I like to use the following example to explain and assess different levels of accountability in organizations:

If there is a piece of trash on the floor in a regularly traveled hallway, what happens?

No Accountability:  Pretend you don’t see it. Comment about the sins of the litterer or the ineptitude of the cleaning staff. Keep on walking.

Accountability:  Keep on walking, then tell the cleaning staff they missed a spot. Or, chide the person in front of you for walking by it and point out how close the nearest trash can is.

Personal Accountability:  Pick up the trash, throw it out, and go on with your day.

What is the typical response in your organization to a piece of trash on the floor? Perhaps a simple experiment is in order.

There are some things right in front of you that, until you look for them, are completely invisible.

For several months, we’ve noticed independent behavior changes in our 11 year old dog, Sadie.

She had become increasingly disobedient, especially not coming when she was called.

She had become a whiner. Whenever she wanted something, she would whine, but whenever we went through the list of options (“Are you hungry?” “Do you need to go outside?” “Do you want to play?”), she would just sit there and keep whining.

Either her reaction time was slowing or she wasn’t paying attention. She was constantly getting underfoot and tripped over.

She finally got smart and realized that she didn’t need to run and bark when the garage door opened any more, since it was always my husband.

She got lazy and stopped following me around the house during the day, and just kept on napping when I left the room.

Then, more than a week ago, she started to shake her head and scratch at her ear. The vet confirmed she had an ear infection. Over the course of treatment, I started looking for signs of hearing loss.

She didn’t come when called – she couldn’t hear me call her.

She whined – she couldn’t hear me respond.

She was constantly underfoot – she couldn’t hear our footsteps.

She didn’t bark at the garage door – she couldn’t hear it.

She kept napping when I left the room – she didn’t wake up when got up from my chair.

All the signs pointed to a single cause of her changes in behavior, but instead I had a different interpretation for each. The symptoms were there, but I could not see they were connected. I was somehow satisfied with the easy logic that in her old age, my sweet dog had become an ornery, lazy whiner.

Now that I know the truth, it’s much easier to communicate with her. I can get closer and speak louder. I can rely more on hand signals and make sure I am in her line of sight. Now that I understand, I don’t get frustrated with her.

We are all quick to assign an explanation to the behavior we see in others. Take a step back to check your own assumptions of the behaviors you see in your organization. When you see independent puzzling behaviors, consider they may be connected, and there may be a common cause. Once you understand the true reasons for others’ behaviors, you can effectively address them.

On this episode of The Change Agent’s Dilemma, you’ll hear my interview with Al Pittampalli, author of Read This Before Our Next Meeting. On the show, we talk about how to host effective meetings that drive change.

Tune in to hear why the way we conduct meetings is so bad, and learn a new format for meetings that will bring about results and use time, our most limited resource, more effectively.

Listen to the show here (30 minutes):

Be sure to visit the radio show page to listen to past episodes and subscribe to the show.

Over the weekend, we returned home from a week-long holiday vacation to the occasional high-pitched, short chirp of the smoke detector that signaled that the battery was getting low.

It was late – almost midnight. The kids were exhausted and needed to get to bed. For some reason, the batteries in smoke detectors are not easy to access or change. And they seem to be the only device in the house that requires a 9-volt battery, which explains why we had no spares anywhere in the house.

The last thing either of us wanted to do after 13 hours in the car was to drive to the store to buy a battery, and then climb up a ladder to change it. But, of course, we did.

The chirping smoke detector can teach us a few things about creating a sense of urgency that compels change:

• Urgency has a purpose. In the unlikely scenario that the battery dies, the power goes out, and there is a fire, we would have a potentially lethal scenario for my family. As annoying as it is, the chirping alarm is designed to ensure our safety.
• Urgency comes from the need or desire to stop experiencing the unpleasant. If the chirping was at all tolerable, we might just try to sleep through it.
• Urgency is continual. If the chirp was a one-time occurrence, either we might miss it, or we could just continue about our business when it’s done. Urgency needs to be unrelenting.
• Urgency is not the same as an emergency. It should not crowd out other important activities. You don’t have to drop everything to take care of it, but you’re not going to rest while it still needs to be addressed. If the alarm had actually been going off, that would have been an emergency.
• You have to feel it. The chirping could have been going on for a week and we wouldn’t know it. We didn’t hear it until we were in the house. Even if we had had a remote device that told us the alarm was chirping while we were out of the house, we wouldn’t have rushed home to change the battery. Since we weren’t there to be annoyed by it, it could wait.
• You also need to know what to do. The chirping is just maddening unless you know what it means and how to make it stop. Urgency without a clear direction to get away from the unpleasantness just makes you feel helpless. Corollary:  The change you make must alleviate the sense of urgency.
• Urgency requires boundaries for acceptable ways to alleviate it. Urgency is the need to get away from something bad. Besides changing the battery, to avoid the noise we could have chosen to stay in a hotel (an expensive choice) or to unplug the alarm entirely (a dangerous choice). If other alternatives are available to alleviate the sense of urgency, then they need to be less attractive than the desired behavior.

The battery has been changed, and we can forget about it until next time. Although now, we have five extra 9-Volt batteries ready.

My guest today is Martin Fenwick, Principal Consultant and Director of TheChangeFactor in Auckland, New Zealand. On the show, Martin describes the concept of a change “bubble,” a way to create a safe space for change to occur in your organization.

Tune in to hear when and why it is necessary to create a safe space for change, and learn how to create the four layers of a change bubble in your organization.

Pardon the crackling – he was calling all the way from Wednesday.

Listen to the show here (30 minutes):

Be sure to visit the radio show page to listen to past episodes and subscribe to the show.