Forget the cheese and the mice, organizational change management just entered a new era: that of elephants and riders. The Heath brothers published a ground-breaking book on our core business.

And the expectations were high. First, because their previous book Made to Stick was a great hit for anyone involved in communication.

Second, because I judged ‘how are they going to pull that one off, without a proven track record of publishing in our field of expertise’? Let’s face it: they are not Kotter, Block, Schein, Weick or Blanchard. So I was a little skeptic.

Compelling Style

And they proved me wrong, by every turn of the page. As we could expect, this book is well engineered from a communications point of view. They use strong and compelling stories throughout the book and – like in their previous best seller – they use ‘clinics’ to illustrate the framework they are exposing. So that’s already an A from an educational and storytelling point of view.

What about the content?

So far so good. But what about the content? Before ordering the book I felt like one of the organizational change practitioner’s on LinkedIn paraphrased it: “this book seems like it’s not going to offer me anything better than the proven techniques put out there by experts in change management.” Some other colleagues stated “this book is not transformative“.

Come again? Not transformative? My colleagues refer to the fact that some of the examples cited in the book have been used before in other change literature. Unfortunately they fail to see that the authors present a framework that is clearer than ANY methodology or phase-model I have ever seen in this area.

The authors use the analogy of elephant and its rider. The rider represents the rational and logical. The Elephant, on the other hand, represents our emotions, our gut response. They are two parts of the human mind and the premise of the book is that change management initiatives need to address both rider and elephant in order to change. The content of the complete book is based on this metaphor:

STEP ONE: DIRECT THE RIDER
- Find the Bright Spots
- Script the Critical Moves
- Point to the Destination

STEP TWO: MOTIVATE THE ELEPHANT
- Find the Feeling
- Shrink the Change
- Grow Your People

STEP THREE: SHAPE THE PATH
- Tweak the Environment
- Build Habits
- Rally the Herd

Elephants … Once you start seeing them

Below is an early note that I scribbled while I was reading the book. On this note I visualize that the rider is analytic and sees a logical straight line from the present state to the future state. This line is best described as ‘Analyze – Think – Change’. The elephant on the other hand – representing the emotional side – tips into the cycle of change as described by Elisabeth Kuebler Ross.

This is a natural process that all of us go through when we are confronted with any change. The point is that people – or rather their elephants – need time to make sense of the change.

Meanwhile, have a look at the rider anxiously holding on to that straight line. Turns out that in times of change motivation is more important than math.

Transformation: from mice to elephants

The real reason why this book is a gem is because the authors practice what they preach: they point out that you don’t have to be a CEO, a president or a prime minister to bring about effective change. If you look for solutions that are as complex and as big as the problem (which analysts often do) you will get paralyzed. Instead, Chip and Dan Heath advice to shrink the change and adopt the Flylady strategy, fighting chaos with five minute room rescues. (by the way, she defines CHAOS as: Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome)

Second, the authors point out that what often looks like a people problem turns out to be a situation problem. On multiple occasions they cite Wansink’s research on Mindless Eating. The point here is that Dinner control starts with plate control. And you often have more tools available than you think: small tweaks to the environment that yield big results.

Third, the Heath brothers take a positive approach and this may be the most groundbreaking point for our field of expertise. Until now our focus has been solely on resistance and how to reduce it. In other words: focusing on the problem and looking at what is withholding change. Instead the focus should be on the bright spots the authors say. Resistance is a symptom and not a cause! Stop looking at the mice. Focus on the elephant!

This book dramatically improves your diagnosis of so-called resistance and puts it in the framework of resilience. And when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change: from resistance busting to resilience building. And that is why I am convinced that it will transform our profession.

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 andstimulates 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.

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

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

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



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

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

In the below video you can see Dr. Wayne Dyer as he makes a distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.

Imagine the following scene:

You are in your house. You’ve got your care keys in your hand. The lights go out because of a power failure. You can’t see a thing. You stumble around in your living room and you drop your keys.

You look around for a moment and you realize that you are never going to find them in the dark. But you look outside and you notice that the streetlights are on. So you say to yourself: "Hmmm … I’m not going to sit around here in the dark and grope around looking for my keys when there’s a light on outside. I’m going to go out here – under the street light – and I’m going to look for my keys."

So you are outside, groping around and looking for your keys until your neighbor comes along. He asks:
- "What happened mate?"
- "I dropped my keys"
- "I’ll help you look for them!"

Now the two of you are looking for your car keys. Finally your neighbor says:
- "Excuse me, but where exactly did you drop your keys?"
- "Well… um …I dropped them in the house"
- "You dropped your keys in the house and you are looking for them here? This doesn’t make any sense!"
- "Well, it doesn’t make any sense to grope around in the dark when there’s light out here!"

Isn’t that exactly what we do when we have a difficult problem or a struggle that is located inside and we are looking for the solution outside of ourselves? Expecting somebody else to change or something outside of you to get better in order for you to make your life work, is something you have to take a hard look at. You are the one with the difficulties.

This reminds me of another quote by Bob Procter:
"You are the only problem you will ever have and you are the only solution."

I have used the evenings of the month of August to pull together this draft of a business fable. In fact, this fable is my way of coping with the ambiguity of workplace dynamics and games people play.

It helps me to make sense of pressure, tension, stress, indifference and breakup.

Is there another way of going about with pressure and tension?

In my world there is.

In this adventure three fish discover that there is always a choice.

Click on the image to download the document. If that doesn’t work you can always copy-paste this link into the address bar of your browser:
http://www.reply-mc.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/the-pond.pdf

And please please please let me know your feedback, as I intend to complete this fable by integrating all the afterthoughts into the line of the story.

Happy reading!

In the below video we see Pat Zigarmi underscoring why involvement of your target audience is the single factor determining the success of your organizational change endeavor. She makes her point incredibly well by stating: "People who plan the battle rarely battle the plan."

People don’t resist change, they resist being controlled. And if we are smart enough to involve people in every step of the project lifecycle, they will be the best drivers of change we could possibly hope for.

In her research she distinguishes 6 primary concerns for change:

1. Information concerns. People respond when they know what you know, see what you see, understand what you understand.

2. Personal concerns: what’s in it for me? Will I win or lose? Will I look good? Is this a picture of the future I can succeed in?

3. Implementation concerns: where can I get help?

4. Impact concerns: will the change make any difference?

5. Collaboration: how do we get everyone involved?

6. Refinement and improvement concerns

Finally she also challenges us to redefine how we look at "concerns": they are not negative, they are just unanswered questions!

Related articles:
- Know-Feel-Do = Bottom Line of Communication – December 28th, 2008
- Music and Leadership – July 20th, 2008
- It’s About Involvement, Stupid! – June 1st, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking at the kind of conversations one can have in a project context.  The ones I have been involved in can be categorized in three groups:

1. Polite discussions: interactions on a level of political correctness. No harm done, but nothing gained either on the level of creativity or relationship.

2. Passionate discussions: Above and beyond the exchange of information and facts. These moments can be filled with joy, sadness, fear, but most of the times they are guided by anger and frustration (Yep: such is life on large scal projects). The point is that there is a counterpart in these conversations acknowledging the feeling you are expressing. Relationship matters. I have learned that when people connect at this level, that they are capable of innovative and very high quality work.

3. Powerplay: ‘Mine is bigger than yours’  and command and control discussions where one party needs to win on the other’s expense. I have learned that these suck the last drop of motivation and commitment out of people in the long run. The result is only as good as the IQ of the winner (which, most of the times resembles Rambo’s instead of Einstein’s).

For the sake of simplifying reality so that it fits into my brain, I have plotted the categories on the chart below:

The moral of the story: you need an optimal level of conflict for a good solution, for conflict is what ensures contact. So don’t be afraid to show some guts from time to time.  Just one big warning sign so you don’t tilt to the complete righthand side: if you loose your vulnerability in the conflict, you loose your dignity and you fall into powerplay mode.

Related articles:
- A conflict isn’t always a bad thing – Part 5 – January 12th, 2009
- A conflict isn’t always a bad thing – Part 4 – December 14th, 2008
- A conflict isn’t always a bad thing – Part 3 – December 7th, 2008
- A conflict isn’t always a bad thing – Part 2 – November 29th, 2008
- A conflict isn’t always a bad thing – Part 1 – November 22nd, 2008
- Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing  – September 12th, 2008

In addition to the articles on parenting as a management skill that I posted in February 2009, there is one more insight I’d like to add. I found out that the epicenter of organizational change management is hidden in the simple mechanism of cause-and-effect. And I found out about it by being home between television time and dinner time on an average working day.

When I ask my 3 year old son to stop watching television and to come to the dinner table, I’m most likely to receive a ‘No!’ and when I persist in my plan, tears and other forms of ‘Resistance’ will follow for the next ten minutes or so.

However, when I get involved in his frame of reference, I tell him that the television will be shut down when the clock turns seven or when the episode he is watching ends. I can also tell him he can count to three for me to turn off the television, etc. It’s a game he gladly subscribes to; running to the dinner table – eager to start dinner.

What happened here? In the first situation I would be using my parental authority to reinforce an action. This likely results in ‘Revenge’, ‘Regret’ or ‘Rescue’. In the second scenario I am using a different approach: instead of pushing harder I take one step back – BUT I STICK TO THE OBJECTIVE, i.e. television out and on to the dinner table.

By stepping back I inverse the cause-and-effect relationship: I let him be the cause instead of the effect of the situation. This is more likely to result in a ‘Responsible‘ response: I give him the opportunity or the ‘ability‘ to ‘respond‘ positively to my request.

The same is true for organizational change efforts. The point is that you can achieve most of the goals by underscoring the objectives, stepping back and then leaving people the opportunity to become involved in the solution. Instead of pushing harder straight on to ‘Resistance’ you are stepping back and allowing ‘Relationship’ and ‘Respect’.

I bet one can’t learn that lesson so profoundly and deeply at Harvard or Wharton the way I did between the dinner table and the TV set.

Related articles:
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 4) – March 1st, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 3) – February 21st, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 2) – February 16th, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 1) – February 9th, 2009

A lot of R words with a particular significance on this blog. In a reaction on last week’s post I was requested to define resistance more precisely. Well, I tend to adopt the definition of resistance the way it is described by Karl Weick, that is:

Resistance is the emotion that occurs when our expectations of ‘the way things are’ are interrupted. Two words are important in this definition:
A – Emotion: the essence of resistance is that it creates an emotion. That means: not logical, not rational and most of all: not predictable.
B – Expectation: resistance does not only occur when things change, but when our expectations are interrupted, regardless of whether that makes rational sense.

As one of the commenters on LinkedIn put it:

"Resistance is an indirect expression of fears of loss of control and vulnerability. It REQUIRES "peeling the onion" to uncover the roots of the affective reaction. Rather than being a "bad" thing, I have found that resistance is more often than not a signpost indicating a potential problem or set of problems that if left unattended could derail any initiative."

Another commenter simplified the definition (I like that a lot!) in a way that negative connotations are almost gone:

"It’s often seen as a negative, however, it turns the light on to areas that really need attention. Just like the voice of our GPS saying, "recalculating" "

Yet another commenter continued:

"We struggle to find a place to put ‘resistance’, so that is doesn’t interfere with the ‘work’ or the outcomes. Seems to me that when we stop fighting it and see it for what it is (without judgment) we may understand better how to use it as a tool more effectively." - Embracing resistance (like the statue in picture above)

And that is indeed the whole point: whether or not we categorize a certain behavior such or so; the difference is in the response we give. And the response can be one of Resentment, Regret, Rescue OR…. RESPECT. The whole point is that we choose our responses to the world.

Finally: thank you to all commenters on this blog and on Linkedin for fueling this discussion!