Implement Change - Effective Templates

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Templates can be useful tools if they are backed by solid research. Read more about effective templates and how it can help in implementing change.

With the need to implement change becoming standard operating procedure, particularly during economic downturns, organizations are interested in making the change process more efficient and successful. Some organizations accomplish this by retaining internal change experts, but many small and mid-sized organizations are facing the need to implement change for the first time. There is a temptation during the change process to employ templates as an organizing tool, but there can be pitfalls to this approach.

Unfortunately, as with any area of interest, many published experts lack any real experience in the change processes for which they are developing templates. They have theoretical knowledge that dictates that the template will work while an organization attempts to implement change, but it turns out that it only works on paper or in a lab. This type of disconnect occurs occasionally in electrical circuit design when all of the theory dictates that a circuit will work, but when it is constructed it will not function as designed.

Templates can be useful tools if they are backed by solid research. There is a practice in medicine, which developed out of research, called a clinical pathway. Clinical pathways are tools that are used to streamline and standardize the treatment process for particular conditions that follow predictable paths. They often include flowcharts to facilitate the treatment process. While clinical pathways are now a prevalent feature in medicine, they are the result of a considerable amount research and statistical analysis across a range of conditions. They were not developed out of a theory about how treatment should occur but from an analysis of how treatments were occurring.

A template is not designed to function in the same fashion as a clinical pathway, which directs at each step, but it should have come out of a similar rigorous type of research and analysis. For any organization that is looking to make use of a template, it is in the organization’s best interest to ascertain the source material from which the template was developed before adopting it as an organizing tool for how they will implement change.