Cover photo from “When change is a constant”

When change is a constant Philips

Consumer Lifestyle
Strategy

As part of its strategic reinvention as a health technology company, Philips embarked on a global transformation journey. I developed and implemented a change communications strategy to keep everyone on the same page.

The Challenge

How do you embed new systems and processes across an organisation, all while taking the organisation on the change journey with you? As part of its streamlining business transformation effort, Philips understood that communications is an essential enabler of the initiative, and needed a strategy and tools to help people understand and support the change.

The Strategy

This change journey was always going to succeed with a leader-led and role-modelling approach. Further, while designing deliberate and consistent communications initiatives, we also fully embraced the concept of emergent strategy, one with greater agility which was adaptable ‘on the fly’ to the ever-shifting needs of the project, and impacted employees.

The Solution

The biggest risk in any change journey is resistance or lack of adoption, so we worked closely with senior and program executives leading the change to ensure that their interventions focussed on emotional narratives and storytelling first, rather than the intellectual side of content, which we placed a careful second. Designing a range of tactical messaging, e-learnings and visual/video support materials with strong emotive appeal, we reached employees on an individual level.

As a result of the campaign, the complexities of implementing broad systems changes across multiple geographies was dramatically reduced, and although resisted in parts, the culture we created was such that differences could be comfortably worked through for win-win benefit.