Please check out my July 2011 blog post on TrainingIndustry.com.
It is about using techniques from systems thinking to balance short-term responses to immediate problems considerations of potential side-effects over the longer-term. It gives an example of a simple system diagram that helps people to move away from a static dichotomous debate to a dynamic discussion of options.
Comments are welcome either here or on TrainingIndustry.com
Please check out my June 2011 blog post on TrainingIndustry.com.
It talks about the importance of taking a step back for a more holistic, systemic view of leading change. It explains how more collaboration can lead to more commitment to implementing an organizational change.
http://bit.ly/collaboration-commitment
Comments are welcome either here or on TrainingIndustry.com
Please check out my May 2011 blog on TrainingIndustry.com
It is about the two major factors affecting organizational change: manager’s decisions and actions and employees’ attitudes.
Comments are welcome here or there.
The previous two blog posts described the four categories that people can fall into, at any given time, with respect to their attitude toward an organizational change. They went into a bit more detail on two of these categories: Advocates and Apathetics. The goal for change leadership is to engage people: that is, to move them from being apathetic about an initiative to having the enthusiasm to advocate it. This transformation in attitude cannot happen overnight.
The first step is information. Employees need to know about the change program, the reasons behind it and the goals it is expected to achieve. This could happen through formal, top-down methods such as organization-wide announcements or through informal discussions with Advocates. (In a later blog, I discuss the relative effectiveness of these methods.) People who get this information can just ignore it—after all the likelihood of a change succeeding is fairly low—or they could begin to think about it. Just considering and weighing the change and how it might work turns former Apathetics into a third category of people, Incubators.
Both Everett Rogers and William Bridges discuss what happens during the incubation process. Rogers emphasizes the rational aspects and Bridges stresses the psychological. Rogers says that people use information make a to make a tentative adoption decision, which is followed by informal testing before accepting or rejecting the change. Bridges has found that people need to go through three psychological phases before they fully commit to a change: letting go, neutral zone, and new beginning. People need time to go through these phases before they can really accept a new change. Whether people are rationally evaluating a change or internally processing the consequences—or both—it takes time. In other words, before fully getting on board, people spend time as Incubators of the change.
It is important to remember that neither the decision steps described by Rogers, nor the psychological process described by Bridges happens in a vacuum. Change leadership affects every step by showing confidence in the change. Good leaderships requires engaging employees in the change by making the case for it clear, making sure that the change is properly budgeted and needed infrastructure is in place, and rewarding behaviors consistent with the change.
*See: Everett Rogers Diffusion of Innovations, William Bridges Managing Transitions.
The Tipping Point model draws on four attitudes toward a change that employees may have at any particular time. These are not permanent or personality characteristics, they are attitudes that can be influenced by the change itself and by management’s implementation of it. To understand how to address employees’ expectations or their angst, it is useful to group people according to their attitude toward the change.
We can think of employees as falling into four categories, based on these four attitudes. Apathetics feel disconnected from the change initiative. Incubators are thinking whether the initiative will work in their organization’s culture or how it might affect them personally. Advocates understand how the change will work or have experience with it and are infected with enthusiasm for it. Resisters have concerns about the initiative, which could be legitimate, constructive or stem from fear or cynicism.
At the beginning of a change, few employees understand the problem it addresses or why it is necessary for the organization’s future. They understand their own jobs and the skills that they bring, but they may not see the bigger picture driving the company to make a change. It is not surprising that initially most employees can be categorized an Apathetics.
Unfortunately indifference persists, and the reasons are fairly clear. Change initiatives often start out with a big announcement of pending improvements. However, to employees who have seen promised improvements turn into unsupported slogans these announcements can feel like “déjà vu all over again.” In fact, research shows that the failure rate for organizational change initiatives is between 50% and 85%*. So the logical position for an employee to take is “wait and see.” It is the role of good change leadership to ensure that employees understand that the change must and will succeed. This means making the case for change clear and involving and rewarding employees at all levels.
*There is more on the success rate of organizational changes in Creating Contagious Commitment.
It is not unusual for management to be advised that they need to get wide “buy in” for an organizational change before beginning its implementation. Before it is put into operation, the change is really just an idea—an idea about getting work done better or faster or cheaper. Getting people behind an idea can really be a challenge. Employees need a more than clear understanding of the change and how it will affect them. They need to see the change in action.
This is not to say no advance buy in is needed. There are always some early adopters*. These should include leaders who by virtue of their position fully understand the challenge or threat that the initiative is designed to address, and they should be able to clearly explain how the initiative will address the challenge at hand. In addition there are always visionaries. In addition, no matter what their position, there are employees who can just see how a new program will work and are eager to get on board.
Effective change implementation leverages those early adopters and turns them into Advocates for the change. It takes attention and leadership. Create pilots or test programs to make sure they get real experience with the change. Provide the tools that they need to properly implement it. Notice and reward them for using the tools and taking risks to make the change initiative better. With this experience, they can explain and advocate the change to their peers. This peer-to-peer advocacy is a powerful way to spread enthusiasm for an organizational change.
*Early Adopters is a term coined by Everett Rogers in his seminal work Diffusion of Innovations
An eBook version of Creating Contagious Commitment is now available. Please click here to learn how to purchase your copy.
It is very easy to have good intentions, and even easier to get advice from someone who has good intentions. What is hard is to recognize the landmines on the path to successful change. Creating Contagious Commitment helps identify and think about such obstacles before we encounter them, making the path to change more thoughtful and ultimately more successful.
Dan Ariely, Ph.D., James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, author Predictably Irrational
“The only sure way to avoid making mistakes is to have no new ideas.”
— Albert Einstein
It is often said that experience is the best teacher, but experience also charges a high tuition and can take a long time. The normal learning cycle from a change effort – from the beginning of planning to full implementation – can take years. Any sort of after action review or lessons learned can help provide knowledge to apply the next time around. But waiting for the next time is just not good enough. We have to learn faster.
Using a simulation adds a low risk, cost effective engine of learning. It is a safe environment to make mistakes and learn from them. A simulated environment leads to experimentation and discussion that broadens understanding. It also compresses time – we can see the effect of the interactions play out in a few seconds rather than several years or months. It leverages the knowledge of the team, it allows participants to see and evaluate their results right away. It helps them learn concepts that can be applied to current change initiatives.
Taking part in a Tipping Point workshop demonstrates that the simulation works to focus dialogue and create a shared idea of change implementation. Objective field research backs this claim. (See Michelle Shields in the 2001 proceedings of the System Dynamics Society.) She found that the Tipping Point simulation improved both participants understanding of the complexity of change management, and their sense that their own ideas were better reflected in their team’s final strategy. The opportunity to experiment and discuss lead to better understanding and collaboration.
*These ideas are explored in more detail in Creating Contagious Commitment.
An intellectual understanding of the dynamics of change is important. Even more powerful is experiencing them. The Tipping Point model is captured in a powerful simulation. When used in a workshop it helps participants experience the dynamics and interacting factors that affect the spread of organizational change. This is experience that they can bring back to their own change implementation. As with all management simulators, the value is not in the predictive power, but in its ability to catalyze reflective conversation and foster understanding. Too often people responsible for implementing an organizational change rely on familiar techniques – such as poster campaigns and mass training – despite experiencing limited success with these methods in the past. Getting these people together to play with the simulation in a friendly workshop atmosphere creates an experiential and experimental learning environment. It helps teams improve their implementation strategies, and it is also fun.
It is important to be clear about what to expect from the Tipping Point simulator. It is not an answer machine. It is a powerful tool that can focus dialogue on change implementation. Using the simulation in a friendly, competitive environment helps teams see each others’ assumptions about change. As people play the game they get new ideas, both from their teammates and from the simulation. Through experimentation and discussion, they see interactions that they had not considered before.
Through the steps within the Tipping Point workshop of cyclically seeing some background theory and using a simulator and then repeating with more information– teams learn together. They get a richer picture – a richer mental model – of the task at hand. Even more important, as a team, they get a shared mental model. Armed with this richer, shared mental model, teams increase their likelihood of successfully implementing an important organizational change.
To thrive, an organization must be capable of creating value and competitive advantage from the political, economic, social, and technological (PEST) constraints that act on it. But competitive advantage does not come from change for its own sake but change that makes organizations more adaptable, nimbler, better able to leverage the PEST and even influence it to their own gain. They will be more responsive to customer needs; their products will have strong market positions; and they will be better able to attract the best employees. Without the ability to adapt to the PEST, companies cannot compete. So a business must be able to broaden its goals and improve the way it thinks about and does work—and do so rapidly. Expanding a business’s goals demands organizational changes. Some examples of organizational change efforts could include implementing a quality initiative, moving an entire firm to a different computer network, changing the compensation structure to reflect new corporate needs, leveraging a customer relationship system to understand customer and market needs better, putting a supply chain management system into practice, increasing workforce diversity, making use of computer-based training, or creating a usable knowledge management system.
Despite the need for change, organizations experience inertia, questioning of or resistance to important change initiatives by affected employees that can become deliberate undermining. The best organizational change is useless unless it is adopted and becomes part of how people do their work. Unless it is put into operation and used, the business sees no gain from it. To face the challenges of the PEST we need a fresh, new way to think and talk about organizational change; we need a new way to understand how change happens in organizations. The Tipping Point model of change focuses on the area of greatest leverage—the people side of change. It describes how leadership can help create an environment that encourages people in the organization to adopt a change. It looks at the function of those who advocate and those who resist change, and how each can make a difference to employees feeling committed to seeing it through to success or just waiting it out.
|
Defining Organizational Change |
|
What: A planned effort to increase capacity and improve effectiveness. Why: Respond to or leverage PEST forces. How: Organizations change when people in them change. |
*This post is adapted from the first edition of Creating Contagious Commitment
