The Change Time Machine

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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...

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

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

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