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)

The Dog That Doesn't Bark

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

The Emperor's New Talk

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