There are three ‘M’s involved in explaining why I capitulate to the non-sense of the way things are. They are: Matthew Effect, Membership and Mindset.

Matthew Effect

For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.
—Matthew 25:29

Those who have shall be given – and if you happen to be on the other side: bad luck. But it’s more subtle than one may think at first sight. In his book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell compares the misfortune of the genius Chris Langan to the successful achievements of another genius: Robert Oppenheimer.

Both men were equally gifted, so the Matthew effect is not applicable on first sight. However, Gladwell states that – while both men were comparable in terms of intelligence – it is their sense of entitlement that has shaped the opportunity (or lack thereof) to grow and have a successful career.

Being talented, good-looking, intelligent, etc. may be the entry criterion for the achievement contest we call life; eventually it is the access to opportunities that will determine the outcome.

Membership

When researching the main causes of hunger and poverty in Third World countries, 1998 Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen discovered that hunger is not caused by a lack of food, but by a lack of entitlement.

In the book Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation he demonstrates that famine occurs not only from a lack of food, but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food.

At the age of nine, Sen witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943. Later he concluded that the loss of 3 million lives was unnecessary. He presents data that there was an adequate food supply in Bengal at the time, but particular groups of people including rural landless laborers and urban service providers like haircutters did not have the monetary means to acquire food.

Mindset

Back to the importance of degrees and the perversity of entitlement. Although entitlement was described by Sen as a matter of having the opportunity to influence your own mortality, I recently came to think of it as an illusion. It seems to me that entitlement to the fruits of a degree is mostly felt by those on the lower side of the glass ceiling.

I also think that the ignorance of how little a degree is worth once you crossed that fence, makes people blind to the real gravitational forces of the Matthew effect. That is: it pulls people down, not up.

A degree is a hygiene factor in terms of Herzberg’s two-factor theory: it is necessary, but not sufficient to succeed. It doesn’t push you up, but lacking it can pull you down.

Tragedy

The tragedy of it all is that it is the degree-less people with the most outspoken talents who suffer the most from this downward spiral of I-am-not-worthy-ness. They carry the lack of entitlement as a burden every day.

They are the victims of a ‘false negative‘ or simply a stupid coincidence.  As a consequence, this world not only suffers an inflation of stock markets. Most of all, it suffers an inflation of degrees.

Hope

Ken Robinson, who recently published ‘The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything‘ became popular after his 2006 TED talk titled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” In this talk he makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning.

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 must 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!

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

Simplicity: Keeping it Simple

One of my favorite quotes in this regard is the one of Bill Jensen: ‘Change all you want, just know that execution happens at the speed of making sense’. This means that people – and that includes you and me – will only do what they understand. At this point we are not even at the level of resistance – comprehension is the issue here!

However, there is a relationship: if you do a good job in sense-making you will be rewarded with less resistance. This implies that you not only tell people what they need to know to make the change happen, but you also listen, involve them and feed-back to them your understanding.

Synchronization: Staying on the Same Page

In the beginning of a project you may not be aware of the need for synchronization. Your project may still be building a prototype and you want to spread the word. In that phase any communication is good communication; whether it is structured or not, prepared or not, accurate or not – anything is better than radio silence (disclaimer: this is not an advice, it is an observed behavior).

But as you are approaching delivery and increasing the contact moments with your target audience people will urge you to get concrete, specific, accurate and fast. That is when your bunch of people (aka: the project team) needs to get disciplined about communication, testing and training (i.e.: the most important contact moments with the target audience).

As the drawing above illustrates, during the implementation phase more people become closely involved in the work of the program. You should be aware that this is also the first time that you meet pragmatists that hook into the details of the testing and conservatives who start to wonder what this is going to mean for them.

You will feel as if the big boulder of the project has reached a tipping point and is now rolling downhill. In other words: from now on you will have to pace the majority of pragmatists and conservatives who will be pushing you for concrete details. Therefore, during your communication it is important that you set the right expectations and that you do not over-promise with regards to delivering prototypes and demonstrating solutions. It is painful to be applauded for the demonstration of a certain solution only to find out that you overlooked some important elements because you did not consult the implementation team at large.

Your team is probably a big team by now and you must align solutions internally first before making promises to the organization. Minor and major incidents in this area will make you aware that you will need to centralize communication as you are approaching the delivery.

So if there is one sentence that you should keep telling yourself when your project is in the delivery mode it’s this one: ‘Let’s keep it simple and make sure we’re on the same page’.

Good luck!

______________________
In the illustration I make use of the following specific terms and representations:
1. The bell-shaped graph: Rogers, E.: Diffusion of Innovations, Free Press 1962
2. "The Chasm": Moore, G.A.: Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers, HarperBusiness 1999
3. "The Tipping Point": Gladwell, M.: The Tipping Point. How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,Little Brown 2000

The End of the Platonic Dish
Moskowitz discovered that consumers don’t know what they desire if what they desire does not yet exist. This was a major breakthrough because until then people in the food industry thought that there was only one way to make a perfect dish that looked and tasted absolutely right. Gladwell calls this the ‘platonic dish’.
 
Horizontal Segmentation
Moskowitz ended the search of human universals (‘one best way’) and started looking for the sources of human variability.  Howard Moskowitz created a new paradigm in the food industry when he proved that there are no universals. If you offer a variety of perfect dishes the satisfaction of your target audiences is higher than the overall satisfaction of the platonic dish. Moskowitz invented horizontal segmentation that is abundant in todays food industry.

A Case for Blended Learning and Blended Communication
However, this fundamental insight is still untapped for organizational change management programs. Would it be true that you can reach a higher satisfaction if you embrace the diversity of the target population? This would mean that segmentation and a proper marketing approach would lead to higher satisfaction and less resistance against the change program.

In practice, one would be offering different ways to support the change so the target audience can pick and mix their perfect Pepsi (i.e. learning blend or communication blend). I’d say it’s worth a try since our goal in organizational change is to foster a learning relationship with the target audience. In the end, what would lead to more ownership of the future state? A. the platonic dish? B. the variety that suits my needs?

Leading change involves building demand for change by managing three different groups: sponsors, agents, and targets. According to Connor (1992) these groups can be defined as follows

Target
This is an individual or entity that will be required to change behavior and actions. They are the most important people in the change process, because if the they reject change, it will fail. However, the way they are commonly referred to is: ‘not me’, ‘they’, ‘them’, ‘those people’, ‘the users’, ‘it’, etc. Of course people love to be tagged like that!

Sponsor
This is the individual or entity with responsibility for the success of a change initiative, and the necessary authority to commit required resources to the initiative. They possess sufficient organizational power to either initiate resource commitment (Authorizing Sponsor) or reinforce the change at the local level (Reinforcing Sponsor).
Common denominator? ‘They’, ‘them’, ‘it’, ‘the ivory tower’, ‘because they said so’, etc. Of course we make sure they never hear us tagging them as such.

Agent
This person is empowered by the sponsor to carry out specific tasks related to the change initiative. Mostly tagged as: ‘they’, ‘them’, ‘who do they think they are’, ‘the project’, ‘not me’, ‘over my dead body’, ‘those consultants’, etc. Of course, change agents are appointed robots, trained and paid to hear that stuff all day, so they don’t mind.

Warcraft Wisdom
OK – so let’s put the sarcasm aside and get to the point: oddly enough the best knowledge on how to guide an organization through a change comes from the army. As Robert Cringely (**) points out in his book Accidental Empires, the founding of the personal computer industry and the history of Silicon Valley is based on different kinds of people, like the different segments of an army.

As you know by now, I am quite keen on recycling any good marketing insight and applying it on the inside of an organization. When we apply Cingley’s analysis we can formulate a clear advise on how to behave as a change agent during the different stages of an organizational change, i.e.: we come to the conclusion that agents of change projects should adopt different styles according to the phase of the change.

Initially, they take responsibility for breaking the fundamental structures that underpin the current context and beliefs. Robert Cringely compares this destructive work to the job of commandos who prepare territory for the infantry:
“Commandos parachute behind enemy lines or quietly crawl ashore at night. Their job is to do lots of damage with surprise and teamwork, establishing a beachhead before the enemy is even aware that they exist.”

In order to get things started, agents take on a commando style in order to create the circumstances for change. Most of the times, the project leader gets the honor of preparing the territory. Whether it is to obtain commitment for blueprinting, design, testing, training or go-live, without the commando actions the efforts will be ignored by business as long as there is no pressure or hard evidence that things will change.

Once the path is cleared, changing can start. Now you will need an infantry of agents to get the job done: blueprinting, designing, testing, training, collecting and cleansing data, etc. The most important thing here is that an infantry takes on a structured approach. In the words of Robert Cringely:
“While the commandos make success possible, it’s the infantry that makes success happen. These are the people who hit the beach en masse and slog out the early victory, building on the start given them by the commandos. […] Because there are so many more of these soldiers and their duties are so varied, they require an infrastructure of rules and procedures for getting things done.”

Finally, the new structures are in place, and it is time to refreeze the new processes that have been installed by the infantry. This is the fragile process of handing over knowledge from project agents to the target audience. You will find that there is still the need for a military presence by means of local coaching. These are the UN peacekeeping troops, a remainder of the infantry (note: you will find nothing about UN peace keeping troops in Cringely’s book – please allow me to stretch the concept). Their only purpose is to stabilize the new order and eventually to hand over to the local peacekeepers: the police.

As you remember from the previous post on this topic, over time different target segments are reached by pushing the boulder of your project work past the Chasm to the Tipping Point. The insight that Cringely adds to this drawing is that this takes different team styles: the commandos are the change agents that make success possible (unfreezing), the infantry make success happen (changing) and UN peace keepers and police are needed to refreeze the new structures and habits like a stabilizing force. Does this call for a different staffing according to the phase of your project? Ab-so-lu-te-ly!
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(*) Connor, D. :Managing at the Speed of Change, John Wiley and Sons 1992
(**) Cringely, R.: Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date, HarperCollins 1993

Population Analysis
For starters, in a 1962 book called Diffusion of Innovations, Everett Rogers (*) stated that adopters of any new innovation or idea could be categorized on a classic bell-shaped curve as described here:

• Innovators (2.5 %) Venturesome, educated, multiple information sources, greater propensity to take risk
• Early Adopters (13.5%) Social leaders, popular, educated
• Early Majority (34%) Deliberate, many informal social contacts
• Late Majority (34%) Skeptical, traditional, lower socio-economic status
• Laggards (16%) Neighbors and friends are main information sources, fear of debt

Building further on Rogers’ observations, Geoffrey Moore’s (**) key insight is that the groups adopt innovations for different reasons. According to Moore, early adopters are technology enthusiasts looking for a radical shift, while the early majority wants a productivity improvement. Both groups are divided by a chasm.

Moore’s observations come close to what you can expect when introducing a shift inside your organization, be it a new performance evaluation system, new software or simply moving from one building to another. According to Moore:

• Technology Enthusiasts (Innovators) are explorers.
• Visionaries (Early Adopters) are more geared towards exploitation. They are not especially bothered by the fact that the product doesn’t work. They are willing to make it work.
• Pragmatists (Early Majority) want a product that works. They want a 100% solution to their business problem. If they get the 80 % that delighted the visionary, they feel cheated, and they tell their pragmatist friends.
• Conservatives (Late Majority) buy products because they really have no choice. They are not reassured by having books about the product,because the existence of books implies the product isn’t simple enough to use. Conservatives will not tolerate complexity.
• Skeptics (Laggards) are not going to buy, though they may talk other people out of buying.

The problem in crossing the chasm is that the visionaries aren’t good references for the pragmatists. They provide tales of heroics. Pragmatists want references from other pragmatists. This brings us to the basic insight that it is going to take strong marketing and employee relationship management (i. e., customer relationship management from the implementation team towards the organization) in order to reach the majority.

Lessons from Customer Relationship Management
Customer relationship management (CRM) is the art of building learning relationships with your target public. In practice we often find a lack of interest when it comes to building a learning relationship between the implementation team and the organization. CRM tells us how to do that if we are willing to replace the “c”of customer with the “e” of employee.

Seth Godin (***), one of the pioneers of CRM, introduced the concept of Permission Marketing in 1999. The list below mentions the six levels of permission that can depict the relationship with a customer, according to Godin.

• Intravenous Treatment The doctor treating you in the emergency room doesn’t have to sell you very hard on administering a drug.
• Green Stamps Executives suffer through long layovers to gain frequent-flyer miles. Here, the company rewards customers in currency they care about.
• Personal Relationships The corner dry cleaner enjoys implicit permission to act in your best interest. A favorite retailer can "upscale” you (recommend something more expensive) without offending you.
• Branding Given a choice between the known and the unknown, most people choose the known.
• Situational Selling If you’re in a store and you’re about to make a purchase, you often welcome unsolicited marketing advice.
• Spam Where most marketers live most of the time: calling a stranger at home, during dinner, without permission. You wouldn’t do it in your personal life. Why do it to potential customers?

Pushing and Pulling
The six levels of permission can help us to get more clarity about our position in relationship with the organization. It becomes even more interesting when we start weaving in the insights of Malcolm Gladwell (****), who investigated what determines the moment of critical mass, the threshold, or even the boiling point of a marketing effort. He calls it the Tipping Point.

From an organizational change point of view, the combination of Gladwell’s and Godin’s observations is illustrated in below:Starting an organizational change program may at times resemble pushing a boulder up a hill. You seem to be making an 80 % selling effort for barely a 20 % response. Your learning relationship with the organization hinges on the lower levels of permission, as you are in the beginning of a relationship. You will soon find out that as the permission level evolves, you will get the buy-in from pragmatists and conservatives.

Before you know it, the boulder starts rolling as a result of the people going through the change cycle. Instead of you pushing a boulder alone, the organization is now pulling at your sleeves to move it forward. From now on, you will have to pace the majority of pragmatists and conservatives,who will be pressing you for concrete details.

Therefore, during your communication it is important that you set the right expectations and that you do not over-promise with regard to delivering prototypes and demonstrating solutions. It is painful to be applauded for the demonstration of a certain solution only to find out that you overlooked some important elements because you did not consult the implementation team at large. You must align solutions internally first before making promises to the organization. Minor and major incidents in this area will make you aware that you will need to centralize communication as you are approaching the date of delivery.

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(*) Rogers, E.: Diffusion of Innovations, Free Press 1962
(**) Moore, G.A.: Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers, HarperBusiness 1999
(***) Godin, S.: Permission Marketing. Simon & Schuster 1999
(****) Gladwell, M.: The Tipping Point. How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,Little Brown 2000