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!

Why so-called Smiley-sheets are important

Donald Kirkpatrick first published his ideas on training evaluation in 1959. His four-level model is now considered an industry standard across the HR and training communities. It was later redefined and updated in his 1998 book ‘Evaluating Training Programs: The Four Levels’.

According to Kirkpatrick, each of these evaluation levels tells you something different. They are:
1. reaction of student – what they thought and felt about the training
2. learning – the resulting increase in knowledge or capability
3. behavior – extent of behavior and capability improvement and application
4. results – the effects on the business or environment resulting from the trainee’s performance

Although there is a lot of discussion going on about the measurability and the isolation of cause-and-effect relationships of level 3 and 4, I would like to point out another problem. It is a problem of arrogance or bad attitude towards the first level.

Now that the Kirkpatrick model has become a standard way of thinking, I see training departments taking their own smiley-sheets not so serious anymore. Reactions are not interesting anymore, ‘because they’re just level 1; no insights to gather there!’ This is a big mistake, for the following reasons:

1. You have created an expectation
In many organizations, feedback gathering is viewed as an isolated activity. They gather feedback but do nothing with the information they’ve obtained. This failure to take action is mostly a major step backwards in building trust because, having been asked for their feedback, participants then watch for changes to take place as a result of their input.
As Naomi Karten states: gathering feedback and taking no action based on the findings is worse than not gathering feedback to begin with. A smiley-sheet creates an expectation for a follow-up action.

2. Training is a Moment of Truth
Reactions (or: satisfaction) will give you an indication of how well the training initiative is perceived. This is more than just smiley sheets about coffee, temperature, and trainer friendliness. The undertone of the wording will give you an impression of the extent to which participants will decide to trust the program. Eventually, trust is the currency of change. in previous posts I have explained that training is most of the times the first real confrontation of participants with their new future. This is an emotional moment that can cause a lot of different reactions (from pure apathy to furious anger).

Looking at the smiley-sheet from a participant’s ‘point of view’ AND ‘point in time’ is essential here. We should take into account that about 90% of the training participants in a change program get a smiley-sheet right after they’ve been told that their wolrd is going to change. With this insight you may want to alter your current smiley-sheets or add a question about the participant’s feelings. I am convinced that spending time on smiley sheet reengineering and disciplined follow-up is a wise investment of attention: it communicates that you care about their reaction.

In short: not only are you creating an expectation for follow-up; you have the unique opening of a slot to demonstrate that you care about the participant’s needs. I’d say that’s pretty fundamental from a customer relationship management (CRM) point of view.

But it Takes Guts

In this article I want to pick up the broken pieces that resulted from my organizational culture rant of an earlier post. I stated that measuring culture is the wrong pot to piss in (well, not in those exact words, but I did meet some HR managers who were not too happy about the directness). In contrast to that particular article, I now want to focus on how to approach organizational culture. More in particular, I argue that philosophy and not psychology holds the keys to organizational culture.

Doing Versus Being
Without getting too philosophical we should note that the way you are being is the source of your reality, which in turn is the source of your actions. But the domain of being is hidden because it is not referred to in everyday action oriented language. ‘Being denies its own coming into existence’, as Martin Heidegger notes.

The point is that changing an organizational culture is creating something that is currently not possible in your reality. It is not improving something that is now already possible in your context by making it better, different or more (which is the domain of DOING). Instead, it is exchanging the current context for a new one in which certain things all of a sudden become possible (context is the domain of BEING).

Again the key insight comes from the philosopher Martin Heidegger. According to him, language is the only leverage for changing the world around you. This is because people apprehend and construct reality through the way they speak and listen. In her book The Last Word On Power, Tracy Goss continues Heidegger’s statement. According to her, by learning to uncover the concealed aspects of your current conversations and learning to engage in different types of new conversation, you can alter the way you are being, which, in turn, alters what’s possible.

The Anatomy of our Perception
In the previous article on culture I ended by saying that hat our inability to measure culture does not prevent us from creating one. But first, let us have a look at what it is made out of. As you remember, culture is a sense making mechanism that works like a pair of glasses you are wearing. It determines your perception, i.e.: the data you select.

Sense making is hard coded into all human beings. It is something we do all the time (you can not ‘not do it‘, like it is impossible to ‘not taste’ the food that is in our mouth) and it always follows the seven steps that are derived from Karl Weick’s seven characteristics of Sense Making in organizations:
(Click on the drawing to enlarge)

1. The Past: We make sense of our experiences by comparing them with previous experiences. The organizational past is an important indicator in predicting the reaction to the current organizational change. The past is something that comes walking in through the back door of emotions. People remember events that have the same emotional tone as what they currently feel. Past events are reconstructed in the present as explanations, not because they look the same but because they feel the same.

2. My Relations: We make sense of changes in organizations while in conversation with others, while reading communications from others, and while exchanging ideas with others.

3. My Labels: People are sense-making creatures. Whenever a change happens that affects us we give it a label and put it into a known category (dangerous, stupid, beautiful, etc.). Almost instinctively, we respond with familiar questions: Who is behind this? What are the credentials of those people? Who said so? What will become of us after that change? Do they have the support of management?

4. A Declaration: Words have consequences. We should never underestimate the power of words and conversations. A situation is “talked” into existence, and the basis is laid for action to deal with it. Declarations are the way we translate stuff from below the surface into explicit knowledge. As a simple example, when people constantly say that “this project stinks” they create a climate in which the observation of difficulties is stimulated and the observation of possibilities is constrained.

5. The Real Story: People are interested in the truth, not the details. And people are not stupid. We construct the meanings of things based on reasonable explanations of what might be happening rather than through scientific discovery of “the real story.” Here is a warning flag to heed at this point: What is a simple truth for one group, such as managers, often proves implausible for another group, such as employees.

6. The Timeslot: Sense making is linked to timing. Like an airplane waiting for takeoff, an event will only get a limited slot for takeoff in the attention span of an individual. If that moment of attention happens to be the right one, it helps in setting a culture.

7. The Triggers: Nobody is capable of observing it all. Our observation is based on extracted cues. The cues that we observe depend on what we expect to observe, As a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, we shape our reality according to how we expect it to be. When we think we are going to succeed at something, we will be triggered by every cue that confirms this reality and act upon it, and vice versa.

The Anatomy of Culture Creation
In the table below and the drawing on the right I have taken the anatomy of our perception and created seven matching steps that are necessary for creating an new organizational culture.

(Click on the drawing to enlarge)

Working on these seven components, all at the same time ensures a shift on the level of ‘being’ of the organization by setting a new context in which different things are possible.

Audit your “ROC” – Return On Communications
All of these elements (not necessarily in that order) constitute the key points of an organizational culture. This is what you need to monitor during the complete lifecycle of any change program. A successful communication strategy during organizational change takes into account the anatomy of our perception and works towards a similar mechanism in order to create a new culture.

Eventually, when scanning through your communication plan, all of these steps should be catered for; either in communication principles or in concrete actions. More important, this should also work the other way around: if you identify any communication action that does not accomplish any of the seven steps above, you should seriously question its added value for the program and the return on investment of attention, time, and money (exactly in that ranking order of scarcity).
__________________________
Sources used in this article:
Goss, T.: The Last Word On Power, Currency: Doubleday. 1996
Weick, K.: Sensemaking in Organizations, Thousand Oaks: Sage Pubications. 1995

No regular article for week 27 because I allowed myself a small break.

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.

How Driving Lessons and Organizational Change are Related

Take for example the first time that you drove a car.

• Your whole life until then you have been a passenger without any driving competence. But you are unaware of it because you never tried it. This is unconscious Incompetence: I can’t, but why should I care?; as they say: Ignorance is bliss.
• After getting into the driver seat for the first time and trying to start the car and drive, you know enough to realize that you are incompetent at driving a car. You are unable, and your first confrontation with the dashboard, the gearbox, the steering wheel and the pedals made you painfully aware of your incompetence. You are now the second phase of learning: Conscious Incompetence. Your innocent and peaceful worldview falls apart, much like the disappointment that hit you when you found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real. This is where most people get in the rollercoaster of change (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance).
• One day, you are ready to do the tests in order to obtain a drivers license. At that point you are most probably in the third learning stage: Conscious Competence. You are skilled at driving the car but it still demands a lot of your attention.
• Finally, it is only after a long while that you will be able to drive the car as an automatic response, as doing normal checks, turning the keys and driving off. You accomplished the 4th learning phase: Unconscious Competence. The skill has become a habit by now, which requires no extra attention.

Plotting Resistance Against Learning
When we translate this learning cycle to the context of an organization and start to wonder what this means in terms of resistance, we will find that these 4 steps are a reliable indicator to predict when resistance will occur on a larger scale. As shown in the second drawing, people will only start to react to the change from the moment that they become aware of their own incompetence in the face of change.

What’s even more important is that this resistance is actually the learning tension that is necessary to absorb knowledge. The frustration of one’s own incompetence is the best motivation acquire new skills and knowledge.

Therefore, when you are introducing a new initiative and you are at the level of instructing people on new things face to face or in a classroom, look at their resistance from a learning perspective. They are incompetent at that moment, painfully aware of it, mostly in the presence of their colleagues and peers. How would you react? I know I would be grumpy! And what would be the best way to overcome that grumpy-ness? A blaming instructor or a caring one?

If you crush resistance at that vulnerable moment, I guarantee it will come back later in a dirty and unexpected way. On the other hand, if you consider this moment of resistance as a moment of truth, you just found an opportunity to build a network of change agents.

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: