Pay now or pay later
Involve people early and give them a stake in the outcome to build commitment, reduce resistance and make change happen faster and last longer.
Summary ideas
Invest in commitment
Change has a price: leaders can invest upfront in building commitment or pay later to overcome resistance.
Make change last
Strategies that build commitment enable faster implementation and more sustainable change than those relying on compliance.
Design both systems together
Collaborative design develops the social and technical systems together, even when progress appears slow.
Complex organisational change is expensive. This is a message leaders seldom want to hear. But leaders will pay to either create commitment or resolve the challenges of resistance. Leaders will pay to achieve their objective or pay for not achieving it. The temptation is to defer investment – to pay later.
Driving factors for this choice include the desire for control and the illusion of speed. In the early phases of a project, it seems faster to generate decisions and conceptual designs with a small, closely controlled cohort of leaders. In one narrow sense, it is faster if a new high-level technical design is your objective. However, it is not simply a new design that you need. You need a new design that is implemented and stabilised with new, sustainable behaviours throughout your organisation.
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.
PAY LATER
Invest to overcome resistance
The illusion of speed, a bias for control and too much faith in traditional change management lure leaders into the pay-later strategy. Fast decision-making does not translate into fast realisation of intended benefits. The benefits associated with fast decision-making are materially overestimated when seen in the light of how people react to change.
Earlier, you were introduced to the concept of patterns on the surface of the mind; those well-worn pathways that develop over time. They are very durable and a source of comfort to those holding them. They create a measure of certainty in the environment. Because of this, the mind does not want to let them go easily. Patterns die hard.
In addition to a preference for certainty, there are related social dimensions to change that affect people at an emotional level very quickly and very deeply. Recognising these dimensions helps change leaders better understand how fast decisions – taken amongst the few and without effective social process – threaten people’s sense of wellbeing.
Emotional response is not rational, and it does not bend to leadership will. A leader cannot expect an employee’s perception of fairness to match their own. A leader’s status is rarely threatened by a change. The point is that leaders must understand that change managed through an opaque process threatens people emotionally. Emotional response distributed throughout the organisation will cause behaviour many will label resistance, and resistance slows implementation.
Lack of good data during decision-making is also a key drag on implementation speed. Organisations are complex systems. Put five people who participate somewhere in a common process in a room. Ask each to describe the end-to-end process with its strengths and weaknesses. Most likely, you’ll need all five to get a complete picture. This situation is described as puzzle learning. Each person has a piece of the data, and all are needed to improve the system.
Senior leaders do not have this data. They have a high-level view but are not well positioned to understand the work in middle- and low-level detail. Lack of understanding when making design choices slows implementation speed because it leads to unintended consequences. Bring unintended consequences together with a lack of commitment from the operation core and leaders have a problem. Implementation of complex changes requires engagement and ownership to solve implementation issues that invariably arise. Successful implementation is not built on the belief that, ‘It is leadership’s design, let them fix it.’. This pushes the problem upwards to the leadership team that owns the design.
Under the pay-later choice, the change strategy is oriented to decision-making among the few and effective persuasion and compliance tactics directed towards the many. It is view of change that places primary focus on the technical design outcome and less so on the conditions needed for effective implementation.
5 sociopersonal drivers
1. Status – A person’s sense of self-worth is established by the meaning they attach to their position in an organisation, involvement in important matters and assumptions about how others see them.
2. Certainty – Predictability has a calming influence. In environments where predictability is not possible, it is useful to know one is not alone in a state of uncertainty.
3. Autonomy – This is the desire for self-determination, within reasonable bounds.
4. Relatedness – Organisations are social communities within which people develop important relationships. Reorganisation threatens these social bonds and even one’s future with the organisation.
5. Fairness – There is a universal desire for fair play as defined by people who are the target of change.
PAY LATER
Invest to build social commitment
Core operating principles
1. People support what they help create
2. The process you use to get to the future is the future you get (ie, design compatibility)
3. Organisations have both social and technical dimensions
4. The technical and social aspects of change must be jointly optimised
Every leader wants broad and deep commitment to a change initiative. Every leader wants rapid implementation during which the organisation is engaged and ready to tackle unanticipated implementation issues. Every leader wants people with a better understanding of the main value-creating enterprise, aligned behaviour and connection to strategy and customer satisfaction. These are outcomes of collaborative design.
Collaborative design is a change strategy. It is deliberate, system-wide planned change that integrates technical change with social processes to help organisational systems change. Its goals are to accelerate end-user adoption through commitment, make changes easier to institutionalise and minimise performance disruption during the transition period.
Coordinating social and technical dimensions means that technical, human and financial requirements must be reflected in critical design choices. This is opposed to a focus on one to the exclusion of the others. To ensure accelerated adoption and a positive ROI, the technical, human and financial requirements need to be designed jointly and concurrently. This is a very different philosophy from that which distinctly and sequentially separates design activity from socialisation activity.
Design compatibility simply means the organisation must begin to act throughout the design process in ways consistent with the end state you seek. The process must mirror and utilise the same ways of working, values and operating principles intended for the final design. The design process must provide the experience of the intended organisation. If leaders want a future organisation of engaged employees, then they must choose a design strategy that invites real engagement. If leaders bemoan lack of engagement, then collaborative design is a powerful lever to shift the culture.
new ways of working
A philosophy of involvement
A pay-now change strategy is based on a philosophy of involvement. The objective is to build a change movement that reaches the hearts and minds as members internalise new ways of working. This does not mean everyone is involved in every decision in an equal way. It does not mean leaders entrusted to steer an organisation do not have an outsized vote. It means leadership recognises the complexity of their organisation, makes the investment to involve people top-to-bottom and side-to-side to fully represent the scope of change, and models involvement throughout the change process.
Choosing involvement to build commitment requires more from leaders. It requires them to accept core fundamentals of group process, collaborative design and transformational change.
The latter point is particularly important to recognise. Leaders who are used to traditional change management may assess a collaborative design process as moving too slowly. This is to fall back into the familiar transactional view. The collaborative design process is changing patterns of the mind and inviting people into commitment with their hearts and minds as the technical design is taking shape. This is the joint optimisation described above. When leaders of a pay-now strategy assess the pace of change over the full sweep of design and transition, they conclude the whole process of transformation was rapid, effective and sustainable.
A final point on the popular change management structure from Prosci® that is sometimes called ADKAR. ADKAR is a perspective on change that enables change management tactics to have focus and direction. Like any other tool, it can be done to an organisation or done with an organisation. In the ADKAR variables there is much alignment with requirements present in collaborative design. ADKAR and collaborative design come into close alignment when the philosophy of real involvement underpins the application. If ADKAR, or any other change framework, devolves into short, sharp and reactive training or persuasion tactics, then the alignment falls apart. Like most useful resources, applications make the difference.
core fundamentals
1. Groups move more slowly than individuals
2. Leaders are in the field modelling beliefs and behaviours
3. The change process itself either builds or resolves resistance through the development of commitment
4. Process helps move people along the path to psychological commitment and change readiness
5. Slow down to go fast
CASE EXAMPLE
Investing early in shared ownership
Let’s return to the leader presented earlier with the scars from a past change effort. What they experienced in the past was the ‘pay-later’ cost of failed change. Committed to a different action for their current organisation, they adopted the ‘pay-now’ strategy. This meant bringing the organisation into contact with the need for change. It required committing to a collaborative design process that moved more slowly than might be possible with a small design team. Big teams move more slowly than small teams. However, and this is what many leaders misunderstand when accustomed to traditional consultants, the organisation was shifting in parallel with designing its future operating model.
The organisation designed and implemented significant design features in nine months. While some leaders chose to leave because of the emergent design, there was no broad resistance to change. In fact, there was so much commitment to the future direction that the change initiative withstood the very sad and untimely death of the CEO. The Board thought it should pause the project. The organisation convinced it to press forward. Had this been the late CEO’s design it would have come to a crashing halt. Because they chose the ‘pay-now’ strategy, engagement and ownership were so broadly established that the project thrived in the face of tragic and unexpected change at the very top of the organisation.
SOURCES
- Conner, D. R. (1992). Managing at the Speed of Change. Random House.
- Hiat, J. (2006). How to Implement Successful Change in Our Personal Lives and Professional Careers. Prosci® Learning Center Publications.
- Rock, D. (2009). Your brain at work: Strategies for overcoming distraction, regaining focus, and working smarter all day long. HarperCollins.