About 10 years ago I saw a movie about stormchasers called Twister.  In order to create a better warning system, they hunted violent tornados in Oklahoma with a complex measuring instrument called Dorothy. Dorothy contained small balls that needed to get inside the tornado whilst sending back huge amounts of data. Of course, the biggest trouble for the heroes of the movie (apart from the romance that the storywriter weaved in) was to insert the measuring device into the very heart of the tornado. Despite their skills, planning and preparation, nature wasn’t picking up Dorothy. To their frustration it took several try-outs before they discovered that Dorothy was too light and fell over each time the eye of the storm approached.

It is pretty much the same frustration whenever I build a measuring instrument on organizational change projects: the biggest trouble is to get the instrument inside the tornado. Quite recently my team built a Dorothy that needed to track ‘who will do what in the future’, based on a list of employees and a number of future roles, which were derived from the blueprinted business processes. We experienced quite some practical problems to get our Dorothy inside and a setback on our schedule. However, in return of my frustration, there are some major learnings that I can share with you now:

1. Designing Dorothy. A measuring instrument should be light enough to get picked up and used by the target audience and stable enough so it does not fall over once the major audience starts using it. We discovered that web-based technology is a virtue for this kind of measurements, because it allows you to have multiple users at the same time, that it needs no installation of any add-ons, and that the design allows you to make it simple to understand and easy to use.

2. Making sure that Dorothy will get picked up. We did this by making sure that users could get more out of the application than they put in; this is the so-called WIIFM (What’s In It For Me). In our case the extensive reporting allowed users to compare their input with that of others sites and users; so the ‘how am I doing compared to the rest of the organization’ proved to be an element that motivated them to massively use and refine their input.

3. Finally, never underestimate nature’s ability to frustrate the s**t out of you. It is quite tiring to bump into a tornado where you "just can’t get the data out" because people just won’t pick up your instrument before their conditions are being met. For example, one of the sites attached quite some importance to some additional check-boxes in the application and simply did not want to use it before that condition was met. Another example: it took quite a while to convince people that a spreadsheet was only half as effective as the web-based application.  We reached the tipping point by getting together in a local conversation where we spent more than 50% of the time listening instead of pushing our point-of-view and then demonstrating the tool with their datasets. We countered the so-called ‘resistance’ with ‘respect’ instead of ‘being right’.

More often than not it takes several try-outs and push-backs from the organization before people even allow you to go ahead with the measurement. But once the tornado picks up Dorothy, there is a wealth of information that becomes available – that is: if you have the perseverance to make it through the try-outs. It is my contention that frustration and failure is part of the job. Preparation is one thing, but improving your prototype based on try-outs is also a must.

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…

Last week I explained how naivety and co-incidence have more to do with innovation than intelligence and analysis. That was my inconvenient truth number 1. The second one comes from the same session that I conducted with my co-speaker and this one was a bit tougher for me to take. But the feedback one resists the most is the truest of all.

So here we go. At the end of the session each participant had the freedom to share their thoughts. One of the participants gave me some food for thought: ‘when you promote involvement, naivety and pragmatism aren’t you just manipulating people into believing that they control the situation? Isn’t your profession all about making people believe different things than they really do?’

No need to mention that I wanted to defend myself from that ‘judgment’. I had plenty of ammunition and an itchy trigger finger. Luckily the facilitator told me that the only answer I was allowed to give was ‘thank you for the feedback’. Now – a few months later – I am grateful for that.

So here’s my answer to that question: yes, we are manipulators. Accepting this truth is a first step to achieving excellence in our profession as an organizational change practitioner.

Let me explain. Our profession is one of getting people out of a comfort zone, into a new reality and making sure that they adapt and cope with that new reality. I can assure you that this takes a nudge (manipulation) from time to time.  Here’s the thing: people don’t like to change, not for the worse, not for the better. Democracy will not get this job done, military discipline gives a higher succes rate.

The question is: how can we do that with integrity? Well, being aware of the fact that you manipulate people is the key to seeing and respecting some boundaries.

Boundary 1: Don’t touch the simple truth (lying). 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.”  Instead of adding cosmetics to the truth, our job is to help people making sense of it.

Boundary 2: respect the freedom of choice (coercion). Sometimes people will opt out. Consciously or unconsciously. People have the right to experience the consequences of not changing. We should not rescue them for that matter.

Are there other boundaries you can think of?

A few months ago I was a co-guest-speaker for a foundation of voluntary workers who give support to adolescents in trouble (problematic family situations, psychiatric disorders, young mothers, etc.). The topic was innovation and how they could learn from best practices in both the non-profit and the profit sector. There were less than 15 participants – each of them managing a foundation in the ‘adolescent care sector’ – and there was good interaction and sharing of ideas.

Together with the other guest speaker – the director of a foundation that is considered an innovator in that segment - we concluded that innovation is a matter of human factors and mindsets, rather than technological acumen. To summarize, there were six levers to innovation we put on the forefront:

1. Pragmatism: this is the theme that Tom Peters would translate as ‘They say plan it, I say do it‘. In each innovation and renewal exercise there is a thinking phase and a doing phase. The geniality of innovation lies in the second phase. ‘Real innovation’ so to speak is ‘a reaction to the prototype’.

2. Naivety: some would say ‘ignorance is bliss‘. My co-speaker rephrased it as ‘if it’s a good project it will get funded‘. Naivety also means putting an unconditional trust in your peers and co-workers as you are implementing the innovation. If you open the oven every five minutes as you are baking the bread, I guarantee it wil be lost.

3. People: Marcus Buckingham would summarize this one as: ’People don’t change that much. Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in. That is hard enough.‘ Innovation in that case is a process of ‘drawing out‘ rather than ‘putting in‘. Regular readers of this blog know that it’s all about involvement.

4. Approach: Adopt a structured approach of getting on the other side of your boundaries on a regular basis. My co-speaker found that simple ideas and contact moments with volunteers, parents, neighbors, etc. were very fruitful from a serendipity point of view. The quote that fits best here is: ‘Do one thing every day that scares you.’ from Eleanor Roosevelt.

5. Leadership: It is not the bold statements and Rambo-aspects of leadership that wil bring about innovation. It is rather the ‘stop doing things‘ leadership style that Peter Drucker promoted that will bring about innovation. To name but a few examples: ’stop your addiction of knowing and controlling things’ and ’stop stigmatizing mistakes’.

6. Thresholds: When it comes to expanding boundaries and doing stuff we never did before, all organizational change practitioners know that the greatest source of bullshit with which we must contend is ourselves. Asking the question ‘What would I do if I was not afraid?’ -just like Hem and Haw in the famous tale of Who Moved My Cheese, you will discover that your relationship with fear determines your ability to innovate. It is our own maturity, expressed by how well we deal with our own fear, which will determine how well we ‘allow’ innovation.

My inconvenient truth and that of many others is that the true genius resides in interaction with people and co-incidence. Getting the added value out of those moments places a different emphasis on intelligence than we were used to.

Intelligence and innovation from that perspective is not ‘the ability to know and to accumulate and analyze facts‘ but rather ‘the ability to interact, the courage not to judge and the naivety to commit before knowing how’. Duh… never seen a management guru praising those skills…

In an earlier article I have argued that Organizational Change Management is a discipline and not a leisure activity. Here I would like to focus on the part where it gets real: execution and how to get all that stuff done in practice. In short: in order to be successful, organizational change efforts are not exercises in democracy but rather military deployments. This article builds further on that military metaphor to clarify my point.

Lessons Learned from Silicon Valley

In the chapter "On The Beach" of his 1993 book Accidental Empires, Robert Cringely talks about the three distinct groups of people that define the lifetime of a company: Commandos, Infantry, and Police. Whether invading countries or markets, the first wave of troops to see battle are the commandos. A start-up’s biggest advantage is speed, and speed is what commandos live for. They work hard, fast, and cheap, though often with a low level of professionalism, which is okay, too, because professionalism is expensive. Their job is to do lots of damage with surprise and teamwork, establishing a beachhead before the enemy is even aware that they exist. Ideally, they do this by building the prototype of a product that is so creative, so exactly correct for its purpose that by its very existence it leads to the destruction of other products. They make creativity a destructive act.

Grouping offshore as the commandos do their work is the second wave of soldiers, the infantry. On big projects these are the multitudes of ‘big 5′ consultants who 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 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."

What happens then is that the commandos and the infantry head off in the direction of Berlin or Baghdad, advancing into new territories, performing their same jobs again and again, though each time in a slightly different way. But there is still a need for a military presence in the territory they leave behind, which they have liberated. These third-wave troops hate change. They aren’t troops at all but police. They want to fuel growth not by planning more invasions and landing on more beaches but by adding people and building economies and empires of scale. They can’t even remember their first- and second-wave founders.

UN Peace Keeping Troops

To my experience, this same distinction applies to big organizational change projects. However, in order to make this approach effective in that context, Cringely fails to notice that you need UN Peace Keeping Troops between the infantry and the local police.

Once your prototype is ready to be tested, you will find that UN Peace Keeping Troops are quintessential in order ‘to get organizational change management done’. This is the fragile process of handing over knowledge from project agents (infantry) to the target users (police and citizens) and to manage the process of political buy-in. 

In most of the SAP projects where I am involved we call them ‘local coaches’ or ‘transition teams’ They manage the fragile process of handing over knowledge from project agents to the target users. Their only purpose is to stabilize the new order and eventually to hand over to the local peacekeepers: the police.

A Best Practice from SAP Implementations

The below drawing shows a model that I would tag as ‘best practice’ because I have been refining it over the course of multiple projects. The yellow boxes indicate the basic principles we want to achieve.

Examples of typical coaching assignments include the following:
– Attaching people to new functional roles and having the subsequent trainings validated
– Communicating the vision and strategy and translating these to the level of the site (‘does this make sense to you?’)
– Communicating the future processes and highlighting the what’s in it for me (WIIFM)
– Local testing of processes
– Implementation and follow up of key performance indicators (KPIs)
– Following up data collection and data cleansing
– Supporting local training initiatives and evaluate the learning of the users after they went to training
– Assisting with the local technical systems deployment

The most important thing is to note that underneath these examples are some fundamental ’soft’ returns on investment:
– By their physical presence and time they spend locally the coaches can do the job of ‘handholding’ that is necessary in times of change
– They provide psychological safety by translating the central concepts to local practice
– UN Peace Keeping Troops leverage the impact of the experts in the central team on a local level because they have direct access to all implementation team members
– If you gather them on a weekly basis and if you facilitate their weekly meeting, they will accelerate best practices and stick to common standards.

UN Peace Keeping Troops need to be there to prevent simple things from going wrong and to help people make their first small victories in ‘real life’.

Sometimes people look at me strange when I mention the importance of psychological safety during organizational change projects. It is a term that I borrowed from the writings of Edgar Schein. Until now I didn’t find a way to explain in plain English what exactly I understand under that term. Strange and expensive words come out of my mouth every time I try to explain and after the upteenth buzzword like "paradigm", "frame of reference" or "change readiness", you can see the blood run from people’s faces. I suck at explaining ‘Psychological Safety’.

So here is another attempt. Consider going to the dentist with children. There are parents who dramatize the event as it approaches and who ‘package’ the situation as dramatic. Most of the times their behavior is driven by their own discomfort with the situation. This tension sucks up all their attention and they transmit this to their kids. Most of the times the result is pretty devastating on the level of fear and tears.

Other parents pay attention to their attention as they know that their own behavior, words AND mindset influences that of their youngsters. I would suggest that their success rate on the level of fear and tears is higher.

The same goes for managers whose organizations are going through organizational changes. They too have a choice between paying attention or not. As their peers and team members are reporting panic, anger or disappointment they can either focus their attention on actions and solutions or focus their attention on persecuting, rescuing or victimizing (aka: dramatizing).

As a manager you need to pay attention to your attention as you are going through an organizational change. If your panic, your people will panic. Why? Because your people look at you in times of uncertainty and they read your behavior all the time. If you’re not paying attention to your words, gestures and mindset, then why should they get a grip on themselves? In times of resistance there is a golden rule: suspect yourself first!

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.

As I am writing this we are about to shake up a traditional organization by means of an SAP implementation. Most of the times this is regarded as a pure software implementation: design the system, configure the system, test the system and roll it out. That is how most software engineers look at it and that is what traditional managers expect of it.

Only, with SAP it’s slightly different: since the software is supposed to administer the way you get your work done inside your organization it is quite instructive as to which standards, timings, methods and data you should manage from then on. Very soon you will find that it pretty much dictates your way of working – that is – if you want to get things done you better align to the ‘way of the system’.

I’ve facilitated about five SAP implementations before from the change management side and as I am embarking upon my sixth one I am starting to see the importance of the factor time. SAP brings with it a number of changes like: different working methods, different documents, a change in an organizational structure, a change in a procedure or a dramatic change of existing SLA’s (Service Level Agreements). Some of these changes are pretty easy to sell, but others a bit tougher.

In an earlier article I presented a framework for positioning the changes accoring to two dimensions: degree of behavior change and degree of WIIFM (‘What’s In It For Me’). I borrowed it from John Gourville (Harvard Business Review 2006). However, since this week I have a bit more clarity on how to use it.

As a starting point I make a big inventory of changes. There is no structured approach to doing that apart from keeping your ears open and being there when people start to worry about the future. This inventory always comes to the surface when ‘old’ meets ‘new’. Mostly a bunch of consultants and a bunch of dedicated business people work together in blueprinting sessions and design workshops. That is when these conversations happen and that is exactly when you should have your notebook ready. Soon you will have an inventory of changes.

Next, it is time to plot them on the Gourville matrix. As a consultant, you should resist the temptation to do this task by yourself. As part of the exercise you should ask the stakeholders (mostly SAP key users or process owners) to map the changes on this matrix. This is what Edgar Schein calls a ‘diagnostic intervention’. In other words: you are surveying the stakeholders but the dignosis itself is an intervention that triggers a change process: people are forced to start thinking about the changes in terms of ‘will we resist or not?’.

Finally, when all changes are plotted you are ready to prioritize the communication in terms of timing. ‘Rough spots’ and ‘Long Hauls’ will need a lot of context (i.e. why-communication) to settle in – and this takes time. The reason is simple: you are introducing a foreign element that will shake up the way things are.

So this is what I will be kicking off next week: harvest the inventory of changes. Having them plotted on the Gourville matrix and then get to the rough spots as soon as I can. People need the time to resist, to say ‘over my dead body’, to bargain and to come to terms with the new reality. Wish me good luck!

Over the past months I have been shaking up the realities of a team that is supposed to deliver IT services to my team. Deadlines are tight, stakes are high and communication gaps are deep.In God we trust and to Virginia I now pray.

Upfront I should be posting a big disclaimer on this article, stating that you are reading only one part of the story: mine. To my experience, the parties on either side of a communication gap tell stories that have very few elements in common.

So here’s my part: one of the big deliverables on the critical path of my project requires a custom-built web-application. From the beginning I have been putting quite some pressure implicitly (never explicitly: I’m slicker than most) suggesting that IT guys were incompetent if they were unable to commit to a timing, a budget and a delivery date. To me that seemed obvious, so I used every legitimate power at hand to make my point. As a result, 4 liaison persons have been appointed, some of the C-level hotshots are copied in emails and next week a web-programmer will start physically in our team, expatriated from the IT department. As I said, stakes are high, deadlines are tight … and I’m the bad guy. Juicy details all over the place, I can feel the spotlights burning on my skin. How fascinating!

As I am writing this I realize that I am on an important crossroad. I now have to suspect myself first and make a choice between being right or being in relationship. Arguing and justifying my past actions will not speed up results; neither will it close the gap that I am – at least partially – responsible for. Here are the facts: the deadline is not-negotiable, the programmer starts on Monday and all the rest is my interpretation.

One of my biggest flaws that I am aware of is my need to win at all cost in all situations – when it matters, when it doesn’t, and when it’s totally beside the point. So I pray to Virginia Satir to help me out here. Virginia Satir is a family therapist whose models and techniques are highly applicable in organizational settings. The wonder I am hoping for is that the insights of the Satir Change Model will keep me on the right track here. It is a model that highly resembles the classical Kübler-Ross model of change.

According to the Satir model, the resistance stage is triggered by a foreign element. Next, people get out of the dip by discovering a transforming idea that shows how the foreign element can benefit them. So here’s my next week’s challenge: 1. discover the foreign element (it could be me!); 2. Find out how this can become a transforming idea; 3. Stay in relationship and keep away from being right. Phew … Virginia, to thee I pray!!

This week I came across an article by Alain Vas, professor at the Louvain School of Management in La Libre Entreprise (i.e. the business section of a Belgian newspaper published in French). Professor Vas – like most professors – starts off by analyzing the origins of the word ‘resistance’.

Apparently the original Latin word ‘resistere’ signifies ‘to stop’ or ‘to oppose against’. When we look at what it means in physics, resistance refers to the force that opposes motion. On the other hand, 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.

Then why is it that resistance in the context of an organizational change program is negative? As I have stated before, a common misunderstanding about resistance is that it is a phenomenon that gets in the way, something to avoid, something to prevent, etc. The belief that resistance is a bad thing is caused by the fact that the emotion is interpreted as negative and the energy is mostly directed against the change (at least: that is what we think!).

The truth is that resistance against an organizational change is an authentic reaction of people that communicates: "I CARE ABOUT THIS AND THEREFORE I REACT". In the above drawing I have demonstrated what I mean with ‘authentic’. The vertical axis describes the intention we have inside of us and horizontal axis describes the behavior that we demonstrate on the outside. Resistance – like commitment – is an energy source because the outside behavior is in sync with the intent inside of us. For a more detailed explanation of the drawing I would like to refer to the following related articles:

• Cracking the Code of Indifference… and Coming to Better Grips with Resistance (May 29th, 2007)
• More Afterthoughts on Indifference (June 11th, 2007)
• The Giant Misunderstanding about Resistance Focus on Indifference – NOT Resistance! (October 28th, 2007)

As for the meaning of resistance in the context of organizational change, let’s agree we give it the connotation that it deserves from now on, shall we?