Strategy squared

By Mark E. Green

According to IBM’s 2006 Global CEO Study, 80% of the 750 top CEOs and business leaders interviewed graded themselves as having been less than “highly successful” at executing strategic change. The issues precipitating change in businesses often include mergers / acquisitions, shifting markets and competitive conditions, stagnant internal culture and attitudes, product / service quality, and rethinking the customer experience.

The hard reality is that humans are creatures of habit, and study after study has demonstrated that we are not effective at changing our thoughts or our behaviors in a sustainable manner. Since organizations are groups of people, they are subject to the same challenges – only magnified by complexity and anything less than exceptional employee engagement. There are countless studies, the IBM survey among them, to illustrate this as well.

Successful strategic change is linked to the ability of those in an organization, as individuals, to change. This is an inconvenient and uncomfortable, but highly useful acknowledgement. It has the power to transform the dialogue – starting at the highest levels - from “We need to change” (translation: “Everybody else needs to change”) to the realization and acceptance that “I need to change.” Once it’s on the table, there’s no escaping it.

Unfortunately, mere realization and acceptance does not make it any easier.

Imagine for a moment that you are lying in a bed, drifting between consciousness and unconsciousness. During a lucid moment, a well informed and trusted authority figure leans over you and says “The good news is you’re going to live, but if you don’t make some changes to the way you think, feel, and act – you probably won’t live very long.”

Do you think if you were in that situation you could change?

If you answered “yes,” like most people do, then you are probably deluding yourself. This particular scenario has been scientifically studied. The patients were coronary bypass post-operatives, the authority figures were their surgeons, and the required changes involved diet and exercise. Research has shown that the odds are 9-1 against your ability to change, and this is in a situation where your life is literally on the line! Since life is rarely on the line when we contemplate change in business, it is likely that the odds against its success are even steeper.

In his book “Change or Die,” author [http://www.alandeutschman.com/]Alan Deutschman utilizes this heart patient example and two others - criminals and workers - to illustrate three prerequisites for sustainable change. They are the three R’s – Relate, Repeat, Reframe – and they can help you beat the odds.

Relate

It is critical for individuals facing change to become both overwhelmingly convinced of the need to change and believers that it (and their own personal change) is possible. The emotion of hope plays a significant role in this, as do relationships with people or organizations that inspire and nurture it.

What can you do to more clearly show your people the rationale for change? How can you more effectively tap the emotion of hope to help your employees relate and believe in the possibilities?

Repeat

Like all animals, we learn most effectively through repetition. When there is hope and an understanding of the necessity for change, it becomes easier for us to try new things. Your ability to relate helps you learn, practice, and eventually master the new skills you’ll need. This “training” process will have its share of failures – just think for a moment about how you learned the skill of riding a bicycle! If we don’t fail, we can’t learn. If your organization doesn’t openly encourage failure (and subsequent learning), your employees will never get the chance to practice and become skilled at change.

Is failure punished in your organization or does your culture celebrate failure as a sign of learning and progress? How can you provide your people with more opportunities to practice and learn how to change?

Reframe

The process of learning new thinking and behaviors, almost by definition, alters your frame of reference. This enables you to look at the world in a different way – one that would have been impossible before you changed. When you look at the world in a different way, all sorts of other things change too. Different questions are asked, leading to different answers and to new possibilities. Opportunities seem to appear out of nowhere and solutions to previously insurmountable obstacles suddenly materialize.

What more can you do to create both hope and learning in your organization which will lead to reframing and new thinking?

As with so many things in this world, these concepts are easier to comprehend and discuss than they are to implement. If you permit yourself to think for a moment and reframe that statement, you might begin to see the rough outline of an opportunity. That is, by getting just a little better at implementing change, you’ll be doing far better than most of the pack.

Here are two concrete steps to get started right away:

Align yourself with an outside individual or organization that can inspire hope for change and with whom your team can relate. New relationships are frequently catalysts for productive change.

Allocate funds and time for leadership and key organizational players to become students of change. Allow them to practice new thinking and behaviors by encouraging experimentation and failure.

Although the odds seem to be stacked against you, the path to sustainable strategic change is well researched, sufficiently documented, and waiting for you to start your journey. An understanding of the three R’s is the first step. The rest of your trip depends on how you choose to act upon them.

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Since founding Performance Dynamics Group in 2003, Mark Green has spoken to and consulted with thousands of business leaders to help them predictably convert the promise of strategic change into a reality of performance and results. His clients absolutely do not want yet another “flavor of the year” initiative — they want measurable and sustainable results.

If you feel the same and would like to understand how his speaking and consulting might be just the right fit for your organization, give him a call at 732-537-0381.

To learn more and to subscribe to Mark’s free monthly enewsletter, visit him on the web at http://www.performance-dynamics.net

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By Hans Bool

Rituals are an easy target when dealing with change; they are visible and provide an extra example of how the organization works. Therefore when including the analysis of rituals in a change program you will gain an extra source of control to manage the change.

But what are rituals? Let’s have a look at television. Series on television can be quite real. Like this scene from Dr. Gregory House in which Chase and Cameron are working together in the laboratory. In the middle of a professional conversation, Chase starts about a personal topic:
“Today is Tuesday… I’m reminding you that I like you … and that I’ll be there for you…” On every Tuesday, Chase approaches Cameron with this ritual since she rejected his suggestion to start a “real” relation…

The strength of a ritual is that it conveys credibility. If Chase is not exactly sure about his feelings to Cameron he would never turn it into a weekly ritual. Cameron knows that it is real – and this is only television.

Television (movies, series) and literature can be more real than life itself, but the credibility-criteria is what makes the fiction turn real. Credibility is what makes us buy what we read and or see.

And this is where the series and real life do not always match. On television it is quite easy to focus on a few recurring scenes where the ritual is displayed to the viewers. In real life this is much harder. In order to achieve the same credibility the ritual must be repeated over-and-over again without questioning. The discipline behind it will make it all credible.

Organizations are also centered around rituals. Think about the guided tour of the new employee to meet the managing board, or about the “casual Friday,” “the employee of the month,” or the new years speech. There all serve to fortalice the organization. But they are also subject to a change. When the seniority principle is loosing importance the celebration of this event will be canceled. New rituals enter the scene.
Just because they are so visible they are an easy target when managing change. Bring them in scope when managing change.

For those who watch House will probably sense what Chase will accomplish with the Tuesday attention ritual.

© 2007 Hans Bool

Hans Bool writes articles about management, culture and change. If you are interested to read or experience more about these topics have a look at: [http://www.astorwhite.com/ ]Astor White or sign-up for our [http://www.astorwhite.com/en/about_news_signup_page.php ]newsletter.

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By Will Kenny

When you discover a great new idea for your organization — a faster process, a better method, something that leads to higher quality products, enhanced customer service, or lower costs — you can’t wait to get the whole company to use the new approach. The benefits of adopting the new practice throughout your company or institution may be so obvious, and so appealing, to management that suddenly a major “initiative” is launched to implement the practice among all employees as quickly as possible.

As quickly as possible . . . I can’t tell you how many times I and my colleagues have seen companies lose most of the advantages of the new procedure, method, or process in their haste to make it the accepted practice everywhere.

If only management would keep these two observations in mind:

No matter how great the potential return on investment, no matter how striking an improvement the new practice may offer, it is not likely to transform the entire organization overnight. New practices take time to be mastered and to yield their benefits, and rushing to implement them will rarely produce significant immediate returns.The bigger the change, and the more important that change to the success of your organization, the greater the benefit of stepping back and planning a series of steps to bring people along. Getting it done quickly often means not getting it done at all. After the big push, with hastily pulled together materials and poorly thought out explanations, employees aren’t sure what they’re supposed to do, or how to do it.

So they go back to the way things worked before. Employees get used to waiting out these “fads”, knowing that things will return to business as usual before long. The organization invests a lot of time, energy, and resources — probably diverting them from other activities that were already planned — and the return is zilch.

Overreacting to a great new idea, even out of enthusiasm, is just a form of panic. Taking more time up front will save time and money, down the road. But most importantly, it will greatly enhance the impact of your message on your employees, and boost your chances that change will take root, that new practices will be implemented not just in the minds of management, but in behaviors on the front lines.

To spread the next great idea in your organization:

Step back and analyze who needs the new practice, and how it might be adapted to different functions, regions, and environments. Even the best methods and procedures rarely work as “one size fits all” solutions, with no consideration for differing needs and resources.Rather than set an implementation deadline based on when you want the change implemented, develop your communication and training plan as if you had all the time in the world — and then try to compress it a little. An implementation plan based on a sound training design will have much more impact than a training plan based on an arbitrary implementation date.Communicate more often, in smaller chunks. Give employees time to get familiar with the process and the benefits it brings, before expecting everyone to come up to speed. Instead of sending employees to an urgent half-day or all-day session next week, send them to several one-hour sessions over several weeks. Follow up. If employees hear little about the new practice once the “initiative” has been rolled out, they’ll go back to their old ways. Lasting change is much more likely with long term contact. It can be hard to resist the cries to “fix it right now,” but if you prepare the ground, and work through the new best practices step by step, you’re much more likely to produce lasting change.

Will Kenny, owner of Best Training Practices, has spent the last couple of decades
helping organizations reach their audiences with messages that make a difference — whether leading internal audiences to perform better, or awakening external audiences to the benefits of products and services. Will has helped companies large and small, in a wide variety of industries, apply best training practices to spread their best business practices. Visit http://www.besttrainingpractices.com/ for free articles and case studies, and sign up for the free bi-weekly e-zine, The Training Tipsheet.

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