The Forum Blog

At Forum we are fond of saying that “all change is personal.” Organizational change is as much or more about individual change (how individuals respond to the need to change) as it is about changes in organizational structure, vision and values, or strategy. Having said that all change is personal, it’s important that we also recognize that as humans we are social beings. Cognitive scientists have shown that our decision-making is powerfully influenced by social context. The biases, frames of reference, and underlying assumptions that impact our thinking are learned in social contexts. We also know, as sociologists have shown, that social networks exert a powerful influence over individual behavior. Any people who have passed through their teens have for sure experienced the influence of the “wisdom of crowds” on individual choice.

So, how do we manage this dilemma of the individual and the organization in relation to change?

One of the best ways is to focus on the social context itself, to create explicit ways in which people can work together to develop the commitment and capability to change. Within the social context, it is then possible to address individual reactions to the change, such as anxiety or complacency. Using the power and support of the social network, we can help individuals identify and overcome their own personal risks of change.

Forum’s research on how adults learn directly addresses this need to focus on social context. Since adapting to change requires learning new ways of behaving and new cognitive skills, our learning principles apply powerfully to the process of change. In fact, three of our six principles speak directly to the issue and importance of social context:

The first learning principle that applies is that leaders of change need to tie the need for change to both value for the individual and value for the organization. This is the classic “what’s in it for me?” or WIIFM approach. It’s important that individuals faced with a change know why that change is necessary for the organization as well as what makes the change good for them.

The second principle that applies is that workplace learning is a social activity in the sense that most of what we need to know beyond technical content involves learning how to work better with others. As a result, this learning principle recommends that we design and cultivate learning communities to enhance learning. When applied to a change initiative, it might take the form of preparing cadres of people to participate in the various components of change.

Finally, we know from our research on learning that people learn more when they’re asked to teach others. It is inherently a social activity. When used as a tactic for managing change, it becomes a natural build on the idea of cadres.

What examples do you see in your own organization of attention to the social context of change contributing to successful change initiatives?

When I think about strategy execution — what makes it successful, what accelerates it, what gets in the way — I usually think about big things like Planning, Decisions, Leadership, and Culture.  What I don’t usually think about is DOHS:  Dumb Ordinary Humble Screw-ups.

All of us — no matter how evolved, trained, planful, and put together we are – will commit DOHS on a regular basis.  And they can derail the best-laid plans.

Here’s an example: 

Last night I returned from a business trip to London.  After a 24-hour travel ordeal involving the usual delays, I arrived at the Albuquerque airport at 11 pm.  Relieved to be on the last leg of my trek, I collected my bag, walked purposefully through the parking garage, found my car, and clicked the Unlock button on the key fob.

Nothing happened.

10 minutes later, after much frantic clicking and double-checking that this was indeed my car, I had recognized the situation:  the battery was completely dead.

How could this be?  I wondered.  See, I am always *extremely careful* to turn off all electrical equipment – everything! — before I leave my car parked for many days.  I even have a process:  1. Write down location of car on parking ticket.  2. Turn off radio, headlights, AC, fan.  3.  Turn off ignition.  4.  Get out of car and double-check that headlights are off … etc.

And I *knew* what the answer was:  The car’s entire electrical system was starting to go!  This was exactly what had happened to my previous car:  The electrical system went kaflooey and the battery would drain after an hour.  I’d seen this phenomenon before.  It was happening again.  This car was clearly a lemon, too – and I would sell it!  Tomorrow!

Called roadside assistance.  Waited an hour.  Guy came and jump-started the car.  I bent his ear for a few minutes about how I couldn’t believe I had bought another car with a faulty electrical system.  What terrible luck!  (He nodded sympathetically.)

Roadside Assistance Guy left, and I prepared to depart.  I reached up and turned the map light off.  I put the car in reverse.

Some part of my brain went, “Huh?”

Why did I have to turn off the map light?

And there it was:  the DOHS (Dumb Ordinary Humble Screw-up).   I remembered:  It had been unusually dark in the parking garage when I arrived at the airport 5 days ago.  I had to turn ON the map light to complete Step 1 (Write Location on Parking Ticket) in my reliable process.  But, see, there is no step in my process for “Turn OFF Map Light.”  So I didn’t.  And the map light switch stayed in the “on” position for 5 days.

The consequences of the DOHS were large:  I didn’t get home until 1:30 am, and I was forced to hang out in a parking garage for an hour in the middle of the night.  If the goal was “getting home from London smoothly and safely,” this relatively tiny mistake put an awfully big wrench in things.  Moreover, if I *hadn’t* recognized my mistake, I would have gone down a terribly misguided path based on faulty assumptions.  I would have sold my (perfectly good) car and bought another at great expense.

And in business, I suspect the consequences of DOHS are also large.  As we go around diligently gaining alignment, making plans, and putting processes in place, what is the cumulative effect of the hundreds (thousands?) of small, everyday mistakes and oversights to which we and everyone around us are prone?  How much of the strategy-to-performance gap in organizations is really due to those unavoidable human screw-ups?

Can we reduce our DOHS Quotient?  And is it worth it to try?

After decades of conducting insightful research into the drivers of successful change and change management, Harvard professor John Kotter has had an epiphany. The single most significant factor in driving change, he now concludes, is the ability of leaders to create and sustain a sense of urgency.

Kotter’s well-known and well-regarded model of change has always acknowledged the importance of creating a sense of urgency, but in his recent research he asserts that “it all starts with urgency.” The big reason that a true sense of urgency is rare is that it’s not a natural state of affairs. Organizations and individuals are typically comfortable with the status quo. Even when we’re in trouble, it’s hard for us to shake ourselves out of our current complacency.

As we look at change in our own research at Forum, we find that almost all change initiatives, large and small, experience plateaus. The organization moves along in a positive way for a time and then reaches a point of little or no progress. Often, we’re not even too quick to recognize that we’re on a plateau.

We arrive on the plateau for a number of reasons. We sometimes think that we’ve accomplished enough. We got the low-hanging fruit; the rest is just too hard to accomplish; it won’t make much of a difference anyway. Sometimes, we’ve succeeded in a portion of the organization and feel that the rest can come along later. And, sometimes, collectively or individually, we just get tired of sustaining a sense of urgency. It’s seems easier for us to claim “mission accomplished” and move on to the next new thing.

So, how do you move off the plateau and continue to improve? You need to recreate the sense of urgency that got the team moving in the first place. There are several proven tactics for doing this: The first usually involves celebrating short-term wins. High-urgency teams, according to Kotter, guide people to achieve specific results. The teams need to see those results and use them to silence critics and disarm cynics. A second tactic involves relentlessly communicating strategy and progress to the appropriate audiences. There is no such thing as too much communication. Yet another tactic involves identifying and empowering those who will make the change happen. Moving from the plateau might require disbanding the group that achieved the original momentum and creating an entirely new group.

Above all, successful change depends on building a great enough sense of urgency in a large enough number of people. Start with that focus on urgency, and your chances of success grow significantly.

But perhaps not the other way round. ‘Those who do not remember their history are condemmed to repeat it’ . Change is often viewed as a process not as an outcome, it is of course both. Though we could simplify this by suggesting that learning is the process and change is the outcome. Most people I know are less likely to be resistant to learning as it is more involving and engaging than change. Learning is open and continuous whereas change is often decided elsewhere so appears closed and discrete. Senge’s ‘learning organisation’ continually changes as learning is applied at all levels.

To change and not learn may mean that your strategy is reactive and short sighted and you will find that when you do want your people to start learning again (and if you survive the change) you will have to overcome momentum as people start to ‘turn on’ to learning again. We are born, we learn, we change, we die. These are the fundamentals, and no one has control over the first and the last, but whenever I have the opportunity to discuss change with clients, I also make sure that we include a discussion about learning.

How do sales managers actually drive the strategy of their company through their sales teams? And what does a clear company strategy have to do with the effectiveness of the sales force? Let’s listen in on questions we might hear a sales manager ask her sales people about their prospective business deals, “Who are you calling on this week? When will the deal close? What will it take to close it? We’ve all heard these questions, perhaps even asked them ourselves.

All too frequently these kinds of questions represent the main line of conversation between sales managers with sales people. Acting as a cheerleader to advance a deal, or as a messenger summarizing the sales pipeline may be of immediate, tactical benefit, but how does it drive the company strategy, and ultimately, add value to the business? The key way to do so is ensuring that sales people are continually applying their company’s customer qualification criteria to all opportunities at all stages of business development. This is not so much directing the sales person’s actions as it is engaging in a dialogue of sorting through the facts of the opportunity and making judgments with the sales person regarding whether to pursue it, walk away, or gather the additional information needed to make a “go/no-go” call. The decision to pursue or not pursue a given opportunity is critical to achieving high sales productivity consistent with the business strategy.

One study by Proudfoot Consulting reveals just how limited selling time is and, therefore, the importance of leverage when choosing where to spend one’s time and energy. When Proudfoot reviewed 1,600 client projects across 9 countries a couple years ago they found their clients’ sales people spent only 10% of their time actively selling and another 10% prospecting, even though the sales people reported spending 50% of their time selling. How a sales person uses their precious time and which customers they pursue can be a competitive advantage, or not, and directly impacts their company’s operating margin–a fundamental value measure.

The sales manager, more than anyone else in a company, plays the crucial role in directing the energy and focus of the sales team towards those actions most aligned with the value proposition(s) embedded within the company sales strategy. By engaging in frequent dialogue with her sales people to jointly discover how and why the company’s products/services are the best fit for a customer’s need the sales manager increases the likelihood that her sales people will focus on the most qualified prospects. And that her people will offer differentiated, compelling proposals in line with company profit targets.

Of course, an effective qualification review of sales opportunities depends upon a clear, complete company and sales strategy that is communicated to, and understood by, sales managers. Without it, sales managers are left to set their own strategy, or worse, push sales people to chase every sales lead that shows up. Sales managers can use the company strategy as a tool to help their people determine as early as possible if an opportunity is real, how they can win it, and whether it will be worth the time and effort required to win. Over time, strategically oriented sales managers increase win rates and reduce unproductive selling time. How do your sales managers, or you, know if your sales people are pursuing well qualified, on strategy opportunities? What prevents sales managers from engaging their sales people in these important conversations about focus and continually qualifying prospects?

 You can’t get there from here!  As Maggie Walsh discussed in her earlier blog (29 July 2008) people don’t so much resist change as they resist being changed.  As leaders driving an organizational change we have two problems in overcoming that resistance.  The first is that we rely too heavily on our powers of persuasion.  The second is that we focus most of our time on the resistors.

Let’s look at the first problem first.  Inherent in any resistance to change is that the person doing the changing needs to experience the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) in a very personal and emotional way.  It’s not enough to paint a vision of the future, describe a need for change, and promise support.  Change is cognitive.  It’s emotional.  As a result, a leader needs to let people try on the change for size and feel the success.  What will it feel like if we’re working in this new way?  How will I personally react to the change? What will it take to master the “new way?”

So, how do you do that?  Primarily, you persuade through involvement.  You get participants in the change to make decisions with you and to try on new behaviors in small increments.  Nothing succeeds like success—you’ve heard that before, I know.  Well, here’s a perfect case in point.  To activate new ways of doing things you need to try them on for size, and you need to do so in an environment that’s both supportive and challenging.

How about the second problem—focusing on the resistors?  We all do it.  In fact, according Forum’s our own estimates leaders will spend 80% of their time trying to convert the 20% of their group who are resisting the change.  Focus on the winners instead.  Let them pull the rest along.  We will purposely identify the early adopters and let them lead the way.  We’ll train them first.  We’ll get them to train others.  And, we’ll let them take the lead in applying the new systems or processes or approaches in the workplace.

What do you do to activate learning and change?  Let us hear from you.

Ask 10 leaders to tell you their biggest people issue for implementing a strategic change and about five of them will probably say, “resistance.” So the question is, “why do people resist change?” There are a lot of different answers to that, but the one I love the most belongs to Richard Beckhardt (a pioneer in the field of organizational development). His response: “People don’t resist change, they resist being changed.”

From our research and work with clients we’ve learned that the leadership challenge is less about reducing resistance to change and more about actively and continuously stepping into people’s shoes to understand their perspectives and to help them make those changes that will drive a strategy to success. One way to do that is to understand and communicate both the realistic effort that will be required as well as the benefits of making the change for individuals and the organization.

What are some other ways you’ve helped people engage with strategic changes?

A quote I love comes from Mackey McDonald of VF Corp.  He says, “We realized we didn’t have to come up with brilliant ideas.  We needed brilliant ways of executing good ideas.” 

One thing I’ve recently learned from Forum’s research and practice in helping our clients execute strategies is that senior leaders often focus on developing the “brilliant ideas” that make up a strategy and fall short in one important way:  they never articulate the specific ways people’s behavior needs to change in order to execute on the strategy.

Some say, “Executives shouldn’t have to think about that – in fact, they may not even know what people’s jobs consist of, or how their behavior needs to change.”  And yet, in survey after survey, the #1 reason employees give for inadequate performance is “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.”

I wonder:  When it comes to strategic initiatives, is it enough for senior leaders to hum the new tune and point people to the dance floor?  Or should they also be showing people the new moves?