“There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”
Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin

To see people who were once labeled as ’sheep’ taking initiatives and putting their ass on the line is the greatest gift of all. Finding out that I am the one now needing to stretch in order to keep up with my Oompa Loompas – instead of the other way around – is a great experience.

When I was appointed as the CIO of our organization I was completely new to this business. I have a background of engineering and until then I had been managing global projects in a multinational environment of product launches, markets and affiliates. All of a sudden I was propelled into the local niche of an HR service provider. Needless to say that my background no longer needed to be at the top of my mind. But then,… what else needed to be at the top of my mind instead?

Foreign Element

From the beginning I made it clear to my department that I had very little knowledge of the sector and that I would need all of their involvement to make the turnaround we much needed. In the beginning that seemed to be radical idea; and I was featuring as the foreign element.

In the beginning the response was quite poor and I remember the skepticism in our department. Soon enough I discovered what people had warned me for: “they are a bunch of sheep”; “dedicated followers with zero sense of initiative”. On top of that, most of the knowledge was trapped in people’s heads and within a growing organization this became more and more a continuity risk.

So there I was with my newly declared Charlie Bucket Approach. First I would learn about the current set-up. Next, I would get as much information as possible. And then – and only then – I would determine a strategy. The only certainty I had at that time: I was not going to pull it off without the Oompa Loompas.

Loompaland

In Roald Dahl’s story, Wonka’s workforce – the Oompa Loompas – come from Loompaland, a small and isolated island in the Pacific Ocean. They are funny-looking characters with strange habits. No use in explaining that my IT department was also being looked at as if they were Oompa Loompas.

Apart from being very busy at all times, nobody really knew what the IT-people where up to, what they were working on, which priorities they followed or whether it was what the business most needed.

Reengineering the Chocolate Factory

With the Charlie Bucket approach in mind, I choose to take on one challenge at a time. For us, the starting point was going to be IT governance and transparency. But it turned out that the Oompa Loompas were not so keen on it.

I remember the discussions we had on serving the internal customer. When I arrived, the Oompa Loompas were providing enhancements and fixes every day. The customer said ‘jump’ – and they said ‘how high’? No thinking, just jumping on whatever they were asked to do.

As an outsider I could easily see that we would definitely benefit from redefining ’service’. And this included saying ‘no’ from time to time and bringing structure to the work.

In the beginning the Oompa Loompas resisted this change, arguing that this would slow down the service to our customers. And eventually it would. Their argument was a valid one. But when we sat down with the customers, we discovered that they did not really need daily enhancements and fixes in their systems. Rather, they prefered transparency, focus and guidance.

This was a surprise to the Oompa Loompas and ever since that moment, they have taken the habit to ask ‘why’ more often and to challenge the things we have taken for granted.

Their Factory

I was lucky to draw Charlie’s golden ticket because I have spent half of my career in Loompaland. I can decode their language and respond in a way they understand. The one thing I learned in Loompaland is never to underestimate what these weird creatures are capable of.  And by now I can say with confidence that I would never have been able to reach this level of change in our department without their involvement.

But challenging their status quo is one thing; gaining their trust is another. Because to the same extent as I was rocking the boat, I needed to provide the psychological safety for people to grow. That’s when I found out that there is a direct relationship between the trust you gain and how vulnerable you allow yourself to be.

In our particular case I decided not to pre-fill the 15 new positions in our department ourselves. Filling the positions myself by appointing people directly would have been the safe-game. Instead we carefully crafted an internal labor market where everybody could apply. My biggest fears at that time: to have a zero response or the complete opposite – a tsunami-response.

Luckily none of that happened. What’s more, people really opened up, as if they had turned a switch in their head. The most touching proof is the one Oompa Loompa in his fifties, who made a complete career-shift. This is a guy who could easily settle for inertia and dozing-off-until-retirement. But he didn’t. To my surprise, he abandoned his burned-out past and is now a dynamic learner and a responsible initiative taker.

Managing Oompa Loompas

I am sure that other organization also have their Oompa Loompas. And I am convinced that – there too – these people are undervalued. So consider the following two points whenever you are in charge of the Oompa Loompas of your organization.

1. How to recognize them
Oompa Loompas are always busy, dedicated and hard working. However, nobody really knows what they are doing and most of the times they look a little distant and weird. This is not good for their reputation and that’s a shame because they are valuable to your organization. Don’t mistake their distant looks for disloyalty towards the organization, and don’t assume that you can put them all in one and the same category. They are a colorful subculture.

2. How to coach them
You have to know that Oompa Loompas have the capacity to engage into the most complex problems of your organization and solve them. However, sometimes they too can get lost in this complexity.

Albert Einstein once said ‘You cannot solve a problem from the same  consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew.’ Therefore there are three rules I always apply in Oompa Loompaland:
- I keep it simple and I tell them “If you can’t explain it to your grandmother, forget it”;
- I tell them to make sure to tell their customer what they are working on and what the customer can expect next;
- I use metaphors to explain where we are heading and what we are trying to achieve; this gets us all on the same wavelenght.

As for this metaphor of Charlie and the Chocolate factory, it is probably the one that makes most sense for myself. Because thanks to this metaphor I realized that I was just the Charlie who made the change possible. They were the Oompa Loompas who actually fueled it, completed it and sustained to the present day.

Behind every successful Charlie there is a dedicated team of Oompa Loompas.

Is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory just another adventurous book written for children or could there be a hidden lesson for Organizational Change Practitioners? In this article Cool Friend Filip Michiels shares his insights on Charlie’s adventures and tells us how he applied them as CIO of an HR services provider.

Some time ago, my children and I were watching the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The story, written by Roald Dahl, is about Willy Wonka and his chocolate factory.

Years ago, after rival chocolate makers sent in spies, disguised as workers, stole his recipes, Mr. Wonka had decided to send everybody home and to close the factory completely to the outside world. Since then, the gates remained locked. However, somehow the factory had resumed operations in complete mystery.

A Case For Change

One day, Wonka realizes that even though his business is good and stable, the knowledge about the operations of his factory would not be covered in case something happened to him. At the same time, being shielded off from the outside world, he fears losing touch with the evolving marketplace, as recent launches of new products had not always been that successful.

Thus he decides to hold a worldwide contest, in which five Golden Tickets are hidden under the wrappers of his candy bars; the prize for those who find them is a day-long tour of the factory and a lifetime supply of chocolate. But, the real reason Wonka has sent out these Golden Tickets is to find a child to be his heir, and carry on his work.

Five Change Agents

Five kids arrive:

1. Spoiled Veruca Salt had managed to get her father, a rich industrial, to buy as many chocolate bars as he could find on the market, to have his work force to open them one by one looking for a golden ticket, with no interest at all in the chocolate itself. Veruca attempts to take one of Wonka’s nut-cracking squirrels for her own and is thrown down a garbage chute.

2. Violet Beauregarde, a very successful and competitive kid, whose only ambition is to be better than any other kid at whatever she does (as with finding the golden tickets). Violet blows up into a blueberry after consuming experimental chewing gum and has to be taken to the Juicing Room to get the juice out of her.

3. Mike Teavee, a wiz computer geek kid, who had developed a computer analysis algorithm to determine from all production runs which chocolate bar would hold a golden ticket, without even eating chocolate himself. Mike is shrunk after meddling with dangerous television equipment and has to be taken to the Taffy Puller to be stretched back to normal.

4. Gluttonous Augustus Gloop eats that many chocolate, so he could not get any other than one of the five bars holding a golden ticket in his hands. From the minute Augustus steps into the factory he blindly starts eating and tasting anything he can get hold off. Eventually, Augustus falls into a chocolate river and is sucked up a pipe to the fudge room.

5. Charlie Bucket, a nice boy from a poor family, lives with his parents and both sets of elderly grandparents. From these four, especially Grandpa Joe (a former Wonka employee), he hears stories about the candymaker Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory he built in Charlie’s hometown.

From the minute Charlie steps into the factory, he starts questioning Wonka about his work force, methods, ingredients and so on…and tells him about all he learned about the factory from his grandfather.

Finally, Wonka announces that Charlie has “won.” He receives the entire factory and will take over the company after Wonka retires.

The Takeaway for Organizational Change Practitioners & CIO’s

A while ago, the organization I had recently joined faced similar challenges as Willy Wonka did: there was a growing gap between the IT department and the business needs. However, in a services environment business and IT alignment is absolutely crucial.

Apart from being very busy at all times, nobody really knew what the IT-people where up to, what they were working on, which priorities they followed or whether it was what the business most needed.

On top of that, most of the knowledge was trapped in people’s heads and within a growing organization this became more and more a continuity risk.
I was the lucky one who drew the golden ticket to tackle this…

Here We Are. Now What?

Below is the presentation that summarizes the ‘Charlie Bucket’ approach – as I now like to call it.

It turns out that there are five ways to go about with this challenge. And that ‘Aha’ moment I experienced while I was watching Charlie’s adventures turned out to be very beneficial in choosing the right approach:

1. Maybe we could have used (big) money to create a whole new set-up entirely replacing what existed (people, procedures, systems,..) ? I am sure that is what the Veruca Salts would do.

2. Or were we the unlucky ones who had attracted all the dumb IT professionals from the marketplace, so replacing all of them with Violet Beauregardes (all new and bright talents from the outside) would do the thing…

3. Or would it have been wiser to look solely at technology – maybe our organization was just victim of running old outdated rubbish and wheeling in bleading edge new high techs offered by the Mike Teavees of this world was what we needed?

4. Another option would be to do it Augustus’ way, having a go at anything we encountered next, just having a taste of it, changing it a bit, but not finishing at all before tasting something new?

5. Instead, I told my Willy Wonka to take the Charlie Bucket approach: first learn about the current set-up, get as much information possible, before determining a strategy.

In brief: work with the existing organization to accomplish our goals, led by a clear objectives, a very open and continuous communication, with lots of room for participation and a strong buy-in from the whole organization.

Spotting Digital Natives like an anthropologist. Catching the first sun after a long winter in Leuven we find students scattered in the park. To me – in my blossoming thirties – a strange sight and a blunt proof of the fact that I have slipped into another generation. Could I be a Digital Immigrant?

The fascinating part of being aged thirty-odd is the realization that you don’t really  belong to the Digital Natives and you can even less identify with the older generation that is often nicknamed Digital Immigrants. We are the lost generation: opinionlesly born in the middle of the chasm; endlesly contemplating on whether to commit to social media or to deny instead; constantly feeling unconfortable. Too much confusion. Time for a second SOS VideoClass.

Again, the video is in Dutch (with my own Flemish accent ) and you will find the English transcript below.

Native Spotting

We are here in Leuven and behind me you can see the next generation. The generation we could refer to as the Digital Natives. They are enjoying the afternoon in the park.

One thing that amazes me – and it may amaze you too – is the ease with which they handle things like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs. To them it’s like a second nature, whereas for us it is sometimes a bit frightening.

FaceCrime

What we often see is that we trust adult people of our age – the working generation – to go to the bank, to obtain a loan, to buy a house or to raise a family. However, once we come to work, we are treated like children. No LinkedIn, No Twitter, No blogs. And no Social Media. They are building a safe firewall around us.

This makes me think of the book 1984, written by George Orwell in 1949 and mandatory reading when I was at school. In chapter 5 Orwell introduces the concept of FaceCrime – a term that sounds a little like Facebook. It is a crime you commit by demonstrating too much of your personality, by displaying too much emotion and by giving away too much of your authenticity.

Today we can observe that social media has penetrated 76% of the population. For the people behind me this percentage will probably be way higher than that. Just imagine: 76% of your customers, your suppliers and foremost: your workforce is using social media.

Nuts

To me this means that you have to be nuts as a company not to be present on that market. That you have to be out of your mind to lock your workforce out of that space. Particularly if you take note of the fact that we operate in a knowledge economy here in Belgium: We have no natural resources; We cannot produce something with added value faster or cheaper than the countries surrounding us – let alone the countries that are further away. Our raw material is knowledge; we’re smart – and that’s what we need to take advantage of.

Changing the way we look at things

The added value of knowledge increases the more it is shared and the more it is exchanged. What our economy needs at this very moment is more knowledge that evolves faster. And that is the reason why we have placed the lifebuoy right here, in the safe and protected kindergarten: it is time to stop overprotecting people. It is time to take both feet off the breaks. It is time to see social media no longer as a threat but as an opportunity.

“Be the change you want to see in the world” – Mahatma Gandhi
 
Every year, thousands of runners are injured due to leg and foot pain. In response, athletic-shoe companies have invested fortunes into high-tech cushioning, arch support, and shock absorbers. But despite these efforts, as many as six out of 10 runners get injured every year.
 
A great fiction story…or not?
In his latest book Born to Run, Christopher McDougall describes an epic adventure that began with one simple question: ‘Why does my foot hurt?‘ In search of an answer, Christopher McDougall sets off to find a tribe of the world’s greatest distance runners and learn their secrets, and in the process shows us that everything we thought we knew about running is wrong.
 
Born to Run is a compelling story, a page turner full of incredible adventures and a cast of characters worthy of Dickens. So as a reader you may think you are reading a great fiction story. Until … you go surfing on the web and you find out that every fact and character of the book is real.
 
BFT
Barefoot Ted (BFT), for example is one of those amazing characters that have helped McDougall to the flip the question: If shoes are not the solution, could they possibly be the problem?
 
Barefoot Ted is a phenomenon. On his website he describes himself as “committed to re-discovering our primordial human potential”. And boy, is he committed! For more than a decade, BFT is being the change he wants to see in the world.
 
He does not ‘fight’ the old paradigm. Rather he:
- is evidence of the new paradigm
- embraces every positive evidence he can find;
- builds a community of fans and has devoted his whole existence to barefoot running;
 
BFT as an Organizational Change Practitioner
And there is more. BFT has interesting things to share about paradigm shifts and how they occur. Insights that are highly relevant to us a organizational change practitioners implementing SAP.
 
As you can imagine barefoot running is a hot topic in runner’s circles and far beyond because shoe companies and just about half of the medical world’s advice is at stake: barefoot running rocks the status quo.

Slowly but surely, there are shoe companies that have adapted to the virtues of barefoot running: the Vibram FiveFingers is a good example. Barefoot running goes mainstream.

Trojan Horse
Pondering over this evolution here’s what BFT says about barefoot running going mainstream:
“I still think that barefoot is best, but barefoot is free…, and I always knew that the only way barefooting was going to become a true, mainstream hit was that there was going to have to be a product…something people could buy. And the VFF is that product…, or from my perspective, Trojan Horse.



The Vibram Fivefinger is a foot glove. No support, no real cushioning. Yet, it is a thing I can buy. A solution that can be purchased. Consumer cultures feel comfortable with it. But what is its real message? It seems the real message of the VFF is that your foot is just fine AS IT IS! That regaining strength and range of motion in your foot is a worthy goal. That you are not broken by default.”
 
SAP is the FiveFingers of Business Process Reengineering
Implementing SAP is also like a Trojan Horse. People think it’s just a software rollout and that all other things will stay the same. … NOT! People wake up in a new world where the system allows or disallows certain things. People have access to different information. As a consequence, people will start working differently – breaking holes into silo’s and getting grips on input and output.
 
As a matter of fact, SAP is the FiveFingers of Business Process Reengineering (BPR). Like barefoot running, process reengineering is common sense and getting back to basics. BPR suffers the same flaw as barefoot running: it’s free.
 
SAP is the enabler of BPR and nowadays we see lots of organizations implementing SAP ‘because everybody does it’. Like FiveFingers it is a solution that can be purchased. And the real message is the same: your company is not broken by default. SAP is not ‘fixing’ a broken company – just like your foot is just fine the way it is. But SAP makes you run differently (i.e. on on your bare business processes) and therefore BPR becomes way more obvious.

I even like the analogy in the abbreviations: What FiveFingers is to BFR (BareFoot Running), SAP is to BPR (Business Process Reengineering)
BPR = BFR!
 
Thanks BFT (BareFoot Ted) – for this great insight!

During large programs it is very difficult to keep an eye on what is cooking inside the organization and how people’s perceptions of the upcoming change are evolving. Hence, a commonly used instrument to check this ‘change readiness’ is holding surveys. Last week I mentioned the Top-10 signs your employee survey needs to change.

In addition to that list, Naomi Karten describes 6 recommendations for conducting surveys and avoiding that they become a waste of time.

1. Set survey objectives. Define those objectives before you start, or you will end up with a list of questions that are unanswered because they were unasked.

2. Keep survey length under control. Avoid nice-to-know-but-so-what questions. A well-designed survey can be completed in less than ten minutes.

3. Make the survey action-oriented. Surveys are often full of thermometer questions. For example, "Did this course match your expectations?" is a thermometer question. Responses may suggest the existence of a problem, but provide too little information for you to understand the problem or recommend changes. If, instead, you ask questions like ‘are you now able to go back to your workplace and put what you have learned into practice?’, ‘Which difficulties did you experience when making the exercises?’, or ‘which topics will require extra attention before using them in practice?’ , you can use the responses you receive to plan a course of action.

4. Balance open-ended and closed questions. Closed questions ask respondents to select from a set of fixed responses. Respondents can answer these questions quickly, and responses can be tabulated, summarized, graphed, charted, analyzed and reported. Open-ended questions, by contrast, ask respondents to answer in their own words. Responses take time to review and are subject to interpretation. However, open-ended questions frequently provide a level of insight into the customer perspective that is impossible to obtain from closed questions. 

5. Ensure an adequate survey response. To generate interest, set the stage by publicizing the importance of the survey in helping you improve your service effectiveness. Explain your objectives and how quickly the survey can be completed. Marketing, branding the survey can dramatically influence the level and quality of the responses you will receive.

6. Tell stakeholders about your survey findings. This is the most important and yet most forgotten about element. Inform stakeholders of your findings and changes you will make as a result of their feedback. When you implement suggested changes, announce that you’re doing so because of their feedback. Don’t overlook this essential element of providing feedback to customers about their feedback to you.

Gathering feedback and taking no action based on the findings is worse than not gathering feedback at all!

The below movie shows an interview with Curt Coffman, co-author of First, Break All the Rules. In my opinion his top ten covers all the pitfalls one can encounter when performing employee surveys.

#10 Your survey hasn’t changed since Bob Dole ran for president;
#9 Your survey has more items than your accounting system;
#8 Employees and managers feel more helpless after completing the survey;
#7 Your customer loyalty scores still have not improved;
#6 You are paying more than $10 per employee for data collection and reporting;
#5 By the time your survey vendor returns the data, your workforce has turned over;
#4 Employee surveys, what are those?…;
#3 You need a 3" binder to hold one report;
#2 The dog ate your action plans;
#1 You keep doing what you’ve been doing and expect a different result.
("When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change")

My both thumbs up for this powerful summary!!

PS: Thank you Craig Smith for pointing me to this video.

You may think of rituals as an exotic thing from far-away cultures and  weird religious communities. Well, it is; but to the same extent it is intimately woven into the way we live our daily lives. Rituals occur wherever more than one person do something together. That is: in tribes, religions, countries, monasties and clubs; but also at work, in families and between partners.

Rituals
We all need rituals. A ritual is a way of shaping reality so you can deal with it. And if the way you and your community fellows have that thing in common it becomes a distinctive feature of your community. The most obvious examples include visual appearances: Aboriginals have white body paint, doctors in a hospital wear white coats, on National Geographic we can see how boys turn into hunters through a manhood ritual, where I live, marriage is a ritual declaring monogamy and the bride has a white dress, etc.

The not-so-obvious examples include: making PowerPoint slideshows for whatever you want to communicate at work but not at home (thank God!), budgeting discussions and the complete cycle of a fiscal year, coffee, KPI’s and Balanced Scorecards (they are the ‘nec plus ultra’ of a tribal belief in numbers), New year, wearing a tie on certain occasions, casual Friday and not wearing a tie, etc.

When looking at exotic or ancient cultures we tend to talk about rites and symbols as if we are way more civilized than that. However, our day-to-day lives are far more abundant with rites and symbols of all kinds, we only have different names for them. In our world we call them agreements, rules, legislation, organization, structure, strategy, common sense, logic, etc.

Habits
A habit is the same as a ritual, but on the individual level. It’s how we deal with reality. We do certain things our own way. Little things. And it’s the sum of a million simple things a day that give us a sense of security and identity. Habit is the daily success of forgetting that the nature of reality is unpredictable and groundless. It’s never the same river twice. We would go crazy if we were to approach reality without rituals and habits.

Addictions
An addiction is a habit exposed in a socially unacceptable way: where habit clashes with ritual. In my opinion an addiction has very little to do with what is good or bad for you, for good and bad are measures set by ritual. Get it?

Attention
I’m sure you can think of another million rituals and habits we use in our world. In fact, not an hour goes by without us shrinking whatever is happening around us to a digestible taste, size and portion by means of ritual, habit or addiction.

There are several ways to become aware of this mechanism.
- Listen to children: It just takes the fresh look of a child to ask ‘why?’ from time to time.
- Connect with weird people – the complete outsiders in rank and order of your community
- Limbo: when you are heavily involved in a change that determines the course of your life and habits drastically. For example when a person close to you deceases, or you lose your job.
- Read all of Dr Suess books, especially The Sneetches.

Takeaway
The takeaway for organizational change managers is quite important. The first thing you bump into whenever you want to implement an organizational change is inertia caused by rituals and habits.

Instead of labeling them as ‘resistance’, we’d better approach them with respect, because they define the very boundaries of people’s comfort zones.

Over the past week I experienced that the good old brainstorming techniques that are derived from de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats don’t need a nudge in the Web 2.0 age.

6 Thinking Hats

I have used this brainstorming technique in a variety of different settings: to generate ideas, to solve complex problems, etc.  The Six Thinking Hats method provides a way for groups to think together more effectively. ‘Together’ is the absolute key word here: instead of having individuals reacting their own way (as usual), the group agrees to deliberately step into each possible ‘way of thinking’ sequentially. There are 6 different types of thinking or hats one can wear in a discussion:

* Neutrality (white) – considering purely what information is available, what are the facts?
* Feeling (Red) – instinctive gut reaction or statements of emotional feeling (but not any justification)
* Negative judgment (Black) – logic applied to identifying flaws or barriers, seeking mismatch
* Positive Judgment (Yellow) – logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony
* Creative thinking (Green) – statements of provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes
* Process control (Blue) – thinking about thinking

In my experience until last week – the Six Thinking Hats was a powerful tool to generate ideas and solve complex problems through parallel thinking. On top of that it creates a greater feeling of momentum in team that otherwise would be cluttered in a ‘being right’ discussion.

6 hats on Web 2.0??

By now most readers of this blog must have noticed that I am making my first babysteps into the Web 2.0 communities. One of them is LinkedIn, where I am lucky enough to manage the Organizational Change Practitioners group (4.722 members subscribed at the time of writing). Recently I decided to have ask the members contribute in which subgroups we would create in this forum.

What I witnessed next was multi-thinking at different dimensions at the same time. One of the most beautiful examples of Six Thinking Hats I have ever witnessed from close by!  At the time of writing, there were over 85 reactions that demonstrated the six thinking styles:

* Neutrality: people responding directly to the question at hand (e.g.:"I suggest to creat a subgroup on human behavior")
* Feeling: people volunteering to become a subgroup manager (e.g.: "Great idea, Luc. If you need help, I would be ready to facilitate/moderate the Web 2.0 group")
* Negative judgement (Black): people opposing to the idea of subgroups (e.g.:"Seems to me the additional structure may add bureaucracy rather than make it easier to navigate and participate.")
* Positive Judgement (Yellow): people supporting the idea (e.g.: "I think having focused discussions would be great so that when dealing with a particular issue, you wouldn’t be all over the place.")
* Creative thinking (Green): people suggesting additional ideas (e.g.:"Maybe a poll would be a good idea to select the final five")
* Process control (Blue): people looking at this process happening (e.g.: "watching and participating in a wonderful new (to me at least) process: asynchronous, large-group virtual conversation and decision making"); one participant even Twittered this discussion thread!

Invisible Hand

The most fascinating observation however, was that the discussion thread almost chronologically went through all of these hats. In the same way as during brainstorming sessions each thinking hat is triggered by one reaction, which sparks a range of reactions that belong to the same thinking type.

Coincidence? Not in a million years. But then, what caused this to happen? How did the group trigger a specific hat, go to a climax of reactions, a decline and then moved on to a next hat? How did the group decide the order of the hats to think by? Honestly – I DON’T KNOW. But I did experience that we were parallel thinking! We simply cannot deny that there is some kind of invisible hand doing some fine work.

“It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.” -  Edmund Hillary

In the 1944 unfinished novel Mount Analogue, René Daumal describes the travel of a company of eight, who set sail in the yacht Impossible to search for Mount Analogue, a solid, a geographical place that “cannot not exist.”

The protagonist of the book is convinced by a certain Father Sogol to undertake this “crazy” expedition. Father Sogol is a figure who likes to invert cause and effect (and is therefore called the inverse of the Greek “Logos” – representing ‘rationality’ and logical thinking).

“A crazy expedition”

The story of Mount Analogue is about making something happen that all people around you say is impossible and ridiculous.  In this novel about the expedition to a mythical mountain that reaches from earth to heaven, Daumal mentions the chameleon law, which he describes as the inner resonance to influences nearest at hand (“la résonance aux plus proches affimations” if you happen to speak French). As the protagonist of this tale is in the vulnerable starting phase of this expedition, he discovers how he is prone to peer pressure and how difficult it is to commit to something before knowing how.

Father Sogol had really convinced me, and while he was talking to me, I was prepared to follow him in his crazy expedition. But as I neared home, where I would again find all my old habits, I imagined my colleagues at the office, the writers I knew, and my best friends listening to an account of the conversation I had just had. I could imagine their sarcasm, their skepticism, and their pity.

I began to suspect myself of naiveté and credulity, so much so that when I tried to tell my wife about meeting Father Sogol, I caught myself using expressions like “a funny old fellow,” “an unfrocked monk,” “a slightly daffy inventor,” “a crazy idea.” After all that I was stupefied to hear her say at the end of my story: “Well, he’s right. I’m going to start packing my truck tonight. For there are not two of you. There are already three of us!”
“So you take this all seriously?”
“This is the first serious idea I’ve come across in my life.”

And the force of the chameleon law is so great that I came back to the thought that Father Sogol’s enterprise was, after all, entirely reasonable.

The Tipping Point

Now what could possibly be the relevance of this chameleon law for us as organizational change managers? Mount Analogue is about inner doubts and how this chameleon law rocks us asleep and prevents us from seeing the other 99% of the possibilities that are at hand in each situation. With rational thinking and conventional ‘common sense’ we easily fall prey to the chameleon law.

However, organizational change projects are mostly about creating a situation that does not yet exist. A situation, a project or any other expedition is “talked into existence”. With every word you speak about it, a seed is planted that can give birth to a new reality. Karl Weick refers to this as the process of Enactment to denote that certain phenomena (such as this crazy expedition, or your own ambitious project for that matter!) are created by being talked about. Slowly but surely – if we are persistent enough – our ideas translate to words, our words translate to actions and our actions result into tangible outcomes.

The chameleon law is the biggest enemy during organizational change efforts, because you are shaping the path for a future that has no gravity in the present. As Arthur Schopenhauer is often quoted: ‘Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized.
In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self-evident.’

Broken Windows

This is exemplified by the broken windows theory. Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Scientists in the field of criminology found that disorder invites even more disorder and that a small deviation from the norm can set into motion a cascade of vandalism and criminality. Litter encourages more litter – another way of saying: resonance to the influences nearest at hand.

Malcolm Gladwell was the first to bring the broken window theory to our attention when he described it as paramount in reaching a Tipping Point (an idea which he first published in 1996 as an article in The New Yorker and which he later published in a book with the same title).  As Gladwell notes: “Why was the Transit Authority so intent on removing graffiti from every car and cracking down on the people who leaped over turnstiles without paying? Because those two trivial problems were thought to be tipping points-broken windows-that invited far more serious crimes“.

So we need to beware of all the broken windows symptoms of cynism and indifference and instantly fix every broken window. This is the intense and step-by-step work of creating a new culture.

Committing without knowing how

However, preventing the chameleon law from taking over goes a little deeper than paying attention to practical details. One has to be crazy enough and stubborn enough to endeavor your objectives against all odds. The Mount Analogue expedition reveals the insight that any expedition or organizational change project is a mountaineering expedition of the inner mind and intrinsic motivation, as much as it is about delivering a project according to a certain methodology. The tipping point is as much an external and societal process as it is an inner struggle for fueling our own commitment to an expedition with an un-rational (i.e. rationally ‘unreachable’) objective. It’s the ability to pursue a dream.

Alpinism is the art of climbing mountains by confronting the greatest dangers with the greatest prudence. Art is used here to mean the accomplishment of knowledge in action.

You cannot always stay on the summits. You have to come down again… So what’s the point? Only this: what is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above. While climbing, take note of all the difficulties along your path. During the descent, you will no longer see them, but you will know that they are there if you have observed carefully. There is an art to finding your way in the lower regions by the memory of what you have seen when you were higher up. When you can no longer see, you can at least still know. . .

Daumal, who was apparently one of the most gifted literary figures in twentieth-century France, died before the novel was completed, providing an extra symbolic meaning to the journey. Beware of the chameleon law as you endeavor to live your dream, instead of dreaming your life!

_______________
Related post: Better a wrong decision than no decision (February 14th, 2007)

Last week the manager of a plant involved in a major organizational change project claimed that the return-on-training of his classroom training courses was disappointingly low. Over the past weeks they have been switching over to SAP, by far the most popular platform in the segment of so-called ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software.

We have been preparing the users of his plant by means of extensive classroom trainings, both on process knowledge and systems skills. From his gut feeling he told me that his people demonstrated at best 10 to 15 percent return (i.e.: what they effectively remember and use in their jobs).

Training is the smallest part of Learning

I will not argue about the percentages. The point is that I obviously did not create the right expectations: he should be looking for the return-on-learning instead of the return-on-training! On this same blog I already announced the end of teaching and I also proclaimed that teaching is placebo. I even painted a picture about it in order to demonstrate what this means for SAP implementations specifically.

In retrospect the 10 to 15 percent reported by the plant manager is fairly high compared to what I always have been saying: 99% of what ‘Learning’ really is occurs outside of the classroom. The bottom-line is that training alone is not enough in order to make an organizational change happen. Increasing the quality of your training sessions will not leverage the return-on-training to the same extent. At the very best it is a starting point. From there on you will need to coach your way to the future state. The drawing below is taken from John Seely Brown (again!) and clearly depicts how learning really occurs

Now back to the return-on-training question. What could be the best way to increase that return? The answer is simple: this return can only increase if workplace learning has already occurred BEFORE the training session (in action, action through participation, participation with the world, participation with the problem and participation with other people, i.e., practices). Involvement, participation and ownership are key. 

The concept of Time-to-task is another way to look at it. Normally we use that term to describe that the training should occur as closely as possible to the task at hand. The only way return-on-training can increase is when time-to-task is negative. In plain English this means: people will get more out of a classroom training when they have been frustrated by real-life problems form the task at hand; they will posses an enormous learning pull and they will ask for and absorb every detail that is needed for the job at hand.

Here is a quote from David Maister to support that view:
"A good test for the timing of training would be as follows. If the training was entirely optional and elective, and only available in a remote village accessible only by a mule, but people still came to the training because they were saying to themselves, “I have got to learn this – it’s going to be critical for my future,” then, and ONLY then, you will know you have timed your training well. Anything less than that, and you are doing the training too soon."

Rethinking Knowledge Management

Participation, involvement and enculturation (i.e.: "belonging to") lies at the heart of learning. It also lies at the heart of knowing. Knowing has as much to do with picking up the genres of that particular sub-profession as it does with its conceptual framework. For example, how do you recognize whether a problem is an important problem, or a solution an elegant solution, or even what constitutes a solution in the first place?

Jerome Bruner made a brilliant observation some time ago when he said that we can teach people about a subject matter, for example, physics. That is, we can teach them the concepts, conceptual frameworks and facts of physics – the explicit knowledge of physics. But that does not make the student a physicist. To be a physicist he must also learn the practices of this profession. As he continues:
"We teach a subject not to produce little living libraries on that subject, but rather to get a student to think mathematically for himself, to consider matters as an historian does, to take part in the process of knowledge-getting."

So here we are. Now what? All the evidence tells us that learning is a social thing. It exists in action, participation with the world, participation with the problem and participation with other people, i.e., practices. A lot of the knowledge comes into being through the practices of the people and the environment you’re working in. The return-on-learning question reveals the challenge we face today for rethinking knowledge management:

1. shift our mindset from "pushing knowledge to people" (authority based and explicit) to "supporting people to participate in their productive inquiry" (situational based and on-the-fly)

2. Shift from tools to increase the individual knowledge stock to tools which support relationships and interaction. 

3. Shift rigid structures from managing an academy (where knowledge gathers dust) to facilitating an ecology of different communities-of-practice (where knowledge lives and evolves).

4. Do everything we possibly can in order to introduce Web 2.0 thinking in the boardroom. Think: collaboration and moments of truth instead of teaching!

Talking about organizational change management… there is work to do!