The Secret to Making Change Effective
I was just doing some research on change management and I had another light bulb moment. The article I was reading said you needed to make a business case for change, and my immediate gut reaction was “on what planet? Nobody ever makes a change for the sake of change.” In my experience most organizations, change is a by-product of acquiring something else that is deemed to be valuable. Let me try and be more specific – if there’s a bright idea by some process wonk that by changing action X, the process can be improved and nobody else thinks the process was broken – it’s a very BAD IDEA. If the company needs to improve their logistics process because their lunch is getting eaten by the competition and everyone in the company knows it; making a process change is a very GOOD IDEA.
When I was much less experienced than I am now (reader younger) I routinely came up with good ideas of how we could improve the way we did things. I had two ways of handling these good ideas. In some cases I’d go walk around and talk to the people in the chain and say “are you on board with this if I implement it?” If they said yes, I never asked permission I just did it. These tended to work out quite well. The problem was always with my big ideas that involved spending money or getting other business units to change where I didn’t have a personal network. Generally I’d have to go to management and 99% of the time they’d say “Good idea, but not now” and sent me back to my office. Most staff professionals get very angry and very frustrated when their ideas get shot down but I found it left me more curious than anything else. I knew they had a reason for making the judgment they did – I just didn’t understand it – hence the light bulb moment.
What I now understand is that contrary to most literature, incremental change imposed by somebody with a bright idea is VERY EXPENSIVE and largely unnecessary. Joe Proctor, a former CIO of Intel, gave me the best advice on the subject I’ve ever received. His question was “who else thinks this is a problem worth solving right now?” Sometimes Joe and I didn’t see eye to eye but that question was profoundly brilliant and is 90% of the threshold condition for making any change (the other 10% is what I call the burning building test — but that’s a subject for another blog).
So a proposal that does not have advocacy from a broad range of people is simply too expensive to do because it creates unnecessary change AND change has a price. (see my blog The Unfamiliarity Factor is Critically Important in Change Management ). The more I think about this the more I understand why I’ve looked at some of the “level 4 continuous improvement” literature and shuttered in horror (and NO the Gartner maturity model for PPM does not have a continuous improvement level). I believe in continuous improvement but it absolutely has to be from the ground up. If it’s top down it needs to be so clear cut as to why it should be adopted that people are literally beating on management to let them do it.
There’s an old book called Up the Organization by Robert Townsend that had another piece of advice that I immediately knew was absolute wisdom the moment I read it. Townsend’s contented that it was essential to never introduce a small change unless people were so busy and so stressed they would accept the change with open arms because it was going to help them (he was talking about adding staff but the advice is extendable).
I hope by sharing my insight that I can possibly help reduce the frustration I know many of you feeel about the fact that your organization is refusing to follow your lead and get on the formal project management process bandwagon. After all top management asked you to make the change and then they (senior management) refused to force people to accept it, leaving you feeling like you are banging your head against a stone wall. But feeling frustrated isn’t worth your time. The answer to the problem is actually very simple if you can’t sell it bottom-up and there’s no burning building to drive adoption top down — go back to the drawing board and rethink what you are doing.
Thoughts? comments? Violently disagree???
