Fight the Right Battles

An incorrect assumption about the purpose of change management causes many change projects to fail. By thinking differently about change, however, we can take control of the process and significantly increase our chances of success.

One of the ways you know a technology is advancing is that it becomes easier to use. Windows is easier to use than MSDOS, the command language Microsoft originally offered on PCs which an ex-colleague once described as "...being as friendly as a cornered rat." Web browsing is more straightforward now than the days when the ‘internet’ was primarily a combination of bulletinboards and FTP. Most of us rarely have to worry about (or even lift up to find out) what is under our car’s bonnet anymore. This happens everywhere – as technology becomes more sophisticated, it becomes less obtrusive. The better it is, the less we have to think about it.

Bizarrely, however, the opposite appears to be happening in management practice. As management thinking and tools develop, it seems that they are becoming more obtrusive and less easy to use. In WW1, the United States moved an army of more than million men across the Atlantic in less than six months using common sense, some forms and a willingness to deliver. Nowadays, companies changing their CRM system take that long simply to ‘engage the stakeholders’. We have allowed management jargon and its evil stepchild, enterprise software, to get in the way of getting things done.

One reason why these things have become cumbersome, awkward and difficult to use is that they are solving the wrong problem. Let's take a look at the business of change, for example.

A tenet of orthodox thinking is that a primary purpose of management of change is to 'overcome resistance' and 'secure buy-in'.

On the face of it, this is a very seductive logic: "We are trying to introduce change. People are resisting change. We need to persuade these people to overcome this resistance if our change is to succeed."

The insidious nature of this logic is that it hangs together and appears very plausible.

But it is wrong, for a couple of reasons.

One is that by focusing on the business of 'change', we do, in fact, create resistance. If we make a big deal of a proposed change, we give would-be sceptics something to resist.

Another is that this logic leads us to believe that unless people buy-in to change, the change won't succeed. The effect of this assumption is give the wrong people an unnecessary ‘pocket veto’ by withholding their support.

Because we have allowed ‘change’ to become a concept in itself, people now focus on the business of change, rather than the change we need. Because we encounter (and inadvertently encourage) resistance, overcoming this resistance and securing buy-in is now seen as the number one aim of change management. Because we have given this idea legitimacy, we have now given people the right to stop, alter or delay our programme because they are unhappy about it. The result is that our projects go late, cost more and fail. Focusing on resistance to change becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Nor do the classic answers to these problems solve anything. The normal response to resistance is to train people in the new way of working, or to work on ways to engage them and to help them to understand "What's in it for me?"

These strategies assume that the reason why people resist is that they don't have enough information - so if we give them the right information their resistance will crumble. But if the cause of the resistance is not to do with their knowledge, then more information will not help, and may, in fact give them more reasons to resist.

What, then is the alternative?

If we take as our start point that our goal is to improve business performance by having people work differently, then the goal of change management ceases to be about overcoming resistance – and becomes instead about putting in place those things that enable, encourage and support working differently. If we think this way then rather than making other people responsible for change that we need, we can take responsibility for making the change happen ourselves. How? Like this.

• Instead of just trying to persuade others to change, let us make the new ways of working easier than the old.
• Instead of imposing training on people, let us require new things of our people so that they recognise that they need new skills and so seek out and want to use the training on offer.
• Instead of asking people to work differently, but managing them in the old way, let us pay attention to new ways of working in the same way we pay attention to existing aspects of performance.
• Instead of trying to change everything (or, for example, our culture) let us change only those things that make a big difference to the end result, so we all understand the focus and can prioritise.
• Instead of hoping that people remember to do new things at the right time, let us give them a clear trigger that tells them: “...and now do something different.”
• Instead of trying to sell the change, let’s have people buy it.

In short, if we want people to race through the water, then let us by all means train them to swim and tell what we want – but let us also take responsibility for cleaning up the water, making it warm, giving them a swimming costume, giving them starting blocks, firing a starter’s pistol and coaching them on their technique rather than complaining about their speed. In other words, make swimming faster the easiest and most natural way to get through the water.

And, by thinking this way, we don't need the panoply of jargon and nonsense that attends upon 'standard' change management - we can just concentrate on working differently. And isn't that what we set out to do?

Mike