Bloomstorm Blog

Put the Cart Before the Horse

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:24:00 +0000

It is a crying shame that most organisations put responsibility for change squarely on the individual. “It is up to you,” they seem to say, “to change yourself, to be positive about change, to work in new ways. To help you, here is some training.” As if the reason why people don’t change is lack of skills...

And, because the business abdicates responsibility for change to the individual, the organisation doesn’t have to do anything different. It carries on managing their people in the same old ways and then acts surprised when things stay the same, blaming their people’s “resistance to change...”

This kind of thinking is commonplace because it is easy. It is also lazy and ill-informed, for it is placing the cart squarely before the horse.

If a business wants to introduce change, it must have a good reason to do so: either what it is currently doing isn’t working well enough, or it wants to do something differently. Either way, the business is seeking a new outcome. If it wants a new outcome, it needs to manage the business differently: set new goals, adjust processes, tweak measurement and reporting, discuss new topics at meetings, establish new feedback processes and revise its reward processes. It is this new context that demands new skills and hence determines the training that is needed.

So next time your business is embarking on change, before specifying training, ask yourself: what have we done to ensure that we are managing the business to achieve our new goals? To make working in new ways easier and the old ways harder? To change things so that we pay attention to new ways of working?

If we can ask and answer these questions well, then our people will want the training we offer, they will know how they will use their new skills - and success, rather than being a struggle, will be inevitable.

- Mike

Photocredit: Javier Gonzalez / www.sxc.hu

Overcoming the HR Barrier

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:55:00 +0000

Most of the time* when I have implemented change in an organisation, success has been either despite HR or through ignoring HR. Where HR has been involved, the result has usually been a signal failure: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing**.

Several reasons suggest themselves for thinking that having HR in a lead role in major change is detrimental.

Out of sight, out of mind Having HR involved makes it easy for the rest of the business to abdicate responsibility for the 'people' side of change to HR and not worry about it themselves. Yet as we all know, the people side of change is most of the battle and all of the war. Change either happens in the operational side of the business or it doesn't happen in any meaningful way at all. It is neither within HR's responsibility or capability to take charge of implementing behavioural change at the front lines.
Uncommon language The land of HR is commonly one where a foreign language is spoken: a place that speaks of 'human resources' rather than people; that speaks of 'organograms' rather than stating who is in charge of what; that speaks of 'learning outcomes' rather than doing things differently. Such language gets in the way, and after a while, compliance with language becomes an end in itself. If the business needs a translator to understand what HR is talking about, then HR's ability to influence the business meaningfully will be minimal.
Own the problem, own the solution No customer ever bought a company's product because they have a great HR department. If a business truly desires fundamental change, then this thinking must be led by those parts of the business that engage and service the customer.

The role of HR (and Finance, Legal or Procurement for that matter) is to follow this lead, not to lead it themselves; to do everything in their power to enable the customer experience, as required by the customer. In the final analysis, HR does not have the power to make front-line change happen - nor should it.

So what then is the role of HR in change implementation? For what it's worth, I would make leading the classic HR tasks (training requirements, communication, job specification changes) the responsibility of what might be termed customer 'front-line' departments, with HR providing delivery resources and advice on implementation.

Each of the reasons I offer above is structural: each is endemic to the role of HR as it commonly functions in many organisations. This is not to cast aspersions on many of the people who do great work within HR; indeed, some of the most effective change agents - no, some of the best people - I know, work in HR. The problem is that their ability to succeed is constrained, and in many cases doomed, by the structural and systematic problems inherent in the current HR models adopted by many companies that I have observed in both Europe and the US.

Are HR tasks necessary for change to succeed? Absolutely. Should HR specify those tasks, or determine the goals of these tasks, or be responsible for the outcomes that result? Absolutely not - because they can't.

Mike

*Most of the time, but not always - some initiatives succeeded because some terrific HR people did their damnedest to deliver despite, rather than because of, the operation of the HR function.

** I couldn't resist the Macbeth quote - not only is it apposite, but it's worth remembering that tragedy of Macbeth was caused by the wrong people taking actions that carried within them the seeds of their own destruction...

(A version of this blog entry was originally posted on the LinkedIn BPM group discussion area).

Photo credit: Scott Liddell / www.sxc.hu

There's No Need to Drown

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:09:00 +0000

My chum Steve Towers drew the attention of the Business Process Management Group on LinkedIn (of which I am a member) to version of the wonderful 'Shift Happens' presentation. If you didn't already know, the World is changing faster than we can imagine...

There is no longer (if ever there was) any way for us to control the flow of information that engulfs us every day.

If we accept this, however, as a good thing, then we will see that we don't have to drown. In the flow we can also find more valuable, worthwhile and downright inspiring information as well - all we need are the strategies to find and use it...

Mike

Don't Let The Size Of The Mountain Scare You

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:12:00 +0000

When we want to implement large-scale change, we need to ensure that the scale of the journey doesn't overwhelm us before we begin.

I was talking recently to some people in a manufacturing company who, quite rightly, want to reshape their business around the customer experience. This is something I happen to know quite a lot about, so we had some excellent discussions as we worked up a plan to deliver the outcomes they wanted in the timeframes that they needed.

And then they chose not to proceed - in part, it seems, because it was too much, too fast. Instead they came back and asked if we might omit some of the activities and maybe take a little longer.

They didn't see that doing that would be worse than doing nothing - leaving them (if we might stretch our analogy) stranded halfway up the mountain having taken a long time to get there.

The scale of the plan reflected the scale of the challenge, and the timeframe was the one which they had understood and agreed was essential. But still they did not want to proceed.

They, like most people who recognise the need for genuine change, had not been able to work out how to do it but when we showed them how, all they could see was the scale of the climb - they had lost sight of the summit.

So we've gone back and confirmed that yes, they really do need to do this thing, and yes, they need to do it quickly - and, yes, everything in the plan is needed to deliver the outcomes they are seeking. So while they are still somewhat apprehensive, they have started to take the first steps.

I sometimes wonder if more of us don't suffer from this problem - shying away from the task because it all seems too big, too quick. But the more I work in the business of change, the more I realise that success comes from a willingness to think bigger, bolder and faster.

After all, can you think of any human achievement of note - any building, enterprise or social movement - which does not have, at its heart, someone's desire to achieve something great and the willingness to turn this desire into reality?

We can be too timid, too self-editing. Think big, and then worry only about getting to the summit, not the scale of the climb.

-Mike

(Photo Credit: Malta333 / sxc.hu)

Welcome to the Blender

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 01:35:00 +0000

We are facing huge change - but we've faced huge change before. And even if the economy is slowing, it's still enormous and full of opportunity. The future belongs to those of us who accept that things will be different and refuse to play the recession game.

We are in the midst of a set of unprecedented changes that are reshaping our world and which will leave us living in different ways. Things like the global credit crunch, global warming, the spike in worldwide food prices, the spike in oil prices, the spike in commodity prices, war and instability in the Caucasus, technology as a source of social leverage, the dismantling of privacy by Governments and technology, the attrition (in the West) of traditional civil liberties, the growth of China, India, Brazil and Russia, the accelerating erosion of the social contract, the rise of liability litigation and consequent growth of cotton-wool living, the cult of celebrity, increasingly voracious 24-hour multiplatform media, the democratic deficit, nanotechnology, genetic technology, the Aids pandemic, the emasculation of antibiotics, the loss of the idea of public service, famine in Africa - any one of these issues will change how we live.

In combination, well...let's just admit that the law of unintended consequences will apply exponentially. Everything is in the blender, and we don't know what will come out. So that makes many people unhappy and uncomfortable.

But it was ever thus. Sixty years ago, we were climbing out of the abyss of the second world war, the cold war had turned frosty with the Berlin blockade and airlift and (here in the UK) we were hosting the Olympics, and launching the National Health Service. Change.

Forty years ago, we had students rioting in the streets around the World, the Vietnam War, the assassination of Bobby Kenned y, drug culture, the start of civil rights marches in Northern Ireland, the Nigeria - Biafra civil war, the birth pangs of modern feminism and the permissive society.

Twenty-five years ago, we still had the cold war and tactical nukes in Europe, we had boom-bust economics (but we were used to it), we had constant inflation, we had war in the Middle East, we had personal computers and computers in businesses, a few people had mobile phones, we started getting junk mail, we had Japanese industrial quality, we were recovering from race riots in the streets, we had Princess Diana, CNN was still new, we had continued social scandals, we had microprocessor technology, we had drug trials and a new 'cure for cancer' every other week, we had STDs and HIV, we were still aware of the thalidomide scandal and no-one I knew would stand for public office and we didn't trust anyone who did (Jeffrey Archer, Jonathan Aitken, Neil Hamilton, anyone?)

The point is this: at any time in history from the fourteenth century onwards, the nature of human society has always been unstable. The macro factors in our lives - environmental factors, politics, society and technology - have all changed our lives in a complex minuet that carries on continuously and will continue to do so.

We have adapted - and people have thrived. In absolute terms, I will contend that more people are better off, have more opportunities, and live longer now than in any time in history (and yes, I know that there are many millions of people still living Hobbesian lives and that none of us should stop striving to help them, but my point still stands).

We should not be surprised by this: the defining characteristic of Homo Sapiens is our ability to adapt and shape our environment to our purposes - to think about our situation and then to take steps to bring it under our control. And every change offers a new opportunity to do so.

And when billions of people are faced with new circumstances, that's billions of people looking for and taking opportunities to bring their lives under more control. Some will fail - but many more will succeed.

So let's accept that we are all in the blender and that we all have to live with change. There is no point, therefore, in getting unhappy about it. The trick, instead, is to work out how best to live with it, or better, take advantage of it.

As a friend of mine pointed out to me the other day while we were talking about the economy, "Recession? That's just a six months of negative growth. The economy has stopped growing for a while, that's all. It's still going, and it's still huge and it's still full of opportunity."

If you think of the economy as an elephant - then my business, your business or any else's business is just flea on that elephant. Does it matter to the flea if the elephant is a bit fatter or a bit thinner? Not really. The flea can still thrive.

The good folks at BNI have got the idea. That's their badge at the top. An excellent philosophy and one that all of us should adopt.

Mike

Change We Can All Embrace

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 08:16:00 +0000

In reality, we enjoy and embrace change all the time - so let's not get hung up on it. Let's hit the beach instead.

It's funny. So much of the literature on business change is predicated on the notion that people resist change. Yet in our lives we invoke it, create it, seek it all the time.

Take the notion of a holiday (or what my American chums would call a vacation). We uproot ourselves from our normal, everyday, comfortable existence to go on often uncomfortable and frustrating journeys to places where we have no frame of reference, eat things we would never consider at home and meet people with whom we have little or nothing in common, save that we find ourselves in the same place at the same time.

Why? Because it is fun. It is enjoyable. It opens us up to new experiences. And sometimes it is life-changing.

Do we resist this change? Do we need a stakeholder engagement plan? Do we need a force-field analysis? Do we need a communications plan?

Do we heck. We just need to get out there and do it - and when we do, we have a great time.

I'm just off to implement just such a change for a couple of weeks with my major stakeholders - my kids and my wife.

I'll be back online in mid-August. Until then - play differently.

Mike

Photocredit: Mike Bird / http://psc.photoshelter.com/user/mikebird

The Need For Speed

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 15:54:00 +0000

Cost Removal is one of the hardest kinds of change initiative. Yet some of the new thinking on change may go some way to helping companies transition to lower-cost business faster, with less pain than before.

As the economic crunch bites, so does the need for companies to cut costs. Cost removal is one of the toughest kinds of change initiative. For one thing, when you are downsizing, successful implementation can't rely on positive engagement and buy-in (although they help). For another, implementing a change that you did not choose and do not want is the very definition of a forced change. And as we saw in the recent Bloomstorm change survey, the defining characteristic of most forced change projects is that they fail.

But there is light at the end of this tunnel. Unlike in previous economic downturns, thinking and practice in change has evolved. Many of us are better equipped to handle cost removal better than we have been before.

And of the many lessons we have learned, one of the most important is the need for speed. This applies to systems, to reorganisations, to workflow redesign - and to cost. In almost every case, it is better to implement something quickly and adjust it, than delay in the vain pursuit of perfection.

So as we think about the changes we need to make to remove costs from our business, we need to think hard about what we can do to make things happen straightaway - in the next hours, not the next months. You can do more faster than you think.

Mike

(Photocredit: Flávio Takemoto / sxc.hu)

A Lack of Surprise

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 15:32:00 +0000

If people believe that existing approaches to business change have little chance of success, then maybe we should do it differently. Luckily, that is increasingly possible...

As you might imagine, I have had quite a few conversations with people over the past few days about the results of our recent survey on factors governing change. The most striking thing about these discussions is the lack of surprise at the result; in particular the first result of the survey: in the experience of more than half of those surveyed, 25% or fewer change projects have succeeded - and, for more than 80% of those surveyed, no more than 50% of projects succeeded.

In other words, most people think that most change projects fail, and four of five people rate a change project's chance of success as no more than the 50/50.

On these numbers, why would anyone embark on a change initiative? Someone wanting to lose a lot of money, obviously. And lose it they do. Billions are spent on change programmes around the World every year, and on this estimate, they'd be no worse off putting the same money on the black numbers at a roulette table...

But as my friend Steve White has always pointed out to me: "If what you are doing isn't working, try something else instead - for if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got." (He's a very smart boy - see his article here for the sanest description of ITIL I've ever seen).

But the problem for most of people is that there is no alternative. Sure there are change methods and practices: ADKAR, Prosci, Kotter and many others that people will sell you: more than 90% of members of the UK's Management Consultancies Association, for example, profess expertise in change management.

So what happens when we next need to implement a change initiative? We continue with the routine, don't we? Formal project management, communication plans, stakeholder maps, workshops to secure 'buy-in', sponsor workshops, kick-offs, early training as part of the 'hearts and minds' engagement and so forth.

Knowing in our hearts, as our survey respondents know, that most of our efforts are doomed to failure, but hoping, this time, it will be different...

The problem is analogous to the days when the formal requirements-led 'waterfall' approach was the only method available to defining and developing new IT systems. People tried to put some structure to it: SSADM, Jackson structured programming, OOP and so forth - but no matter what anyone did, most software projects ran late, over budget and compromised on functionality. But still we carried on, because no-one could think of an alternative. Gradually, however, a few mavericks started using alternatives: SCRUM, eXtreme Programming (XP), hothousing, and the range of techniques that now come under the umbrella term 'Agile', which an increasing number of people are using.

These new ways became possible because the pioneers reframed the fundamental question of software development from "How do we organise ourselves to deliver software to meet a set of requirements?" to "How do we best quickly produce code people can use, so that we can get feedback and iterate fast to get it closer to what our customers want?"

We need to do the same thing with Change: we need to reframe the basic question from "How we overcome resistance to change?" to "How do we quickly make it easy for people to work in the new ways we need?" Phrased this way, the business of change is not about resistance or engagement, nor about overcoming barriers; it's about rapidly adjusting the work environment so that the new way of working is the easiest, has the least ambiguity, is rewarded, is noticed, and is understood.

And that is a very different game. Of course, I'm biased: it's the game we play at Bloomstorm, and it's one that works.

It's also a lot more fun to do.

Mike

(Photo Credit Michal Zacharzewski, SXC)

The Change Time Machine

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:33:00 +0000

If we concentrate more on working differently and less on thinking about "the change" then we reduce the prospect of resistance and make the chances of success significantly easier.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - one of the biggest barriers to business change is the term 'change' itself. I have been struck by this as I do some work for a very successful web services company. Here, the work environment is geared to giving people freedom to deliver in whatever ways they think works best and significant amounts of change are happening in this company all the time. But because change is the stuff of work - it is part of what they do round here - it's not a big deal. They don't get hung up on the term. So stuff gets done faster, in practical terms, than in many other places.

That's not to say that things are perfect - every now and then some structure is needed (which is why I'm here) simply to ease the friction and make sure that people can work together more effectively. But the fascinating game as far as I am concerned is that I'm giving them some ideas and then working with them to help them understand how these ideas work best in their environment. It's challenging work - but great fun.

And one of the best things we are working on is using structure by stealth - to use these new ideas by asking relevant questions at the right times - but not to tell anyone that they are using a method or a tool. In this way, the people they work with just focus on the question, not on the method, and the process simply works.

This is why I despair sometimes of so many of the management fads to which companies succumb periodically - six sigma, lean, BPR, TQM, ERP and the like - because before you can get any work done, you have to sell people on the method and the language and the concepts and before long you have a six-month rollout programme to give people a 'positive orientation' to the process of change before you start to see anything improve.

The most successful programmes that I have seen begin instead by getting some people to do something different - something real that makes a visible difference. When others ask "how did you do that?" - then you're into the real change game...

It's like putting 'standard' change in a time machine and running it backwards - make the change happen, then let people know about it.

Mike

(Photo credit: Rodolfo Clix / www.sxc.hu)

Fight the Right Battles

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Sun, 31 May 2009 09:29:00 +0000

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

Working, Not Flagging

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Mon, 18 May 2009 17:26:00 +0000

The new internationalism has been made possible by work environments that make it easy.

I, an Irishman living in England, spent Tuesday and Wednesday sharing a platform with (amongst others) a woman who works for a French company describing her work in Belgium, an Italian describing his (excellent) work for his Swiss-owned cable company, someone whom I think was Croatian describing his work for a Norwegian mobile operator, an Egyptian describing his work in a telco in Saudi Arabia, and an Englishman working in Germany doing projects in Greece. We were speaking at a conference organised in the Czech Republic by an amazingly efficient producer who is half-Finnish and half-German and based in Estonia.

This growing comfort with international working is, I think, one of the most profound changes in business that I have witnessed over the past 10-15 years. Part of the change has been the EU's role in creating what it originally set out to be - a 'common market' - by enforcing a relaxation of international controls between its (seemingly ever-increasing) numbers. And part of the change has been the increasing willingness of people of all ages - but young people in particular - to uproot themselves and go somewhere else for work, recreation and learning.

These forces would not be enough, however, were it not for the creation of platforms like this conference for people to come together - and the acceptance of English as a (forgive me) lingua franca for common working. In other words, the need for change is not enough - people will only commonly change the ways they work if these new ways of working are made as easy as possible.

Just like any other change, in fact...

Mike

A Fatal Flaw

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:49:00 +0000

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

The Law of Unintended Consequences

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:51:00 +0000

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)

HR are often change victims, rather than champions

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 12:56:00 +0000

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

The Results Are In...

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:34:00 +0000

A new Bloomstorm survey report has just been released and the results show that current approaches to change are not working.

We have just surveyed a range of people experienced in business change about their perceptions of change success and the results are enlightening.

Half of those surveyed think that most change initiatives fail
Everyone has seen change projects fail to get the buy-in they need
Almost two-thirds of respondents think that no more than half of all change initiatives get the buy-in they require
Everyone has seen change initiatives forced through or imposed
Of these, more than half of those surveyed state that these forced or imposed projects fail
Senior and front-line management are seen to be almost twice as important as any other business function, including training or IT, in terms of their value to successful change implementation

What these findings suggest is that our current approaches to change - the change orthodoxy, if you will - simply aren't working. On these findings, most changes are likely to fail, and the chances of failure increase as change initiatives are imposed. But given the downturn in the economic climate, it's a safe bet that more uncomfortable changes will have to be imposed on companies if they are to survive.

In sum, the survey says that these changes - which many of us will have to implement - have a very poor chance of success. So we are caught between the rock of necessary change and the hard place of probable failure...

If we are to succeed with change, we need to think differently about change. We need to think specifically about the environments in which people work, to make it easier to work in new ways, rather than harder.

The question, of course, is why we don't do this already...

Mike

PS If you would like a copy of the survey report, just drop us an email to that effect at info@bloomstorm.com with your name, company and email details. We'd like to know what you think...

(Photo Credit: Susan McManus/www.sxc.hu)

Not drowning, but waving...

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:00:00 +0000

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

The Dog That Doesn't Bark

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:00:00 +0000

Change is about hearts and minds. Most advice focuses on the heart - but we need to address the mind if we are to address the rational causes of resistance and make it work.

An axiom of much change management advice is that people resist change. Regardless of how true this is in general, in business many of the problems of change are laid at the door of people resisting the change.

This in turn has created a mini-industry of change-management professionals offering advice almost all of which is concerned with overcoming resistance. Workshops, town hall meetings, posters, stakeholder management, mugs, force-field analysis and a whole panoply of consultant jargon, academic theorising and a panoply of tools, instruments and methods to 'engage people', 'secure buy-in' and 'obtain senior management commitment'.

And almost all of it barking up the wrong tree.

The issue is not overcoming resistance. It's about understanding the causes of resistance and removing them.

Most of the time, people resist change because the work environment in which they find themselves makes resistance a reasonable response to change. In other words, they resist change because the business environment encourages them to do so.

To give a simple example: if, say, we want middle managers to use a central recruiting process rather than go to their own local network of recruiters, then we will see rational resistance if the new process compared with current local practice is slower, more cumbersome, less flexible, has higher impact on local budgets, is less trustworthy or reduces the manager's choice over whom they hire. If I am locally measured on these things, reducing my ability to meet these metrics will, of course, increase my resistance.

No amount of persuasion, engagement or group working will change this logic. To change the logic, we need to change those aspects of the work environment that make resistance a correct and rational position.

So: if you want to make change happen (rather than talk to people about change), here are a few things to consider. Identify three or four places in the workflow of your new way of working where the quality of the process is visible.

Now change the environment round these three or four places by implementing answers to questions like these. What triggers the new way of working? What is in place to make it easy, practical, quick and aligned with relevant local metrics? What standards of performance are expected? What information do people get in real time about how well they are doing - and who notices?

Have the business put in place specific actions to reduce specific causes of resistance, real-time, in key places, as people work in the new ways. (And conversely, put in place things to make working the old ways harder).

Don't overanalyse, don't try to change everything (as I said, three or four places only) and don't work too hard to secure 'buy-in'. Try making operational changes quickly and seeing what works in terms of performance. When things work, the performance changes. 'Acceptance' is secondary.

You should find quite quickly a cluster of focused specific work environment changes that lead to people working differently. Document these and implement them pragmatically if you need to to roll the change out further.

While efforts to overcome resistance through persuasion, communication and engagement are good things, experience - and logic - show that you will get a better outcome if you adjust the work environment instead: this is the dog that doesn't bark.

- Mike

Hitting the high notes

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 21:25:00 +0000

Sometimes, to hit the high notes, you need to aim beyond them.

Back in my youth, I directed a production of Twelfth Night (modern dress, lots of colour, tried to keep it clear and moving at pace - and above all, funny) and had a ball. One of the reasons I loved doing the whole theatre thing was that it gets you to learn an awful lot very fast - and I don't mean the lines.

I mean things like this. We had commissioned some original music and songs for the show, but our actors were actors, not singers, so they were understandably nervous about doing the music justice. One actress in particular had trouble rehearsing one song where she had to hit a high 'A' note. Every time she tried, she lost it. Her confidence and my patience were rapidly ebbing. She turned to Chris, the musical director and said, "I can't do this."

Chris was, however, a man of genius. Infinitely calm, he said, "Let's see." And he sat down at the piano and said, "I'll change the song to a different key. Give it your best shot, trust me, and let's see what happens."

When he played the intro for the song, I was surprised - instead of shifting the song down, he had moved the key up. The actress also looked surprised, but he caught her eye and she nodded. She sang the song in the higher key - and again crashed and burned on the top note. She pulled herself up and said, in a distressed voice, "Sorry, Chris, it didn't work."

She was surprised to see Chris bound up from the piano and walk straight over to her with a big smile on his face. "Ahh, but it did work," he said. "Your problem was that you couldn't hit the high A. But then I shifted the key, asking you to go even further, to a high C. You didn't hit it - but you know what you did do? You sang a perfect A on the note before, on the way up to C. You did it."

After that, they went back to the normal key, and she hit it clean out of the ballpark.

The point is this: If we want to help people achieve their true potential, we need to set high standards. And sometimes we need to set targets that they initially believe are beyond them. But by striving for excellence beyond what we have done before, even if we don't always make it, at least we will always be good - and sometimes, we will be brilliant.

Mike

Blessed Are The Peacemakers

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 09:09:00 +0000

Great change is often a matter of small actions, constant conversation and doing the right thing. In this case, it is also the stuff of heroes.

The documentary The Secret Peacemaker, broadcast on BBC2 last night, was one of the most moving things I have seen for a long time. It was the story of a businessman called Brendan Duddy, who lives in Derry in Northern Ireland.

He isn't, by the normal ways of looking at things, anyone special. He was an ordinary man who owned a chip shop. But what he did was amazing.

A republican and a pacifist, Brendan acted as the broker to facilitate dialogue between the IRA and the British Government for more than twenty years during the 70's, 80's and early 90's, the darkest time of the Troubles.

He set up meetings at his house and elsewhere to get representatives of the IRA and the British Government together, during times when neither side could be seen to be talking to each other. He did so at immense personal risk to himself and his family. In Northern Ireland at this time, to be seen talking to a British soldier could get you shot by IRA paramilitaries paranoid about 'touts' or informers. Loyalist paramilitaries were shooting catholics seemingly at random. Being seen with militant republicans could have you thrown in jail indefinitely without trial.

There was nothing in it for Brendan, except the belief that dialogue was better than killing, and that the killing had to stop.

For twenty years, he spoke in coded messages on bugged telephone lines, drove through the dark to anonymous houses to convey messages to men who were ordering murders by the day, and kept it all secret from his friends and neighbours - everyone except his family.

He brokered meetings in his house, making cups of tea for killers and intelligence agents sitting on his sofa, being a trusted witness to conversations where the politically unthinkable was discussed and deals were done - ceasefires, doors kept open, promises made - that paved the way to the Good Friday agreement and the brittle but enduring peace that exists in Northern Ireland today.

I am sure that the story I saw had been cleaned up, sanitised and edited nicely - and that the truth is more ambiguous, murky and uncomfortable than the version broadcast. But regardless of what we learn in the future I have no doubt that this man is a hero of the highest order.

He did the right thing when it would have been easier to put his head in the sand. He risked everything he had to make things better, when there was no realistic prospect of success for years. And he did it effectively alone - not working for anyone else, not following anyone else's policy - but because he personally saw that something needed to be done and he could do it.

I grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles - and because I know how bleak those days were, I have nothing but admiration for this man who tried, in small steps over many years, to work to end them.

And, at the risk of sounding crass, I think Brendan can teach us something about change. First of all, the primary driver of peace process was conversation - dialogue between people - not 'communication' formally issued. Indeed the main time things went wrong for him was when some information was released the wrong way - announced in the House of Commons - rather than in discussion.

Secondly, if you want change to happen, it is much better to get out there and do something, rather than wait, even if you don't know every step of the journey. Brendan facilitated the dialogue, often when neither party was clear about what they were to talk about. Doing something and getting the dialogue going was critical.

And finally, change is about having a compass, not a map. Brendan was a pacifist - he wanted the killing to stop. He didn't have a great plan for peace, he just knew that if he could put the relevant people together, then the killing became less likely. It was a move in the right direction and that was the right thing to do.

Now the changes we have to face in our companies are much less mortal, are more defined and are much simpler than the things Brendan faced. But his example, I think, is something from which we can all learn.

- Mike

The Word Is Spreading

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 22:17:00 +0000

Bloomstorm features in a new podcast and in another blog.

Technology is a wondrous thing - it lets anyone do anything... And in this case, it lets me talk to Howard Graham of the Made Simple Group about Bloomstorm in this podcast. In it, you'll hear me explain where the name 'Bloomstorm' came from, why 'resisting change' is not what you think, and why change implementation, rather than management, is critical...

It was pleasing also to find that the most recent Bloomstorm Briefing (our free bimonthly newsletter offering tips and insight on change - you can sign up for it here) gave Howard a theme for his latest blog - on the notion of punctuality and respect.

You know what they say: great minds think alike.

Regards

- Mike

PS We've made some nice tweaks to our website - have a look and let us know what you think of it as well. Ta.

The Emperor's New Talk

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 20:36:00 +0000

The terminology of the change industry gets in the way of doing real change. Try cutting out the jargon and watch performance improve.

My friend and ex-colleague, Vincent Rousselet, has considerable intelligence and great experience of making and seeing change happen. I interviewed him today for the book I'm writing on change implementation - working title: Everything You Know About Change Is Wrong (But You Can Do Something About It) - and in the course of an excellent discussion, we wondered if, for the next change his organisation is implementing, he should remove all reference to the word 'change' altogether.

"Don't say we're implementing a change - say this is how we are going to work differently". An immediate change of focus, from jargon and 'stuff' to real activity. A chance for people to focus on real work, not workshops.

And this, of course, is one of the themes of the book. If you are managing change, you are not delivering it. If you are engaging stakeholders, you are not getting people to do things differently. If you are developing a communications plan, then you're not talking to your people.

It's like we've all been infected by a disease. Politicians talk like this. Business schools train their graduates to talk like this. And we pay consultants thousands of pounds to talk like this. And, after a while, we begin to believe it too: if we say certain words and do certain activities, we can sound impressive and make it look like we are doing real work, but we're not: in fact we are doing things that get in the way of real work.

Colette, my wife, says these things are 'Waffle Words' - words that sound meaningful and make you feel intelligent, but actually mean very little and deliver less. But the purpose of change is not to engage stakeholders, or to execute a comms plan: it is to improve business performance by working differently. Anything else is noise.

So next time you're involved in an activity to have people work differently, try this: do not permit anyone to use the following words and see what happens. I'll guarantee that people focus more on real results rather than the jargon.

Change (try 'working differently')
Strategic (try 'big' or 'important')
Tactical (try 'small')
Stakeholder (try 'someone who needs to do something')
Commitment (try 'what we need them to do')
Intervention (try 'task' or 'activity')
Communications (try 'letting people know what they need to work differently')
Outcome (try 'improved performance')
Vision (try 'what we need to do')
Rationale (try 'reason')
Engagement (try 'working with each other')
Model (try 'way of looking at it')
Deliverable (try 'what we need to have')
Performance System / incentives (try 'pay and perks')
Process (try 'how to do something')
Culture (try ' how we talk and do things round here')
Analysis (try ' work out what I need to know to move forward')

To make it more interesting, try fining your consultants, say, £5 every time they use one of these terms. You could get a refund on their fee in a couple of hours...

I'm sure you can think of many others - I'd like to see your your thoughts and suggestions in the comments section below - let's see if we can create a dictionary of change nonsense together...

- Mike

The Case Against Goals

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 14:19:00 +0000

Don't let setting goals stop you getting things done.

Those who know me know that I am (in the words of my friend Sam Bodley-Scott) "built for comfort, not for speed." In other words, I carry a certain amount of excess weight.

But for the past 6-8 weeks or so I've been losing weight. A bit of watching what I eat (low carbs, low GI, anyone?) a bit more exercise and getting more sleep. And it's working.

Now I know that I'm supposed to have a goal - a target weight - to which I aspire and which is supposed to motivate me, but quite frankly such goals only make me depressed because they show me that I have a long way to go and it's going to be a lot of hard work to get there. In fact, I need to stop thinking about this right now, or else I'll get so depressed I'll have to cheer myself up with a cream cake (:-))

I am, however, serious about the goal thing. We are told, are we not, by almost every single textbook on change to set a goal and then think about how to get there. But in this case, that doesn't work for me. And in fact, I think it doesn't apply in most cases of change.

What happens when we think about the goal of a change - say an IT project, or an organisation redesign, or even a personal weight loss programme? We spend a lot of time "visioning the end state" We may spend a lot of time arguing or discussing with others how we will measure the goal. We may spend lots of time trying to work out how we will get there. Anything, in fact, instead of getting going. (BTW This is also a great place for consultants to make money. The longer they spin this bit out, the more money they make. And it's easier than actually doing the work...)

And underneath these discussions are a lot of contradictory thoughts, such as: "Damn! That's a stretch! We'll never get there," or "Fine, whatever, we'll forget about it after a few weeks like we always do," or "That is so far away, we'll never be able to do all the work we need to do to get there." As our NLP practitioner friends tell us, negative self-talk is a BAD THING, and so many change initiatives begin handicapped by a serious negative vibe.

So I haven't set a goal except that I want to lose some weight - not so much a goal as a direction. And so I've no excuse not to get started straight away. I just need to get going, see what happens and adjust things as I go. And I have: 16 lbs and counting.

And I can't help thinking that many change initiatives could benefit from a similar policy. Sure, set a direction for where you're going, but then get going. Try it out, see what works, adjust it and do it some more.

Much of the time, you'll know when you get there. And you'll get there faster, and have a happier journey - for nothing settles arguments more than delivery.

- Mike

Where I've been

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:42:00 +0000

Just visited the nice people at world66 and they let me create this map. Seems I've been in 26 countries and worked in most of them. That's 11% of the total. Only another 89% to go...

create your own visited country map

Dear John...

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 17:04:00 +0000

Change is matter of action, not words.

In my game, I see a lot of analyses, review many reports, hear frequent recommendations. And I'm sure they are useful, but at the back of my mind, I know...

Analysing what's wrong is easy.

Reporting our findings is easy.

Making recommendations is easy.

They are, all of them, easy. If it wasn't, why would we keep doing these things at home, with our friends, our families?

It's acting on these recommendations, making the necessary change, that is more challenging.

If you don't believe me, cast your mind back to the last time you had a relationship with a 'significant other' - and it had gone wrong. (If you can't remember such a time, either you are too young to be surfing the internet or I would like a glass of whatever you were drinking at the time...)

Remember? Talking about it with your friends and forcing them to listen until they ran out of patience (three weeks for women, three hours for men) and gave you the recommendation you knew was right: 'Dump him / her'.

This is a change that is easy to say - but, for most of us, very hard to do.

And all the nonsense about 'Management of Change' doesn't help. The important thing is not 'change' - it's about making things better: more efficient, more effective, less painful. Change is not something abstract to be taught on a workshop, it's specific, it's personal and it takes time.

And, like breaking up, it's better done cleanly, with good manners and by taking into account the feelings of the other person (people?) involved. And sometime down the line, after the pain is gone (but it never really goes away, does it?) it might be possible to see that yes, things are better; yes, it was the right thing to do.

But no matter how it comes out, we shouldn't be surprised that making change happen is hard, because it's always personal.

- Mike

Change to make it easy for the customer

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Bird) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:47:00 +0000

In every business, the customer has a job to do. Make it easy for your customer to do their job, and your costs go down and your profits up.

A couple of years ago, I worked to help a client translate feedback from customers into better ways of working. Stripped of consultant jargon, this meant: "Your customers say they don't like it when you do this. Please stop."

If only it was that simple. The things we were helping our client to change existed because the client needed to manage their costs and the trade-off of improving the customer experience while keeping costs down - was not simple.

So we turned things on their heads. Instead of thinking "what can we do to make things better?" we thought,"what can we do to make it easier for our customers to deal with us?" In other words, we considered the job the customer had to do when they wanted to deal with my client.

And you know? It worked. An example: one problem was that customers called our client for help when the information they needed was already available on the client's website. When we checked it out, we found that while the information they needed was a few clicks down the page, customers found the customer service telephone number at the top of the web page. So they naturally called straightaway, rather than taking the thirty seconds or so to look down the page.

Result? The customer got the information they needed - but after a time-consuming phone call taking five or more minutes, rather than in seconds from the website.

So our client made it easier to draw the customer's attention to the necessary information - by moving the telephone number to the bottom of the page.

Result? the number of calls from customers were cut by 50% - while customers got the answers they need in seconds, not minutes. Lower cost, happier customers.

So many companies don't realise that one of the fastest and easiest ways to boost customer satisfaction and sales is make it as easy as possible for your customers to deal with you.

In other words, pay as much time and attention to managing and motivating your customers as you do your people - and you'll be rich.

Mike