There are many reasons why change initiatives fail.
The first reason is that the idea is lousy. Leaders rarely admit that, unless they have an obvious debacle of New Coke proportions. The executive suite typically figures somebody else is responsible. The managers implementing the change are lazy or incompetent. Or the staff is needlessly resistant, not willing to accept that change is inevitable and must be constant these days.
But sometimes the idea animating change is flawed.
“We need to come to terms with the reality that our ideas are always wrong,” change expert Greg Satell warns on his blog. “Sometimes they’re off by a little and sometimes they’re off by a lot, but they’re always wrong, so we always need to be on the lookout for problems.”
He shares physicist Richard Feynman’s observation: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.”
Encouraging pushback on your ideas can help. Two often-touted techniques are to hold a pre-mortem, in which you imagine how a project could fail, and setting up a “red team” to specifically look for flaws before starting the initiative. I’ve also liked the black and red hats in Edward de Bono’s Six Hats method: Everyone donning a figurative black hat together provides a time when people can openly speak about the negatives of a proposal, and when the red hat’s turn comes people can voice their intuition and emotions, which often can signal danger ahead.
A second big reasons for change failing, Mr. Satell says, is assuming that resistance to change has a rational basis. Leaders feel that if they listen to concerns and address those, they will be able to build trust and win over skeptics.
“The simple fact is that human beings form attachments to people, ideas and things and when they feel those attachments are threatened, it offends their identity, dignity and sense of self,” he says. “This is the most visceral kind of resistance. We can argue the merits of a particular idea and methodically build trust, but we can’t ask people to stop being who they think they are.”
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t rationally address the criticisms. Just don’t waste your time trying to convince the inconvincible. You’ll just frustrate and exhaust yourself. In your favour is that often irrational resistors will undermine themselves and their claims.
He also urges you to jettison – or at least rethink – the shibboleth about change being inevitable. “While change in general may be inevitable, the prospects for any particular change initiative are decidedly poor and the failure to recognize that simple fact is why so many transformation efforts fall short. The first step toward making change succeed is to understand and internalize just how fragile a new, unproven initiative really is,” he writes. To succeed you will need to listen to skeptics, identify and fix flaws in your idea to methodically build trust, and outsmart those determined to kill change.
Consultant Elsbeth Johnson encourages you to also ditch the belief that heroic leaders are often stymied by lazy managers when pursuing change. Her research reverses that equation. “When change efforts are failing, I lay the blame not on lazy managers but on lazy leaders. And by lazy, I don’t mean they’re not working at all, but rather that they aren’t doing the right work: The heavy lifting of thinking and decision-making that lays the groundwork for a successful change that the managers under them can then deliver,” she writes in Strategy + change.
The narrative of heroic leaders and lazy managers exists, she says, because most studies of strategic change consider only the first few months of a transformation effort rather than what’s needed to sustain it over time. As well, the researchers only talk to leaders about what they (heroically) did, not bothering to ask middle managers what they needed to deliver the change.
Talking to managers rather than their bosses and looking at the full term of projects she found three key leadership failures: Leaders weren’t clear enough about what they wanted; they were not realistic about how long execution would take or how much it would cost; and they weren’t consistent enough in the signals they sent about what was important.
Those heroic middle managers are often the most susceptible to change fatigue – a feeling of being overwhelmed by all the change or disruption taking place – which is another common barrier to success. Factors stoking fatigue can be the sheer number of changes, the pace at which it is supposed to happen and inconsistent or conflicting change messages. “If left unaddressed, change fatigue can lead to exhaustion and turnover within your existing workforce, as well as cynicism,” the consultants at NOBL Collective note.
They stress change fatigue is not overwork. It’s about the amount of change, which may or may not involve overwork. And it may not stem from cynicism. The people may still believe change can happen but are too exhausted to participate.
Don’t overlook this issue because it can be a showstopper. The solutions revolve around simplifying and prioritizing, managing expectations and providing more context. More generally, senior management must be prepared for the many impediments to change, rather than assuming promulgating change means implementing change.
Cannonballs
- While organizations increasingly are forcing people to come back to the office in order to be collaboratively creative, research suggests synchronous work can stifle creativity. Women and people from marginalized communities are given fewer opportunities to speak and are criticized more harshly when they do in a range of synchronous work settings. And a new study of Baul folk musicians in India found women’s performances were rated 17-per-cent higher when they recorded asynchronously, and this effect was driven by the degree of creativity in their singing.
- Basecamp co-founder Jason Fried argues innovation is rare and mostly happens by accident. You need to accept that work is mostly mundane, maintenance and small improvements.
- Stop worrying about some explosive crisis striking and demolishing your company, says entrepreneur Seth Godin. Rot is the more common occurrence for organizational failures.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.
Harvey Schachter