common as global temperatures rise.

I work with a center at the University of Michigan that helps communities turn climate knowledge into projects that can reduce the harm of future climate disasters. Flooding events like the Houston area experienced provide case studies that can help cities everywhere manage the increasing risk.

Flood risks are rising

The first thing recent floods tell us is that the climate is changing.

In the past, it might have made sense to consider a flood a rare and random event – communities could just build back. But the statistical distribution of weather events and natural disasters is shifting.

What might have been a 1-in-500-years event may become a 1-in-100-years event , on the way to becoming a 1-in-50-years event. When Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in 2017, it delivered Houston’s third 500-year flood in the span of three years.

Basic physics points to the rising risks: Global greenhouse gas emissions are increasing global average temperatures. Warming leads to increasing precipitation and more intense downpours, and increased flood potential, particularly when storms hit on already saturated ground.

Communities aren’t prepared

Recent floods are also revealing vulnerabilities in how communities are designed and managed.

Pavement is a major contributor to urban flooding, because water cannot be absorbed and it runs off quickly. The Houston area’s frequent flooding illustrates the risks. Its impervious surfaces expanded by 386 square miles between 1997 and 2017, according to data collected by Rice University . More streets, parking lots and buildings meant more standing water with fewer places for rainwater to sink in.

If the infrastructure is well designed and maintained, flood damage can be greatly reduced. However, increasingly, researchers have found that the engineering specifications for drainage pipes and other infrastructure are no longer adequate to handle the increasing severity of storms and amounts of precipitation. This can lead to roads being washed out and communities being cut off . Failures in maintaining infrastructure, such as levees and storm drains, are a common contributor to flooding.

In the Houston area, reservoirs are also an essential part of flood management, and many were at capacity from persistent rain. This forced managers to release more water when the storms hit.

For a coastal metropolis such as the Houston-Galveston area, rapidly rising sea levels can also reduce the downstream capacity to manage water. These different factors compound to increase flooding risk and highlight the need to not only move water but to find safe places to store it.

The increasing risks affect not only engineering standards, but zoning laws that govern where homes can be built and building codes that describe minimum standards for safety, as well as permitting and environmental regulations.

By addressing these issues now, communities can anticipate and avoid damage rather than only reacting when it’s too late.

Four lessons from case studies

The many effects associated with flooding show why a holistic approach to planning for climate change is necessary, and what communities can learn from one another. For example, case studies show that:

Floods can damage resources that are essential in flood recovery, such as roads, bridges and hospitals . Considering future risks when determining where and how to build these resources enhances the ability to recover from future disasters . Jackson, Mississippi’s water treatment plant was knocked offline by flooding in 2022, leaving people without safe running water. Houston’s Texas Medical Center famously prepared to manage future flooding by installing floodgates, elevating backup generators and taking other steps after heavy damage during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001.

Flood damage does not occur in isolation. Downpours can trigger mudslides , make sewers more vulnerable and turn manufacturing facilities into toxic contamination risks . These can become broad-scale dangers, extending far beyond individual communities.

It is difficult for an individual or a community to take on even the technical aspects of flood preparation alone – there is too much interconnectedness. Protective measures like levees or channels might protect one neighborhood but worsen the flood risk downstream . Planners should identify the appropriate regional scale, such as the entire drainage basin of a creek or river, and form important relationships early in the planning process.

Natural disasters and the ways communities respond to them can also amplify disparities in wealth and resources. Social justice and ethical considerations need to be brought into planning at the beginning.

Learning to manage complexity

In communities that my colleagues and I have worked with , we have found an increasing awareness of the challenges of climate change and rising flood risks.

In most cases, local officials’ initial instinct has been to protect property and persist without changing where people live. However, that might only buy time for some areas before people will have little option but to move .

When they examine their vulnerabilities, many of these communities have started to recognize the interconnectedness of zoning, storm drains and parks that can absorb runoff, for example. They also begin to see the importance of engaging regional stakeholders to avoid fragmented efforts to adapt that could worsen conditions for neighboring areas.

This is an updated version of an article originally published Aug. 25, 2022 .

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Climate-Smart Intervention Takes Top 2023 Case Studies in the Environment Prize

Case Studies in the Environment is pleased to announce the winners of the 2023 Case Studies in the Environment Prize Competition .

Eligible submissions are judged for their ability to translate discrete case studies into broad, generalizable findings; for advancing a strong perspective and engaging narrative; for being accessible to their intended audiences; for addressing topics that are important or notable in their novelty, impact, or urgency; and which contribute to the teaching of environmental concepts to students and/or practitioners.

The winning case study from the 2023 competition, “ Building Resilience in Jamaica’s Farming Communities: Insights From a Climate-Smart Intervention ,” from The University of the West Indies’ Donovan Campbell and Shaneica Lester, demonstrates that while climate change poses immense threats to the environment and to human livelihoods, adaptation also provides opportunities to strengthen a community.

“This positivity and sense of agency is critical to the success of climate initiatives,” noted CSE Editor-in-Chief Dr. Jennifer Bernstein. “The editorial team felt that the manuscript exemplifies the journal at its best–identifying and evaluating an important environmental question using robust interdisciplinary methods.”

The honorable mention articles from the 2023 competition are “ Teaching the Complex Dynamics of Clean Energy Subsidies With the Help of a Model-as-Game ,” from Rochester Institute of Technology’s Eric Hittinger, Qing Miao, and Eric Williams; and “ Barriers and Facilitators for Successful Community Forestry: Lessons Learned and Practical Applications From Case Studies in India and Guatemala ,” from Vishal Jamkar (University of Minnesota), Megan Butler (Macalester College), and Dean Current (University of Minnesota).

“‘Teaching the Complex Dynamics of Clean Energy Subsidies’ recognizes the value of subsidies, while at the same time acknowledging contextual constraints. The game itself allows students to work through subsidy design via a number of cases, and provides high quality material for use immediately in the classroom. This is a wildly useful tool, and exemplifies what we want to see with respect to accessible pedagogy using environmental case studies as a focus.”

“Barriers and Facilitators for Successful Community Forestry” is the author team’s second case study contribution to the journal, extending the well-developed framework of their previous article, “ Understanding Facilitators and Barriers to Success: Framework for Developing Community Forestry Case Studies ” and applying it to two unique locations.

Both the winning case study and honorable mentions have been made freely available to the public at online.ucpress.edu/cse .

The Case Studies in the Environment team extends their gratitude to everyone who submitted articles for the 2023 competition. For previous Case Studies in the Environment Prize Competition winners, please see our prize competition landing page .

Case Studies in the Environment is a journal of peer-reviewed case study articles and case study pedagogy articles. The journal informs faculty, students, researchers, educators, professionals, and policymakers on case studies and best practices in the environmental sciences and studies. online.ucpress.edu/cse

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