Wednesday 7 May 2008

Not drowning, but waving...

Successful change implementation requires that you reduce the perception of risk. The best way to do this is to change the work environment so that it makes the change easy.

If I asked you bet your mortgage on a sure thing at the Derby, you would probably be reluctant to do so. But (as many shareholders and customers of the British bank Northern Rock can testify) our mortgages aren't necessarily safe in our financial institutions, either. There are no certainties about the future.

Which is one reason why people worry about change. They can't be sure that it will work out as promised, and they can usually see many ways in which it won't.

So, if we want people to work differently (which is all, really, we mean by 'business change' most of the time), we need to understand where they see the risks to be. And this is where many traditional views of change fall down.

This is because most approaches to change look at things like 'overcoming resistance' and 'obtaining buy-in' - which is to say that they look at creating a positive upside for the individual to change. This is fine, as far as it goes, but does nothing to address the underlying cause of resistance - namely the individual's perception of risk.

It is like teaching someone on dry land to swim and telling them it's great and they will love it, but not letting them near the water to practice if they agree to not to worry about drowning.

Effective approaches to change, however, put much more emphasis on reducing the perception of risk. How? By changing the work environment so that people need to work differently to succeed - but also taking care that the new way of working is also the easiest. In other words, put them into the water gently, with support - even before they know how to swim properly, so that they realise that the water isn't as dangerous as they thought.

Less friendly, but in many cases even more effective, is to remove the choice altogether: make the change quickly and have them accommodate to the new way of working regardless of whether they have bought in or not - thus stopping their fear of the unknown from getting them in the way. But of course, pushing people into the water is only going to work if (a) the water is a comfortable temperature (b) people can swim and (c) they've changed into their swimming costume...

So next time you're thinking about change, worry less about the swimmer and worry more about warming up the swimming pool...

Mike