What would our sector look like if we gave our value proposition a little twist? What would the results be like? The difference a subscription makes over a contract … “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change“

Until recently I thought that there was no alternative for ‘consulting as we know it’: onsite, full-time, fixed-rate, and mostly during office-hours. As it happens my net value as a knowledge worker varies according to the challenge at hand: sometimes I am solving a problem; other times I am filling a gap in operations and sometimes I invoice idle time (that frustrates the hell out of me).

The Switch

Knowledge follows different rules than a tangible product. If we want to get more value out of my services as a knowledge worker, we should use it differently: by means of a ‘subscription’ instead of a ‘contract’.

Let’s have a different look at the way knowledge workers go to market. In management science the elements of the marketing mix are often referred to as ‘the four Ps’: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Because this model came into existence for selling tangible products, I have added a different emphasis as I address the 4 P’s below:

1. Product: Knowledge

Building a stock of knowledge made sense in a stable world. But in this rapidly changing world an inventory of knowledge gathers dust: the problems we face today cannot be solved with the knowledge of yesterday. The warehouse value of knowledge is close to 0.

The good news: knowledge gets better when it is shared and used where you need it and when you need it.

What if we used consultants no longer for building an inventory of knowledge and more for solving today’s problems?

2. Price: Value in Hindsight

For consulting, training and facilitation you can’t know in advance whether an intervention will create value. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes it exceeds expectations. The value of knowledge always appears in hindsight.

What if we agreed on the price of consulting after delivery? The price you pay is the value in hindsight. Instead of a proposal upfront we agree on added value afterwards.

3. Place: Plug-in

Let’s face it: most knowledge workers are not performing 100% every hour of the day. But at specific moments we perform 200% or 300%. That’s when we make the difference.

What if you could hire consultants at the moments when they make a difference? Plug-in when peak performance is needed, both onsite and online.

4. Promotion: Only the Knowledge you Care About

Customers who are satisfied with my services tell their friends. Don’t tell your friends when you paid me too much for a problem that was not fixed. Tell me. I will learn and in return you don’t pay.

What if you only paid when you were satisfied? ‘No cure, no pay’; that is: zero for online work and only the expenses for onsite work.

Old Wine in New Bottles

OK, now let’s imagine – only for a second – that this model would work and that the mainstream of all self-employed knowledge workers would switch over to consulting 2.0. What would be the consequences?

What About Parasites?

What if customers abuse you in order to get the value and then rate your services as bad so they can catch free rides? Rationally speaking I would be selling myself out of the market in no time.

But I’m an economist and I happen to remember Adam Smith, who is widely cited as the father of modern economics. In his work The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, he critically examined the moral thinking of the time and suggested that conscience arises from social relationships.

In short: customers who are satisfied may give you a hard time, some will take a free-ride, but the majority will gracefully put the money where their mouth is.

And the other customers? You let them go as they continue to build a bad reputation for themselves.

Market Dynamics

In these times of ‘open source’, ‘open code’, ‘open access’, ‘open licenses’, etc. I consider it rather dangerous to go to the market with a ‘closed’ mindset.

‘Open contract’ is the answer for launching consulting 2.0. Again, this is not a new idea as the same Adam Smith mentioned it in 1776. That’s when he published The Wealth of Nations, in which he introduced the idea of an invisible hand to describe the self-regulating nature of the marketplace.

The point is that ‘open contracts’ will remove impediments for the market to tell you what you are good at. As an example, take the partner of a big consulting company that I met about a year ago. His philosophy is to say yes to every customer request for services, ‘and then I work my way out, because the customer will pay anyway’. This person is in for hard times in the new pricing model: No cure, no pay.

The market will tell you what you are good at and vice versa. To put it in the words of Adam Smith:
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”

Related articles:
- Good Lemonade – February 16th, 2008
- Web 2.0 includes Invisible Hand – June 29th, 2009

Important note:
All the credits for this idea go to Martijn Aslander, a guy from the Netherlands who calls himself a lifehacker.

! ! ! EXPERIMENT ! ! !
Contribute to a mindmap on Consulting 2.0
- 04-Dec-2009 -

This article has caught the attention of a lot of people who came back with tons of questions. Seems I hit a nail but did not get to the bottom of the concept.

Therefore:
- Do you want to edit the mindmap online and lean in on the discussion? Let me know your email address and you’ll receive a mail with the link to EDIT the mindmap on the MindMeister platform;
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And here is my word: I will not use your email for any other purpose than having you access the MindMeister platform.

Thanks!
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Whenever you kick-off a large scale organizational change initiative you are going to need people to sponsor it, to lead it and to execute it. In plain English: you will need to staff a project team with skilled people and you will be asking of them a more than average commitment and a considerable effort. On top of that, there is no real guarantee that your project will be successful; projects are like life: you win some, you lose some.

In my professional life as a consultant I go from SAP implementation to SAP implementation and they resemble the above characteristics: a need for high commitment and effort and no certainty of success from the beginning. Therefore, one of the most fragile project phases in the program initiation; when the program is not really an established reality yet and the team is not yet calibrated as an 'institution' with some gravity. Staffing the project with internal people is fairly difficult at that stage and it requires some marketing to do so: that is where you need to think of Nespresso.

As I have stated in previous articles on the subject of 'marketing', there are a lot of elements from marketing that you need to apply inside of your company as you are about to endeavour an organizational change project. The branding of your project is not just about using common templates, logo's and stationeries; most of all it is about program identity.

People wonder what will happen when they quit their old familiar job to join the program: how will it influence their career?, Will this be a leverage for their career or will they be on a sideway? In the first case, they will be thrilled to join the project ('must do', 'definitely need to be part of it', 'don't wanna miss it'); in the latter case they will ask for a firm down payment before they even consider joining the program.

Program branding makes the difference here. The Nespresso branding strategy shows us exactly what to do in this case: instead of drinking coffee, Nespresso drinkers belong to an exclusive club. They don't just drink coffee, they drink one of the 12 blends. Maybe you are Nespresso drinker yourself and then you know what I am talking about: you don't drink just any coffee; you drink Nespresso. You are part of a community; you share an exclusive taste for adventure. And whenever you have visitors you are quite proud to let them pick a blend from your Nespresso box.

Organizational change programs need to brand themselves alike: making sure that people are not 'sent to' the program as some sort of punishment, but rather that they enter an adventure that they just cannot afford to miss; a unique experience which will leverage their experience and career (regardless of the outcome). It is my contention that the project identity that you convey (i.e. 'how you talk about the organizational change initiative') makes the difference between membership as a punishment and membership as an opportunity.

Just like Nespresso, what else?

The subject of this post is borrowed from a book with the same title. The 1976 book Good Lemonade by Frank Asch and Marie Zimmerman tells the story of Hank who sells lemonade to his friends. Throughout the story we learn that the quality of his lemonade is not so terrific and – no matter how hard he tries to sell and repackage the product – the competing lemonade from his friend Howie sells better.

Hank is convinced that bad tasting lemonade can be salvaged. All he needs is a little advertising and promotion. The moral of the story is clear: no matter how good you package and sell your product – if the quality is no good – people will feel betrayed and turn you down. Likewise, if you have a good product it will stand out – regardless of the marketing campaign. Good lemonade seems to benefit from an invisible hand as customers become fans.

Regular readers already know that I gracefully pick up marketing logic in order to recycle the insights on the inside of an organization. If it works for a customer there is a fair chance that it also works for an employee – because neither of them is stupid. In the context of organizational change projects – be it a process re-engineering, an ERP implementation, a merger or a downsizing operation – you will be selling lemonade as well. Only in this case the lemonade is called ‘future state’.

Resistance to organizational change is the way lemonade buyers come to your market. If your lemonade is of good quality an invisible hand will be there to help you. However, if the opposite is true, no matter how hard you try, people will just see trough your phony slideshows, road shows, posters, advertising, newsletters, training and management speak.

It only takes one extra step to see where indifference comes from. In business bad lemonade is not bought and you go out of market, period. In organizational change we tend to ‘be right’ instead of ‘in relationship’ when the lemonade is bad so we push the initiative so hard that the resistance goes underground. Unlike customers, employees have no other choice than to buy your bad lemonade. That is where stinking indifference starts – sucking every last drop of energy out of your people.

The moral of this article: don’t abuse change management activities to repackage and advertise bad lemonade. If the lemonade is bad, be straight about it. Work on the lemonade instead of accusing the buyers. Use change management activities to bring about involvement and participation that triggers an invisible hand.

In this presentation Malcolm Gladwell introduces us to a man named Howard Moskowitz. In the seventies, Pepsi wanted Moskowitz to figure out the perfect amount of sweetener for a can of Diet Pepsi. Moskowitz looked for the concentration that people liked the most.  But the data were a mess—there wasn’t a pattern—and one day, sitting in a diner, Moskowitz realized why.  They had been asking the wrong question.  There was no such thing as the perfect Diet Pepsi.  They should have been looking for the perfect Diet Pepsis.

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?

Below you will find a presentation by Guy Kawasaki. Kawasaki is well known in the world of marketing and it’s about time that the dry and – at times – overly academic world of organizational change gets introduced to his ideas.

In this particular presentation Guy Kawasaki talks at the 2007 Event Marketer Conference about the art of innovation. As you know I am a big fan of introducing marketing concepts in the arena of organizational change management. The above presentation gives me tons of extra ammunition: an organizational change project is nothing less than an innovation endeavor. About 99% of Kawasaki’s advice can be applied inside of your organization for leading your organizational change project.

How to use?
1. You can watch the presentation as it appears here or you can click the "full screen" mode to see both speaker and slides on a full screen.
2. the "Outline" button allows you to jump to particular pieces in the presentation

PS: I found this video on the blog of Presentation Zen, a very inspiring blog that I regularly visit: highly recommended!

The Marketing Mix of Organizational Change
By now you must know that I am a firm believer and a copycat of successful marketing concepts. The ‘marketing mix’ of Philip Kotler is another one of those basics I keep referring to. Remember what the 4 P’s of marketing are? (they are: Place, Product, Promotion and Price) Well, in organizational change management, there is also a mix that applies. And it equally contains 4 P’s…

Marketing Made Simple
The 4 P’s of Organizational Change are not a plain copy of the marketing mix as the context is not one of consumers with a buying potential but one of employees with an attention potential. The idea comes from Bill Jensen as he builds a case for simplicity. According to him it is essential to formulate the need for change as clear and simple as possible, because people tolerate management’s logic but still they will draw their own conclusions. As a result you need to practice what he calls ‘behavioral communication’; i.e.: communicating on the level of the information needs of the receiver (as opposed to: ‘the justification needs of the sender’).

Cooking Class
In my trainings I often compare an organizational change effort with the chemistry that is involved in cooking. Even though the comparison with cooking may not seem so obvious, it’s worth noting that the chemistry of cooking involves molecules of different ingredients to be blended through heating into a new form: a prepared meal. The same goes for organizational change: heating up existing ingredients, occasionally adding some elements and blending them into a new shape with a new objective. In this perspective the 4 P’s are the boiler plates that you need in order to create the exact heat that is needed for the chemistry to happen.

Ok now, back to the 4 P’s of Organizational Change; what are they and do I have a simple trick to remember them?

Well, just as a good cook knows his way around the kitchen and knows how to handle the kitchen equipment, a compelling case for change is always built up along the lines of these 4 boiler plates:

1. PUSH: people will only take the leap into the unknown if their house is on fire. That is why the first step always serves to indicate that there is no other option than change.

2. PROGRESS: the answer to the question: ‘where are we and what have we accomplished to date?’, which clearly indicates which certainties and means are at our disposal to undertake this process of change.

3. PLAN: a clarification of the different steps ahead of us and actions that we need to undertake in order to reach the nearest milestone and the one after that and so on.

4. PULL: the final destination, which serves as the magnetic North or the lodestar in case people would lose a sense of direction.

There is also a 5th P: getting all the information on one and the same Page!

The Daily Routine of Great Cooks
The point is that these 4 P’s are so essential that you should not keep them as a one-off exercise or a ‘nice brain teaser’ (this statement is usually followed by "and now back to work"). If you are serious about making a compelling case for change and weaving it into to your approach of managing your project then these 4 P’s should be shaping your status reporting at all levels.

If you want be become a good cook, it will take some practice and “failing forward”. Along the road you will discover how the heating equipment works and how to make best use of it: gas, electricity, induction, fire, grill,…In the language of Organizational Change Management: along the way you will find out what works best in your environment to heat up or cool down things in your organization. All the best in practicing the 4 P’s!

Deliverable by Deliverable and Never Alone!
In all of the organizational change programs I have been involved in there came a moment when the work ahead of us seemed so massive that we did not know where and how to start. It was only until two weeks ago that I found out that this puzzling situation always overwhelms me at exactly at the same moment: once I accomplished a clear definition of what will (and will not) change and how this will impact the organization. Those moments are paralyzing and you feel pretty small. Project managers refer to this situation as the ‘how to eat the elephant dilemma’.

 

Hidden Elephant

Every project manager knows that the answer is ‘bit by bit’ and the classic response is to chunk the assignment into workable pieces, attribute manpower and materials, define the critical path and schedule over time. Then the thinking is over and the execution can start.

 

But how do we take care of this elephant when the assignment is along the lines of ‘the organization needs to own the future state’, ‘people need to adopt the new way of working’ or ‘People need to use this new software to perform their work’. Regular readers of this blog know that involvement and psychological safety are the two main elements of any successful organizational change effort. But then still, where is the elephant and how do we chunk it?

 

 

As you can see from the above drawing the elephant is hidden in the target population of a change program and it will only surface when you care to listen very carefully. This ‘burning’ insight came to me as I was reviewing the marketing concepts that I claim to be important inside an organization. The chunks of the elephant are actually the parts of the audience that you encounter while introducing a new product or initiative.

Timing Matters

In organizational change things are fairly predictable (within boundaries) once you start to recognize certain patterns such as the change cycle that we all go through whenever our expectations about the way things are get interrupted: “things will get worse before they get better”.

 

To a greater or al lesser extent we all go through the anxiety, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance phases. Another thing that is good to know is that different groups go through the cycle at a different point in time and a different pace.

 

As an earlier mentioned McKinsey research pointed out: anxiety and resistance will surface anyhow, regardless of whether your project is successful or not. Therefore the attitude I choose is one of ‘no time to waste’, i.e.: making sure that the innovators and the early adopters (most of the times this is your own core team and the sponsor of your program) get through that change cycle first and accept the fact that things will change dramatically. Once you have won their minds and their hearts they will help you to attack the next big chunk: the pragmatists and so on.

 

Ready, Fire, Aim!

The way to get your target audience moving is not by telling them ‘do something’ but by carefully organizing what we have earlier referred to as ‘diagnostic interventions’. The target audience needs to be guided through their change cycle, but at the same time the work needs to get done. The solution then is to combine both and to provide a series of progressive and smart shaped deliverables that people can shoot at, nicely ordered in the same direction: forward.

People make sense of the change as they react to the prototype of your deliverables. Not only will this improve the quality and the accuracy of the deliverables, it will also get their minds in motion and their noses pointed in the direction of the program.

 

The way these deliverables are ordered and paced over time is best determined by the moments of truth of the program, i.e.: in terms of what makes sense to the target audience of your organizational change effort.

 

Itchy Trigger Fingers

Some final notes for those of you who would conclude that you can just throw about anything at people’s heads to provoke a reaction. The point of organizational change management is that people will only take ownership of the future state if it all makes sense.

 

And sense making is a process that requires time and psychological safety (knowing that it is OK to step out of an old habit and to try something new). So listen, listen and listen because the cause of major setbacks on an organizational change program are most of the times due to going faster than the speed of making sense.

Another Must-Know Insight from Marketing
Time and again I have underscored that organizational change management experts can learn heaps from the marketing department next door. If only we are willing enough to discover the parallels between a marketer and his customer segments one the one hand and an organizational change program manager and his stakeholders on the other hand. No need to reinvent the wheel… here comes another one that you can apply to your organizational change program; provided that you are willing to give it a little twist: the Moments of Truth in Customer Interactions.

The added value of this concept in terms of revenue increase or cost savings lies in improved interactions and more profitable relationships with customers and stakeholders. Building further on Goleman’s insights, you should know that managing moments of truth requires your attention to be split over 4 dimensions:

What’s in a word: Sponsors—Agents—Targets
I always wonder why a glossary is mostly the last part of a document – it just makes no sense. So, let’s not do that and start with the glossary of this very article…

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!
________________________
(*) 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

Because they share basic insights of Evrett Rogers, Goeffrey Moore, Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell! So here is my small manifesto for less academic mumbo jumbo and more marketing common sense.

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.

___________________
(*) 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