Thursday 30 April 2009

A Fatal Flaw

If you want to make change happen, don't confuse symptoms with causes.

I have a deep underlying psychological flaw - I greatly enjoy an argument, especially when I can pick holes in the logic. This flaw is so bad that I even took a degree in Logic and Metaphysics (and no, this was not at the most boring university in the world) and spent much of my life working for a consulting company that is the world's leading practitioner of the application of rigorous logic to troubleshooting business problems.

Most of the time, I can get by without this flaw coming to the surface and becoming such an immense social disability that I drive friends away and have to grovel with abject apologies the following day…

Sometimes, however, something sets it off.

The most recent trigger was when I was browsing JP Rangaswami's excellent blog, Confused of Calcutta, where in one entry he references a site illustrating how we can all be seduced by cognitive biases. (Strongly related to what used to be referred to as 'Perceptual Set' back when I was teaching Psychology). Fundamentally, the site lists a litany of cognitive biases to which we are all prone.

This is, of course, useful information. In many ways, it is a Get Out of Jail free card for any argument, especially if one is losing. Knowing about these things, one can say: "The only reason you can hold that position is because you have a cognitive bias about...." - which can't be gainsaid, as the bias is supposedly unconscious.

In a similar vein, I have a huge amount of time for Scott Adams. His books contain an immense amount of common-sense, leavened by a caustic cyncism and humour. One of his books (The Joy of Work) also contains a checklist that mounts a terrific assault on the flawed logic often encountered in the trenches of business, entitled "You are wrong because…" - you can find a copy of the list here.

It is an interesting experiment to apply this logic to the standard shibboleths of change management ("You must secure the buy-in of stakeholders for the change to succeed," for example, or "You can only introduce enduring change by changing the culture").

If you do, what seems like common sense often turns out to be flawed. In fact, in many cases our logic about change confuses symptoms with causes - such as thinking that resistance to change is what we need to fix, instead of fixing the workflow, feedback and perceived consequences which are the causes of such resistance. Or thinking that if people say that they accept the need for change then their behaviour will change as a result - and then being surprised and frustrated when this does not happen.

Such flawed logic means that the standard approaches to change management not only appear to be faulty, but in many cases will actively damage the success of your change effort.

Change is an emotional thing - but it is pointless if the rationale is faulty. Let's think differently.

Let's think better.

- Mike

Friday 24 April 2009

The Law of Unintended Consequences

The standard ways of thinking about change may be creating the very problems they are being asked to address.

An awful lot of change effort, time and money is typically spent engaging with, educating and securing the buy-in of people to the changes we need to make.

By seeking their buy-in, then, by implication, we are asking them to be responsible for the change's success. (Or, as the more sceptical might suggest, making them responsible for its failure). No wonder people resist buying in.

Our efforts to create buy-in are actually creating resistance. Logical resistance.

And, if they don't buy-in, what do we do then? Buy-in assumes choice. If people choose not to buy-in, do we scrap the initiative? Or do we press on and force them to do what we want regardless? In which case, did they really have a choice to begin with?

The rational response to to being presented with such a false choice is apathy and cynicism.

Resistance, apathy and cynicism. Ask any change professional and they will tell you that these will kill a change deader than roadkill. Yet our very efforts to overcome them are, in large part, responsible for creating them.

The standard answers no longer apply. To make change work, we need to do something different.

And that is why I do what I do.

Mike

(Photo credit: Jens Nicolay)

Saturday 18 April 2009

HR are often change victims, rather than champions

HR people are often asked to lead change, but lack the traction - and the tools - to do so. In consequence, they often end up victims of the change process themselves.

Just had a fascinating conversation with a prospective client who was asking my opinion about managing 'cross-cultural' issues and the role of HR in dealing with them. I had thought my answer would be too provocative for her, but strangely enough we had a meeting of minds.

The company provides a range of customer services through an international service chain. They have had tremendous problems ensuring that the customer gets the same high standard of experience regardless of the location providing the service. In fact, when customers complain about the experience, the primary cause of the complaint is less to do with poor service as it is to do with inconsistent service.

The task of fixing this has been given to a team led by Human Resources, and they have been working on it for more than six months - running education sessions, doing a lot of employee communications and ensuring that there is alignment of pay and performance systems against customer service criteria in each location.

All worthy stuff. What difference has it made? As far as the volume and nature of customer complaints are concerned - absolutely none.

When I heard the problem and their solution, I was not at all surprised at the result. In just about every case that I have seen where HR has been given responsibility for dealing with cross-cultural issues, it has been a signal failure, for three reasons.

First, as soon as we begin to label or discuss issues as "cross-cultural" we are moving away from the real issue, which is: what performance (behaviour / language) do we want to see, and what do we have in place in the business to ensure that we get it?

Almost always, the answer to this question lies in treating it as an operational issue, not an HR issue. If we need people to perform, we need to set standards for performance (this has to be an operational issue) and create performance environments (workflow, priorities, skills, triggers, short and long-term consequence systems, feedback) that make these standards possible. Again, almost all of these need to be set and managed at operational level, consistently.

Second, HR in many organisations lacks operational credibility. They are heard to speak a different language (Human Capital Management, anyone?) and often are seen as detached from the business. So their ability to influence real behaviour on the ground is very limited, especially when compared with the influence of operational line management.

Third, HR don't usually feel the pain. Their performance measurement and rewards tend not to suffer when cross-cultural issues affect business performance. Their priorities, attention and sense of urgency tend not to be same as those directly in the business. So while HR people often suffer stress and frustration, it is more often because they have been asked to fix something outside their control than feeling the operational pain directly.

This is not to say that HR cannot add huge value to any cross-cultural activity - facilitating the introduction of common ways of working, creating infrastructure for performance measurement, ensuring alignment of standards, and helping handle the fall out when things go wrong are all examples of what they can do. But to have them lead the resolution of cross-cultural issues is, in my experience, an invitation into a World of Pain -for them and for the company

So what are we do? First thing is to enable the managers who feel the operational pain to fix the problems. We do so by helping them work out where things can be changed to make things better; we show them what needs to change for this to work; we guide them to understand how to implement this change, and we support them to put the change in and make it stick.

And we do so with the support of HR - but we don't ask them to lead what they can't change...

Mike