Organisations are human
Build the commitment to make a new operating model stick by understanding how people respond to change and involving them in shaping it.
Summary ideas
Recognise embedded patterns
Culture is formed by deeply rooted patterns of organisational behaviour that take time and effort to change.
Support psychological transition
People accept change through a psychological process that leaders must understand and support.
Build commitment through involvement
Organisations are both technical and social systems. Successful design must consider both.
Operating model modernisation is not only about technical design features – jobs, teams, integrating mechanisms and other items you can illustrate in a PowerPoint pack. True transformation occurs in the hearts and minds of people. Leaders will find success by moving beyond the ‘expert’ paradigm that treats an organisation like a machine designable by outsiders using best practice comparisons and installed by change managers. It is the social and psychological dimensions of organisational transformation that determine whether a design and its new patterns of behaviour will stick. Nothing changes until behaviour changes.
Durability of established patterns
There are dominant patterns of sense-making and action-taking in any organisation. Together, they demonstrate culture and exert strong influence on organisational outcomes. There are broad patterns and there are localised patterns. These localised patterns, powerfully shaped by local customs and leadership, form subcultures. Collectively, these broad and local patterns establish themselves over time and become durable and resistant to change effort.
The mind is a pattern-making and pattern-following organ. When presented with a situation, people make sense of the situation and define a course of action using yesterday’s well-established patterns. Ways of operating are quite literally exercised into the neurological pathways of the brain. This explains why patterns are difficult to change and barely respond to management edict. Behaviour change is no small endeavour.
People change when they are ready and even then, it can be difficult. Quitting a smoking habit is a good reference because in this condition the physical body is also conditioned for behaviour. Some may counter that compliance measures that force change onto people can be effective. This strategy has challenges with commitment, sustainability and speed and breadth of implementation. Compliance tactics rarely win the hearts and minds of an organisation.
These highly established patterns of behaviour are an important reason transformational change is difficult. They are a reason it is not possible to tell people into change. They help explain why a commitment strategy based in real involvement is better aligned to shifting an organisation’s sense-making and action-taking patterns of the mind.
THE GELATINE METAPHOR
Chris Rodgers (2007) offers a useful metaphor in a tray of gelatine tilted at a small angle. Pour a cup of hot water onto the tray. The water will flow down the tray and leave behind residual pits and channels in the gelatine surface. Pour a second cup. The pits grow deeper. The channels become more established. The water follows along existing paths. Repeat again and the established system of pits and channels increasingly direct the water flow. This is the metaphor of the mind. So, too, goes the organisation.
CHOICE AND VOICE
People support what they help create
When viewed as a technical system, organisations are primarily machines and promote a view of design through an engineering lens. A small cadre of designers and leaders are separated into a design team. They build a new system with the assumption that a small, closed team can fully understand today’s organisation and that the system behaves according to the design team’s logic. This view claims, ‘There is a best design, we will determine it and deploy it, and people will change.’ They deploy the plan on the assumption that logic, their logic, will win hearts and minds.
A major flaw in this approach is that, in addition to having technical elements, organisations are complex social systems. They are comprised of people with creativity, different knowledge bases and varied experience. These benefits exist alongside deeply embedded emotional needs, runaway assumptions, political interests and patterns of behaviour. Organisations are both messy and full of potential for creativity and commitment.
People do not resist change. People choose to change all the time. However, they do not like being changed without some role in the process. It is unfortunate that a natural human condition has been assigned the negative phrase ‘resistance to change’. There are understandable reasons explaining why people might have trouble adopting change that is thrust upon them, including fear of the unknown, knowledge or experience that a change initiative violates, or simple lack of understanding. It is too easy to take the predictable and negative impact of a flawed change process and assign it to the unreasonable and uncooperative nature of change targets. A kinder rephrasing of resistance is multi-directed energy.
People support what they help create. Recall the gelatine metaphor – hot water, pits, valleys, durable patterns. Sustainable change requires each person to overcome their established and nearly automatic patterns of sense-making and action-taking in the new organisation. This requires self-awareness, attention, and importantly, will.
Wilfulness comes from a sense of self-determination, however small, that comes from some type of meaningful participation in the change process. This does not make an organisation a one-person, one-vote democracy. It does require leaders to deeply understand that change strategy matters. If leaders want people to change behaviour, there must be a design process that facilitates ‘choice and voice’ through which people can participate as their own personal vehicle to committing to the change.
THE CHANGE EQUATION
The psychology of transition
The language of transition is deliberate. Change is situational and often technical in nature: a new process or technology, a new product or market, a new operating model. Transition is psychological and social. Transition is a process that people must go through as they meet a change, develop understanding of the new situation and decide to commit to new personal behaviours (or not). Psychological transition occurs at the individual level and aggregates up to the organisation.
A basic and memorable formula for transition is the change equation of D*V*F > R. It identifies the basic elements that must be in place for a person or group to choose to be different. The multiplication symbols are important to notice. Whenever any single element in the formula is missing or sitting at a zero value, the left-side product of the equation is zero. This means there is insufficient energy and motivation in the system to overcome the inertia of standing still.
The three essential elements in the equation are:
D
Dissatisfaction or Drivers
People must recognise a common need for change. This is not about manufactured urgency but creating shared awareness of dissatisfaction with the current state. ‘Are we satisfied with the current state?’
V
Vision
This is a compelling future state. This represents where the organisation aims to be. People need a direction of travel and an answer to the question, ‘Where are we going?’.
F
First steps
The path to the future begins with the first step. Everybody must know what to do next. ‘What are the concrete actions required to reach the vision?’
R
Resistance
This is the choice to do nothing because a person is not dissatisfied with the present situation, has no compelling future vision and recognises no easy next step even if they wanted to change.
The ‘R’ in the equation is Resistance. This is the choice to do nothing because a person is not dissatisfied with the present situation, has no compelling future vision and recognises no easy next step even if they wanted to change.
When trying to move an organisation, it’s essential to create a distributed movement. A sufficiently large and influential group of people must share in the DVF formula. Pragmatically, this means representation from across levels, functions and teams in the organisation. No method to achieve this outcome is more powerful than bringing people along the journey with meaningful opportunities for participation. The common phrase, ‘generate buy in’, is a warning sign to notice. It is often used to signal a process of convincing others to ‘buy into’ a change initiative. When used this way, it’s the opposite of bringing people on a journey.
As change leaders bring others along the change journey, they must consider psychological commitment, and the journey people must take to reach it. It is far better if the organisation is prepared and committed to pull the change into place, compared to the condition wherein leaders must push the change into the organisation.
Change strategy and process matter. Achieving understanding and positive perception is strongly and directly related to participation opportunity. A change process that involves people and leverages the organisation’s social network greatly supports understanding and positive perception. Involvement does not mean the shop floor worker is deciding matters of strategic direction. It does mean a person is meaningfully involved in some way relevant to their work life. The alternative to bringing people along an established psychological journey is frequently to shock the system with change announcements, presuming a positive perception.
It is established knowledge that even when people do not like the full scope of an outcome, if they understand the rationale and had some voice and participation in the process and see the process itself as valid, then they will accept the outcome. Change process can either generate or ameliorate resistance and will greatly influence your outcome. People will support what they help create.
early stages
1. Contact – People develop a general sense of the conditions requiring some change.
2. Awareness – Those expected to be impacted by change understand change will impact them and they might have a very fuzzy notion of change. Details are unclear.
3. Understanding – The nature and impact of the change is now clear, and people can judge the change and form perceptions of it.
4. Positive perception – At this point, people choose to support the change (or not).
The engagement payoff
When people are involved in creating a shared future, it releases a vast reservoir of goodwill, energy and organisational knowledge. It allows leaders to move beyond constantly ‘selling and telling’ (ie, creating buy-in) to a future in which employees engage and contribute their know-how and discretionary energy. This is something every leader wants. By understanding the psychology of change and choosing a participation strategy, leaders do not just build a better operating model, they build a community of engagements characterised by belonging, collective understanding and commitment. This condition leads to faster implementation and faster realisation of expected benefits.
CASE EXAMPLE
Building commitment to a shared future
What brought them here will not get them there. Most leaders will recognise the adaptation of the familiar aphorism. Yet, it is difficult to mobilise a group that is prideful and satisfied with past success, even as the operating environment has changed and now presents a clear threat to existing operations. This was the case with an organisation built on statistical and delivery excellence whose core business was threatened by evolving practices in the existing market.
A core task of leadership was to help the company find its dissatisfaction with the current business model and quickly fill the gap with a compelling future vision. It is never enough to do the former without the latter, or it is despair that will fill the gap. Design process took a significant cross-section of the organisation to create difficult but shared awareness that the organisation could not rely on its past success. Because there is a sequential nature to finding a vision after concluding dissatisfaction with a current state, leadership filled the temporary gap. It did not have the answers, but it made a believable case that the current organisation had all the tools to plot a successful future.
The design process pressed forward while through a broadening of the circle of engagement. Established belief patterns in the organisation melted away as members of the organisation, from senior levels to line-workers, reimagined business direction and built an operating model to achieve it. A subteam was formed to further socialise design choices and help organisational members release their grip on the past and accept the discomfort of an uncertain but promising future. Collaborative design process and strong, visible and involved leadership then helped this system translate its future operating model into tangible action steps needed to put the new design into action. All elements of the DVF change equation were in place and the organisation began to move itself under its own energy.
SOURCES
- Beckhard, R., & Harris, R. T. (1987). Organizational Transitions: managing complex change. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
- Bridges, W. (1995). Managing transitions: making the most of change. Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
- Conner, D. R. (1992). Managing at the Speed of Change. Random House.
- Dannemiller Tyson Associates. (2000). Whole-scale change: unleashing the magic in organizations. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
- Edward De Bono. (1970). Lateral Thinking: creativity step by step. Harper Perennial.
- Rodgers, C. (2007). Informal Coalitions: mastering the hidden dynamics of organizational change. Palgrave Macmillan.