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?

1.  Change Knowledge

Change agents are the people in their organizations who understand how change works – or at least how it is supposed to work.  Your own change knowledge helps you know what to expect and understand what is really happening.  When the initiative is stuck in a rut, your knowledge helps you generate ideas for what to do next.

2.  Clarity

A lot is said about the importance of a clear vision.  In addition to making sure leadership has a vision and that it is clear, change agents also assess current reality and identify the barriers that stand in the way of achieving the vision.

3.  Your Role

When used correctly, your role as change agent can be a powerful tool.  As trusted advisor, you help leaders fill in the gaps to ensure that change happens.  It is necessary to strike a balance of ownership of the initiative and to manage relationships.

4.  Power

People who have power are able to take action, make decisions that affect other people, model behavior and open minds.  Since change agents don’t have direct authority, they need to build up indirect authority to influence others.

5.  Leadership Support

Also, since you don’t have direct authority as a change agent, you need to gain a partner who does have it.  When you have leadership support, you need to make sure it manifests as behaviors and activities that drive the change forward.  If you don’t have support, you will eventually need to get it.

6.  Conversations

The one-on-one conversations you have as a change agent will help get beyond fear and develop mutual understanding.  Conversations are a means of providing feedback and preserving relationships.  The most important conversations are the ones you don’t really want to have.

7.  Meetings

Most meetings are seen as drudgery, or necessary evils; however, when effective they can be a key means of moving a change initiative forward.  Whether you are meeting with a project team, a leadership team, or a work group or a steering committee, your job as the change agent is to make sure people are collaborating for results.

8.  Accountability

Without having direct authority, you will most likely not hold people accountable yourself.  As a change agent, your responsibility is to make sure a system of accountability is in place.

9.  Incentives

Although incentives can be tricky because they frequently have unintended consequences, effective change agents find ways to motivate desired behaviors or results.  The best motivation techniques are not external rewards but psychology-based nudges in the right direction.

10.  Communication

Some say the first law of change is communicate, communicate, communicate.  To be more specific, the key activity for change agents is to get the appropriate message to the right person and to have them do something about it.

Whether you are executing strategy, implementing technology, designing process improvements, or transforming culture, your role as change agent is fraught with challenges.  Use these ten tools to help navigate them successfully.

For a more in-depth look at the 10 Essential Tools, check out:

• The 10 Essential Tools webinar
• The INflux Change Agent Network

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.

One of the first to study organization development, Kurt Lewin described the change process as Unfreeze > Change > Freeze.  It is commonly misinterpreted that the thing you are freezing is the change itself.  That is, you permanently affix the initiative you are implementing.  In fact, it means that the state you freeze is the true desired future that continues as “normal” after the initiative ends.

To see this myth in action, ask yourself this:  How does what you really want to happen differ from how you are accomplishing it?

Myth #2:  Change must start at the top.

No one will deny the importance of leadership driving and reinforcing the change process throughout the organization.

But does change need to start with leadership?  The answer is a definite “no.”  There are numerous examples of large-scale organizational changes that started as either grass-roots efforts or small trials without much leadership involvement.  Plus, ideas for change initiatives frequently come from people lower on the org chart who are more directly affected by the problems and challenges of the organization.

When we believe that change only starts at the top, any lack of leadership commitment can make us feel like our efforts are fruitless.  The truth is that change can start with you.  Your job is to help the leaders to drive and reinforce the change process.

Myth #3:  People behave rationally.

You knew this was a myth already, didn’t you?  And yet as change agents we frequently assume that we can predict what the reaction will be to our initiative based on what we think a rational human being would do.

We believe that if we provide a monetary incentive to accomplish something, it will motivate people to do it.  We assume that if we list all the benefits of the initiative, people will get on board.  We think that if we put a group in a room together with a goal they will work as a team to get it done.

The good news is that although people do not always behave rationally, their irrational behavior is actually fairly predictable.  When you think through the impact of your initiative, consider whether your plan is based on the assumption that people will behave the way you want them to behave or that people will behave as they will actually behave.

If you feel like your change initiative is getting stuck, challenge these myths and look at change from a new perspective.

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.

]]> http://www.enclaria.com/2009/07/07/poached-frogs-and-the-capacity-for-change/feed/ 1 http://www.enclaria.com/2009/05/08/the-single-greatest-truth-about-organizational-change/ http://www.enclaria.com/2009/05/08/the-single-greatest-truth-about-organizational-change/#comments Sat, 09 May 2009 02:54:48 +0000 Heather Stagl http://www.enclaria.com/?p=1050 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?

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?