Change management: why good practices do not transfer easily
Transformations often rely on a pilot team whose methods are then expected to be rolled out more widely. The managerial question is specific: what should be checked before asking another team to reproduce a practice considered successful?
What the literature establishes
Gabriel Szulanski (1996, Strategic Management Journal) examines barriers to transferring best practices within firms. His findings highlight, among other factors, the recipient's absorptive capacity, ambiguity about the causes of success and difficulties in the relationship between source and recipient. Transfer thus emerges as a matter of knowledge and interaction, not simply willingness to adopt.
Understanding requires prior knowledge
Wesley M. Cohen and Daniel A. Levinthal (1990, Administrative Science Quarterly) define absorptive capacity as the ability to recognise the value of new information, assimilate it and apply it to commercial ends. Their analysis emphasises the role of prior knowledge in this learning. Applied to transfer between teams, this mechanism suggests that the same documentation does not provide an equivalent resource for every recipient.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that better documentation and training for the receiving team are all that is needed. These studies do not justify reducing transfer to that formula: knowing the steps does not mean understanding what produces the outcome. A practice may depend on tacit expertise, working relationships or local conditions that the protocol captures poorly. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot promise
The study of internal transfers is not a randomised trial isolating the effect of a particular form of support. The work on absorptive capacity addresses learning and innovation, rather than the evaluation of a change management programme. These contributions provide diagnostic guidance, but neither an optimal rollout period nor a guarantee of replication.
A practical check in Lausanne
In Lausanne, a medtech company, a higher education institution, an international sports organisation or a scale-up in the Lake Geneva region could test the transfer of a practice on a limited scale before extending it. Over four weeks, the receiving team would record each use, interventions by the source team and compliance with a quality criterion defined before the trial. The measure would be the proportion of uses meeting that criterion without intervention by the source team, reported alongside the total number of observed cases and the reasons assistance was needed. Within SHR — Swiss Human Resources' « Conduite du changement » programme, this protocol could serve as a diagnostic exercise: it indicates the autonomy acquired, without itself proving that the transfer improves performance. To go further: explore the Change Leadership training in Lausanne, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Change Leadership in Lausanne
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