What is the value of feedback when I can’t frame it, understand it or act upon it? Will I be labeled ‘resistant’ if I ask to reframe it over and over again? Feedback – yes but… feedback that is not actionable and measurable in my world will not empower me.

Blessed with a pair of craftsman hands, a good sense of humor and a healthy dose of common sense, my dad challenges me to widen my perspective from time to time. And he beats any management guru, scholar or business school with the advice that he gave me upon graduating:

“Do right and fear no one.”
- my dad

Kyoto & Copenhagen

Recently my dad installed a new condensing boiler and the system is said save a lot of energy compared to his 30 year old oil boiler. As one thing leads to another, my dad soon started looking for a measure. How much am I saving compared to my old boiler? Although you wouldn’t allow my dad to join the Davos, Kyoto or Copenhagen conferences his quest is one of high importance and high direct impact on current levels of energy spending. The question is the following: ‘How can I see the Euro amount of energy I am spending?’.

Struggle for Meaning

So here is what we did: we called the gas distribution company and asked how we can track our spending in Euro. Turns out that it was the first time they were confronted with this question. But after a few minutes the helpful helpdesk correspondent managed to get an amount of Euro Per KiloWatt-hour.

Unfortunately there is no such thing as a KiloWatt-hour meter on our consumer side. We do have a meter, but it reads volume (cube-meters). It would take a simple conversion with a factor 10 to make the calculation. However, this would not be a good measure for monitoring the energy spending because there are about 10 other parameters that influence the final invoice.

The Whyway

Contrasting this simple question to the TV news reports on Copenhagen, Kyoto and Davos I imagined a Yes Men scenario: stating the obvious question in the middle of a powerful crowd of leaders who are trying very hard to look the other way.

My dad is asking for a simple dashboard to monitor his energy spending; stating that he, his neighbors and every family can reduce 25% of their energy spending.  If only they had a proper dashboard to monitor. Like the dashboard of a car, the display of a gasoline pump or simpler: the price tags in a grocery store.

So we rang the gass company about three times until… Well. Until it felt wrong. We felt like behaving annoying and offensive. Embarrassed. Uncomfortable. That’s the price you pay for asking WHY too many times.

In his 2004 bestseller The Seven Day Weekend, management guru Ricardo Semler stesses the importance of asking why. It is one of the most important mechanisms for navigating out of the control-zone and back into the area of what matters most. In his company SEMCO, they even have a name of it: they call it the Whyway.

But it takes guts and perseverance according to Semler:

“Ask why. Ask it all the time, ask it any day, every day, and always ask it three times in a row. This doesn’t come naturally. People are conditioned to recoil from questioning too much. First, it can be perceived as rude. Second, it can be dangerous, implying that we’re ignorant or uninformed. Third, it means everything we think we know may turn out to be incorrect or incomplete. Last, management is usually threatened by the prospect of employees who question continually. But mostly, it means putting aside all the rote or pat answers.”

The Result? The Wattson!

My dad is not a university professor or an academic of any kind. Instead he spent his life on the production shop floor experiencing first hand what works and what doesn’t. So when he asks a ‘why’ question he is not playing an intellectual game. He is on to something.

How much am I spending on gas? Why can’t we monitor our energy spending? Why can I see my energy spending instantly when I drive my car but not when I am heating my house?

As a coincidence I was reading Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein. They explore he psychology of our every day decision making and argue that we make poor decisions due to the architecture of how choices are presented to us.

As it turns out my dad and I have nothing to be embarrassed about because one of the nudges that they illustrate responds almost exactly to our monitoring quest. Have a look at the Wattson device below:

The Wattson monitors our energy spending for electricity in a currency we understand and care about. We like that. We want that. And we also want one for the gas spending!

The Takeaway

What can organizational change practitioners learn from this story?

First,  that the ‘whyway’ is the road less traveled because people run the risk of being labeled ‘resistant’ in a split second. Peter Block warns against the paranoid habit of some consultants interpreting every line manager’s objections as resistance (see: Sometimes it’s not resistance).

Second, ‘why’-people may drive you crazy, but they prevent you from project cocooning and other defense mechanisms. Think about it: what would happen if you were to replace your ‘Resistance’-labeling-machine with a ‘Whyway’-labeling-machine? The label is not an ending point to ditch people into a category – period. Rather, it would be a starting point to improve and fine-tune the project at hand.

Finally, involving the whyway people creates buy-in and stimulates their ownership of the project results. Remember: Why-people take a risk because they care. Why-people take the risk of feeling embarrassed because they are committed. Why-people leave their comfort-zone for a good cause. Outside their comfort-zone they are vulnerable. And if we follow common change-management methodology we are most likely to label them as resistant and to treat them in a belittling way. Should we not suspect ourselves in the first place?

Whyway-people go a long way to reframe the feedback they receive. Feedback that is actionable and measurable in a currency they care about. Actionable and measurable feedback empowers people and accellerates their change-readiness … by 25 %. OK – this is a bold statement. So bring it on. Prove me wrong. For I do right and fear no one.

This week’s post is a small reminder of something I blogged about before: THANK GOD FOR RESISTANCE! In physics, resistance refers to the force that opposes motion. Next to that, the resistance of a material against an external influence, the resistance of a human body against a disease, and even the resistance in the Second World War are uses of the term that describe quality, health and guts; three terms that I would label as positive. 

Resistance means:
- People care about the stuff;
- People are brave enough to tell you they disagree;
- People have a backbone and guts;
- People are being authenthic.

The below graph paints the picture the way I see it. 

Some additional notes:

1. The dimensions: INTENT versus BEHAVIOR
The vertical axis describes the intention we have inside of us and horizontal axis describes the behavior that we demonstrate on the outside.

2. The four quadrants

• Commitment: what happens when your intention is willing and your behavior follows your intentions. Let’s say this is an authentic ‘yes’;
• Resistance: what happens when your intention is unwilling and when it is in resonance with your behavior. In his book on Flawless Consulting, Peter Block lists some common types of resistance that are abundant during the lifecycle of an organizational change, they are: Need more detail, Giving a lot of detail, Not enough time, Impracticality, Confusion, Silence, Moralizing and Press for solutions. These behaviors demonstrate a ‘no’, but an authentic ‘no’.
• The Stockholm Syndrome: The Stockholm Syndrome describes the behavior of hostages who become sympathetic to their hostage-takers. The name derives from a 1973 hostage incident in Stockholm, when several victims began to identify with their hostage-takers as a coping strategy. It is the same kind of fear of repercussions that we can find in some organizations. People lose their perspective as if they were in a hostage situation and start to act against their unwilling intent. From the outside they gladly execute, commit to the commandments that were made, so the behavior is a false ‘yes’.
• The Otis Redding Syndrome: I borrow this one from Bob Sutton, who recalls the line from Otis Redding’s old song: Sitting By the Dock of the Bay, “Can’t do what ten people tell me to do, so I guess I’ll remain the same". Clearly, this describes people with a good intention who are somehow hindered to follow their intention. In this model I will call this a false ‘no’.

 3. Systems thinking

One of the basic laws of system thinking is ‘The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back’. The same is true for resistance – in an awkward way: the resistance will go underground and on the surface indifference will appear. As a result you have lost every bit of visibility on resistance – but that’s not the worst thing.

The point is that indifference is never positive and always energy-draining. And that is the last thing you want to create whenever you are performing a big organizational change…

So thank God for resistance and always suspect yourself first!

The political point of view: let’s have a look at what this comes down to when the rubber hits the road: people and the games they play. There is a matrix I often use to categorize stakeholders in terms of their resistance. It is based on the 1987 model of Peter Block.
The major insight here is that conflict has two dimensions:

• Trust: Can we rely on the stakeholder’s support or are they avoiding ownership of the program?
• Agreement: Are we in agreement about the content of the program?

The point of the diagram below is that we need to get the most important stakeholders on the right-hand side into a relationship of trust. Second – and most important – disagreement is actually an accelerator, provided that it happens in a relationship of trust.  Never mistake a lack of agreement with a lack of trust!

The above matrix tells us that we need a healthy mix of:

• Allies who fuel our vision, and
• Opponents who bring out the best in us.

For those stakeholders that are situated low in trust, there are two types you are likely to encounter:

• Bedfellows (or better even ‘one night stands’): these are the most difficult to get a hold on because they seemingly agree on the surface of face-to-face discussions and meetings. However, as we follow up on their commitments and actions we discover discrepancies. The advice here is to start an individual conversation about what is going on their level of commitment (a conversation about the conversation) in order to bring to the surface whatever is blocking them. It takes courage to start these conversations.
• Adversaries: Just like bedfellows, they are low in trust, but at least they are straight about it. It is likely that you will run into people of this type, openly declaring that they are against this program. If you do, you should approach them in the same way as bedfellows: a conversation about their commitment.

If this all seems a bit too theoretical for you, let’s have a look at a real life example. The mapping below is one that we did for the stakeholders of a major ERP implementation for a multinational in the construction equipment industry.

Here is what we learned:
- First, we mapped the different stakeholders according to the dimensions of trust and agreement.
- Next we figured out that the conflicts we have with keys users, process owners and business representatives in the project are actually "productive conflicts". At the same time we discovered that the agreement with suppliers and customers was more of a phony type.
- Finally, when it came to mapping the support department and end users, we soon discovered that the conflicts were not of the productive type. As a consequence, between now and go-live we will need a plan to gradually involve both stakeholders and to give them a stake / some ownership of the delivery.

As you can see from the picture we also mapped three areas (A,B and C) of the population analysis (see last week’s article) on the matrix as well.

Conclusion: think twice before you categorize, because the essence of stakeholder readiness is trust, not agreement.
_____________________
Source: Peter Block, The Empowered Manager: positive political skills at work. 1987

This is the title of a paragraph in Peter Block’s book ‘Flawless Consulting’. He warns against the paranoid habit of some consultants interpreting every line manager’s objections as resistance. Resistance is often a label used by consultants who want to be right – in spite of the customer relationship.

Here’s a quote of that paragraph:

As Freud once said when he was asked whether the cigar he was smoking was also a phallic symbol, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”; sometimes client objections are not resistance. The client just doesn’t want to do the project.

We can all become paranoid by interpreting every line manager’s objections as resistance covering some underlying anxieties. If a manager says directly, “No, I do not choose to begin this project. I don’t believe in it”, that is not resistance. There is nothing in that statement that blames the consultant or presses the responsibility for the difficulties on the consultant. The manager is taking responsibility for his or her own organization and has a right to choose. If we think it is the wrong choice, well that’s life.

We are getting paid to consult, not to manage. If a manager says to me, “I am too vulnerable a position to begin this project now”, I feel appreciative of the direct expression. I know where I stand with that manager. I don’t have to worry whether I should have done something differently. I also feel the manager understands the project and knows the risks, and it turned out that the risks were just too high. I may be disappointed that the project didn’t go, but the process was flawless.

As I said before, you should always suspect yourself first before jumping to conclusions, like the two consultants above are doing…

… and Coming to Better Grips with Resistance