For the leaders of change activity, it will inevitably be necessary to deal with barriers, conflicts, resistance, and other negative effects. There is a tendency to see these as disasters that will cause the change to fail. But by adopting a thoughtful and professional approach, most of the mistakes, barriers, and difficulties that change brings, can be overcome. Some negative repercussions will be inevitable: It will help, at the outset, to prepare yourself for the certainty that you will have made some misjudgements in your planning of the change. Also, despite careful analysis of the likely repercussions of the change, it is not possible to accurately forecast all of these, nor the degree of impact. This means that you acknowledge that you intend to succeed despite the setbacks caused by mistakes that are made, and forecasts that prove to be inaccurate in places. In short, you are allowing yourself to have some weaknesses. Unless you and your leadership team colleagues are blessed with genius, you are highly unlikely to introduce major change without running into some unexpected, or more serious than expected, difficulties.
Forecasts will have flaws: Even if you have...