Change: Alarms and Indicators
How do I know if things are going wrong?
A couple of months ago I wrote about the basics of Change Craft, which comes down to simple questions: Why? So What? Who? What? How? I finished with “expect back sliding, missed targets and failure.”
A reader commented to me by email, “Alan, those are all results indicators. By the time I see those, the change process has already gone off the rails. What are the initial condition indicators or process alarms that will help me avoid a problem before it happens.”
“Good point, Ted,” my response began and I went on to describe the flashing red lights a change leader should look for. They aren’t always obvious. Mostly they are language cues that indicate a dangerous mindset.
If you hear yourself or your boss or those on your team say these things, watch out!
“Easy Peasy”
Change is not easy. Individual self-improvement is hard enough, but add to that the difficulty of groups of individuals it gets exponentially harder. Different people hear the same word differently. For example, my wife believes that “worry” is much more serious than “concern,” but if I hear “I’m concerned” that is “DefCon 3, Stop everything you are doing and FIX this.”
So even people who share the same national and corporate culture will hear the same words differently, complexifying describing change rationale, and giving instructions. That complexity multiplies by the numbers of people involved. Now imagine cross border communication, or acquisition integration communication. How do you know people are hearing what you mean?
Also, a change plan, inputs, activities, outputs, and responsibilities, especially recorded on Microsoft project or similar software, looks like every other plan. It is likely to produce a “of course – we got this” reaction, which has to do with tasks not people.
“Need to know basis”
Secrecy and change success are negatively correlated. Oh, I get that when making a strategic change in products or markets, you might want to keep some of the information close to keep it away from competitors. However, in the absence of information, people just make stuff up, and what they make up is often destructive.
I once worked in a health insurance company that was breaking into the Medicare Advantage market. An IT manager decided to “get ahead of the game,” and installed time clocks on the Customer Service Representative’s (CSR) screen, and a new call code MAD (for Medicare Advantage Deployment). A rumor started in the call center among the CSRs that MAD stood for “Measured Against Downsizing.” The not-yet-operational clocks were perceived to be measurement devices and that each CSR was being evaluated against some criteria that would lead to a workforce reduction in force. In a matter of weeks the rumor spread across the company to other call centers and CSRs were threatening a walk out – all because some executive wanted to keep the new market entry strategy a secret, and CSRs didn’t “need to know.”
“We/they, us/them”
This is a tricky one because talking about us and them happens frequently in business, we-company, they-suppliers or customers. But when you hear leader saying us/them about layers or departments, or change teams talking about other change teams using we/they, it’s a signal of artificial divisions and a lack of integration, which is death to change initiatives.
This shows up in change activities. “The training is for them, not us.” We get the full briefing; they don’t.” “They get paid overtime for out of worktime change work; we don’t.”
Most organizations are hierarchical; and “siloed” vertically, but when you need the whole organization to move as one, as in an integrated change, then hierarchies and siloes can slow you down or stop you dead.
“Resistance”
“Resistance to change” is a cliché, “We fear change,” Is a frequent Saturday Night Live joke. Many change models actually describe what you need to do to overcome the rational, political, and emotional resistance to change.
While it is true that some of us don’t like arbitrary change, (“So why exactly is it better to put the apple corer here, instead of where we’ve always kept it?”), most people don’t fear change and they don’t resist change. They fear loss in unknown circumstances, lost of job, pay, reasonable workload, etc. Mostly they fear a loss of autonomy, the right to choose the change on their own terms. In short, they don’t resist change; they resist your change, because they weren’t consulted, or it wasn’t explained to them.
So when you hear your change team talking about “resistance to change,’ they may be covering up their failure to engage people properly.
“That’ll never happen”
I don’t know for a fact if anyone on the IT manager’s team at the Medicare Advantage change effort brought up the unintended consequences of “getting out ahead of the change”, described above. I imagine that if it was brought up, it would have been met with, “What? That’ll never happen. The CSRs won’t even notice!”
“That’ll never happen” is the command and control leader’s response to raising low probability-high consequence events. In risk analysis, real dangers are glossed over with the conflation of the likelihood and consequence scales. “Come on. What’re the chances?”.
Unintended consequences are a real concern in change. What seems like a simple action changes unseen variables. “Raising the temperature one degree, did increase viscosity and therefore throughput, but it also increased pressure and the ‘U’ pipe sprung a leak.” Uh-oh.
The biggest single oversight of unintended consequence I ever saw, was in an acquisition of a competitor in specialty chemicals. The low value brand bought the premium brand, both US firms. Realizing that acquisitions are an aggressive competitive act, the leaders paid attention to market share and concluded that combined global market share of 16% wouldn’t be threatening in a market where the number one and two players had a combined share of almost 70%. In public relations announcements they signaled that this was a one-time event, (i.e., “don’t worry ‘bout us – no threat here”). One month into integration the number one player, a German firm, bought one of the firms’ domestic suppliers. The combined two US firms bought 60% of this supplier’s output and the German firm didn’t want to get squeezed out of US supply. Instead the combined firm was.
The head of production at the acquiring firm had raised this possibility and suggested long term supply contracts. He was told “What? That’ll never happen.”
People make change happen
A consulting partner once told me, “change is about the decision; people will fall in line.” And sometimes they do. Usually, when they do, it is because some leader engaged them in the process and treated them as equals worthy of trust. People don’t come equipped with warning lights. The only flashing alarms we have are body language and words.
