Enabling Change

Sun, 16 Nov 2014 16:51:38 +0100
philosophical

Big changes are always a complicated thing to get done and can be the harder the bigger or more diverse an organization is it is taking place in.

Transparency

Ideally every change is well communicated early and openly. Leaving people in the dark about what will change and when means people have much less time to feeling comfortable about it or arranging with it mentally. Especially bad can be extending the change later or or shortening transition periods. Letting people think they have some time to transition only to force them to rush later will remove any credibility you have and severely reduce their ability to believe you are not crossing them. Making a new way optional is a great way to create security (see below), but making that obligatory before the change even arrives as optional with them will not make them very willing to embrace change.

Take responsibility

Every transformation means costs. Even if some change did only improve and did not make anything worse once implemented (the ideal change you will never meet in reality), the deployment of the change still costs: processes have adapted to it, people have to relearn how to do things, how to detect if something goes wrong, how to fix it, documentation has to be adopted and and and. Even as the change causes more good than costs in the whole organization (let's hope it does, I hope you wouldn't try to do something if the total benefit is negative), the benefits and thus the benefit to cost ratio will differ for the different parts of your organization or the different people within it. It's hardly avoidable that for some people there will not be much benefit, much less perceived benefit compared to the costs they have to burden for it. Those are the people whose good will you want to fight for, not the people you want to fight against.

They have to pay with their labor/resources and thus their good will for your benefit the overall benefit.

This is much easier if you acknowledge that fact. If you blame them for having the costs, claim their situation does not even exist or even ridicule them for not embracing change you only prepare yourself for frustration. You might be able to persuade yourself that everyone that is not willing to invest in the change is just acting out of malevolent self-interest. But you will hardly be able to persuade people that it is evil to not help your cause if you treat them as enemies.

And once you ignored or played down costs that later actually happen, your credibility in being able to see the big picture will simply cease to exist at all for the next change.

Allow different metrics

People have different opinions about priorities, about what is important, about how much something costs and even about what is a problem. If you want to persuade them, try to take that into account. If you do not understand why something is a reason, it might be because the given point is stupid. But it might also be that you miss something. And often there is simple a different valuation of what is important, what the costs are and what are problems. If you want to persuade people, it is worth to try to understand those.

If all you want to do is persuade some leader or some majority then ridiculing their concerns might get you somewhere. But how do you want to win people over if you do not even appear to understand their problems. Why should people trust you that their costs will be worth the overall benefits if you tell them the costs that they clearly see do not exist? How credible is referring to the bigger picture if the part of the picture they can see does not match what you say the bigger picture looks like?

Don't get trolled and don't troll

There will always be people that might be unreasonable or even try to provoke you. Don't allow being provoked. Remember that for successful changes you need to win broad support. Feeling personally attacked or feeling presented a large amount of pointless arguments easily results in not bringing proper responses or actually looking at arguments. If someone is only trolling and purely malevolent, they will tease you best if they bring actual concerns of people in a way you likely degrade your yourself and your point in answering. Becoming impertinent with the troll is like attacking the annoying little goblin hiding next to the city guards with area damage.

When not being able to persuade people, it is also far to easy to consider them in bad faith and/or attacking them personally. This can only escalate even more. Worst case you frustrate someone in good faith. In most cases you poison the discussion so much that people actually in good faith will no longer contribute the discussion. It might be rewarding short term because after some escalation only obviously unreasonable people will talk against you, but it makes it much harder to find solutions together that could benefit anyone and almost impossible to persuade those that simply left the discussion.

Give security

Last but not least, remember that humans are quite risk-averse. In general they might invest in (even small) chances to win, but go a long way to avoid risks. Thus an important part of enabling change is to reduce risks, real and perceived ones and give people a feeling of security.

In the end, almost every measure boils down to that: You give people security by giving them the feeling that the whole picture is considered in decisions (by bringing them early into the process, by making sure their concerns are understood and part of the global profit/cost calculation and making sure their experiences with the change are part of the evaluation). You give people security by allowing them to predict and control things (by transparency about plans, how far the change will go and guaranteed transitions periods, by giving them enough time so they can actually plan and do the transition). You give people security by avoiding early points of no return (by having wide enough tests, rollback scenarios,...). You give people security by not letting them alone (by having good documentation, availability of training, ...).

Especially side-by-side availability of old and new is an extremely powerful tool, as it fits all of the above: It allows people to actually test it (and not some little prototype mostly but not quite totally unrelated to reality) so their feedback can be heard. It makes it more predictable as all the new ways can be tried before the old ones no longer work. It is the ultimate role-back scenario (just switch off the new). And allows for learning the new before losing the old.

Of course giving the people a feeling of security needs resources. But it is a very powerful way to get people to embrace the chance.

Also in my experience people only fearing for themselves will usually mostly be passive by not pushing forward and trying to avoid or escape the changes. (After all, working against something costs energy, so purely egoistic behavior is quite limiting in that regard). Most people actively pushing back do it because they fear for something larger than only them. And any measure to making them fear less that you ruin the overall organization, not only avoids unnecessary hurdles rolling out the change but also has some small chance to actually avoid running into disaster with closed eyes.