When change is a bad idea
April 28, 2010
One of the assumptions I typically hold true on this blog is that the change you are trying to implement is in fact something you should be doing — one that brings about improvement, helps people work better, and makes the organization more successful.
Occasionally it helps to be reminded that not all change is good. I recently watched the movie Up In The Air, whose context is an organizational change project that alters the way the company does business and in the process will completely change the lifestyle of George Clooney’s character. It turns out that despite significant efficiency improvement and cost savings, the project is just a bad idea.
How do you know when the change is a bad idea?
Someone in your organization has probably already figured it out. Listen closely to objections. There is always a valid reason for resistance. Many times concerns are personal and natural, and can be addressed without impact to the initiative. Other times, people follow a logical path to the conclusion that the change is not going to work, or will have negative side effects. Don’t brush off objections as resistance that you can ignore and keep pushing forward! Instead, seek to understand the objections, and ask yourself: What is the likelihood that the change will follow this path? What happens if it does? If there is a chance that the initiative is the wrong move, you can start small to test it out or otherwise mitigate risk before going full-bore. Plus, your initiative will be more robust, and you will have more buy-in from people whom you respect enough to understand and address their resistance.
When the project is already in process, there is a fine line between the symptoms of a bad idea and poor implementation. If you are seeing unintended and unexpected consequences occurring during the implementation, determine whether the consequences are an artifact of the change process (e.g. poor communication or lack of leadership support) or of the change itself (e.g. the new process didn’t save as much as you expected, or customers didn’t like the change as much as you thought they would). If there is a problem with the change process, then you can work to get it back on track. If the problem is the change itself, no amount of change management is going to solve the problem.
What might be true when resistors tell you the initiative will not work?
Ten Essential Tools for Change Agents
February 2, 2010
Change agents are individuals within organizations who influence change without having direct authority over people who are going through the change. The following are ten things that effective change agents use to influence change in their organizations. Read more
Three Myths About Organizational Change
January 5, 2010
Our beliefs about what change is and how it works can influence our willingness to take on the challenge appropriately. Change agents who believe these three myths might find their initiatives stuck in a rut.
Myth #1: The goal is change.
Perhaps we are victims of language. Organizational change practitioners commonly talk as though the end goal is change itself. It is common to say “implement change” as if the change itself is the goal. It’s not! Change is the process of bringing about the desired future state. Read more
Guest Blog Post: Poached Frogs and the Capacity for Change
July 7, 2009
By Robert Gold
If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.
So goes the often cited and vividly unfortunate metaphor of the poached frog, which is used so often in business settings that it has become a tired cliché. James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly has even devoted an entire series of blog posts devoted to the worthy cause of banishing its use, and the myth has been busted by scientists and journalists alike, notably in Issue 1 of Fast Company. I confess to having succumbed to the lure of using the poached frog story myself, but I have since foresworn using it, and encourage you to do the same.
The metaphor is appealing because it can be applied to support opposing arguments. ‘Don’t change too slowly,’ one conclusion tends to go, ‘because people won’t engage with gradual change before it’s too late.’ The opposite conclusion says, ‘Don’t try to change everything all at once, because people are simply unable to handle the shock.’ One (or even both!) of these arguments have been used at times by many of our consulting brethren; to support a recommended fast pace of change in a client organization, or to incite a response to a threat that has grown too gradually to notice. But there is no universal truth about the pace of change.
Despite the weakness of the metaphor, understanding and managing the pace of change is really important. Excess caution in driving change enable skeptics and resistors to simply ‘ride out’ the change program while saying, ‘this too shall pass.’ Excess appetite for change risks distracting the organization from its legitimate efforts to deliver on the current value proposition, and exceeding what I call the organization’s capacity for change.
I believe that each organization’s unique capacity for change changes from time to time like the weather. Separate from the organization’s capacity for change is its necessity for change, a variable which is driven by threat and opportunity in the organization’s environment. All too often, periods of low capacity and high necessity coincide to doom a previously healthy organization to failure.
The objective of successful strategic management is not to simply drive a specific change, but to increase the organization’s overall capacity for change, While change is absolutely essential for the long-term survival of every organization, attempting to drive a degree of change in excess of the current capacity will have devastating results. The ability to change is an asset; the nimble enterprise with reserve capacity has an advantage over less-prepared competitors. But successful strategic management also requires an explicit awareness of the necessity for change through an ongoing process of monitoring, discussion, and hypothesis testing to enable good decisions about when and how much change to ask of the organization.
Does your organization have the capacity to change that it needs? Is your leadership constantly aware of the necessity to change? What steps have been taken to make your organization more capable to change? Please respond below with your insights and comments.
Guest Blog Author: Robert Gold
Robert S. Gold brings over three decades of professional experience to his role as founder and thought leader of Tenacious Tortoise, LLC.
In twenty years of executive-level management consulting, Bob has advised and enabled hundreds of organizations in such disciplines as strategic planning, business performance improvement, and information technology management. Prior to Tenacious Tortoise, Bob was Vice President and Practice Leader for Strategic Information Technology Management with Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, working directly with Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, authors of the Balanced Scorecard discipline for strategic management.
Bob earned his MBA (with distinction) in Management Strategy and Organization Behavior at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
This post was originally published at the Tenacious Tortoise blog. Reprinted with permission.
The single greatest truth about organizational change
May 8, 2009
Last week, I posted the following question on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter:
What is the single greatest truth about organizational change?
My own response that I developed when I originally thought of the question, was:
Organizational change starts with one person who sees something that should be different, and takes action.
I received 46 responses from all three sources. Most of them can be accessed on LinkedIn here. The largest group of responses expressed that people don’t like change, or that people hate it. Several people said that change is constant. There were also a few cynics. I appreciate all the responses and value each of them as the summation of each person’s own experience with organizational change.
Here are some of my favorites that especially rang true for me:
Richard Rowan: “The key is to start the change from where you are, with what you have. Not what you wish you had.”
Michelle Hurteau: “Organizational change happens one person at a time.”
Mark Herbert: “Culture eats strategy!”
Robert Gold: “That it happens in spite of leadership, not because of it.”
Justin Carter: “Calculating its NPV is a bitch.”
When I received the last one, I laughed out loud. Having been in the position to try to justify projects with “intangible” benefits, I totally agree!
What do you think is the single greatest truth about organizational change?
The memorylessness of change
July 3, 2008
Yesterday, I was doing some preliminary thinking about creating an assessment to help clients determine where they are in their change process, and what options they have going forward. One thought I had was that the survey, or at least the analysis, might depend on where the client is on their change journey. And that’s when I remembered about memorylessness.
Every now and then my brain will dig up a factoid that I was taught back as an undergraduate in industrial engineering at Northwestern. It must have been in stochastic modeling class (a fancy way to describe systems that contain variability) in which we learned about the memoryless property of the exponential probability distribution describing the time between events.
Let’s say, for example, that there is a bus stop where the bus arrives on average once per hour (not on a fixed schedule). The memoryless property means that the probability that you will have to wait more than 15 minutes for the bus is the same regardless of how long you have already been waiting at the bus stop. In other words, how long you will be waiting for the next bus does not depend on when the last bus was there. There is no memory of it. I don’t recall the exact day I learned that, but I do remember being rather amazed. (For more, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorylessness.)
Probability and engineering aside, the concept of memorylessness fits well with the Change Starts Here theme, that you can’t go back and change what has already happened, you can only act in the present and plan for the future. So, that makes me lean toward a one-size-fits-all assessment, regardless of how far the client is into the change program.
Inquiry: In what ways might change be memoryless?
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