Behavioural Change & Resistance.

A little while ago, I was asked if I’d be willing to speak at a Driving Change conference, at which a number of other, considerably more worthy, people in this profession would be speaking.

Some time after I’d agreed to speak, I read the brochure description for the topic of Behavioural Change and Resistance : Influence positive mindsets! Combat resistance! Uncover best-practice! Mitigate disengagement! Regain trust! And I liked the sound of this topic until I remembered that this was the one I’d agreed to speak about. Anyway, I didn’t tell them how to do those things: and why should I??

After all, these are some of the most intractable problems faced by those looking to deliver any form of change into an organisation. I might not be the sharpest tool in the box, but I promise you that if I had world-beating solutions to these issues, I’d have had them bottled by now, sold and paying towards a retirement a tad more luxurious than whatever currently beckons.

In the thirty years in which I’ve been leading or implementing change of one kind or another, it’s never been the delivery of things that have been challenging; not the design or construction of wonderful new processes or operating models, nor the introduction of new technologies that have ever caused me sleepless nights; what does keep me awake is the prospect of them never being embraced fully, of them lapsing into disuse because the people whose embrace we need want nothing to do with it, don’t believe in it, fail to see value in it. And what I’m doing at the moment is a great case in point.?

You see, we’re not very good at planning our change resource needs, and we’re not very good at fulfilling them once we know what they are. We leave it way too late to do either, and the result is that we constantly end up hiring lots of third party or temporary staff, because doing otherwise will derail our change delivery schedule.?

Hiring managers insist on making their own selections, they want the skills to be fully rounded from day one, and the consequence is that we have temporary staff who are more permanent than many permanent ones, and permanent staff who are very temporary because there’s limited opportunity for them to develop. People who could become really valuable, motivated and long-term employees simply move on.

Now I’m not shy about telling you all that, because many of you will recognise that expensive little cycle, and it’s what the team I lead are looking to break - by planning more long term and, by aggregating those plans, you can procure third party staff at scale and discount, you can create the learning and hiring pipelines to bring more permanent people in and develop their careers: it’s a virtuous circle. It saves us money, our people feel more loved and wanted, and our suppliers get greater certainty and they like us more.?

We’ve seen unit costs drop already, and our leadership loves it - large-scale cost avoidance that aligns with our organisation’s purpose. It is, as a friend had advised me when I asked him how best to pitch the principle to our ExCo, something to which no one could possibly object.

Now from the outset, Communications has been an essential stream in this programme. Stakeholder lists were drawn up, RACI matrices assembled, webinars held, intranet sites created and updated, overview documents and email announcements galore. So what happened? For that, I need to dig into the backstory of prog rock.

The recent death of the great Charlie Watts, that rhythmic heart of The Rolling Stones, is a sad reminder that most rock stars from the 70’s are now themselves in their seventies or, in Charlie’s case, in their eighties, and that’s a scary thing; I’m not so far behind, so their mortality is also mine.?

One such star, who, at the time of writing I’m about to see live, is Steve Hackett, who was originally the lead guitarist with a prog rock band called Genesis. Now, I feel obliged to describe them that way, since while 1977 feels like yesterday to me, it may well be never-heard-of-it to many of you, so you won’t have heard of them or, at best, will only remember their drummer, Phil Collins, more for his Eighties pop career than for his ability to keep a 9/8 beat (which the poor old bloke can’t do now, as he has a bad back).

One of the songs Hackett will be playing is something called “Supper’s Ready,” a 23-minute magnum opus that took up the entire side of their album Foxtrot. Now after one such performance in 1976, a fan approached Hackett and gushingly told him that, during the final, soaring climax of this epic, he had seen God. “I’m really pleased you saw God”, said Hackett, “because all I was doing was trying to play the right notes.” And that’s the thing: most of our people are just trying to play the right notes. They don’t have time to see God, or any other celestial object. They’re trying to lurch from one end of the day to the other without dropping any one of several balls they’re trying to juggle. Just trying to organise a meeting can be soul-destroying on its own. Damascene moments are for others.

But this was what lay behind my own such moment. “The thing is Dave,” said someone whose buy-in was going to be essential to our success, “that this is terrific: it’s everything that we should be doing. The problem is that it doesn’t help me with the problems I face in my business right now; and unless you can help me with those, I’ll never be able to focus on this.” The colour drained from my face; well, in this case it didn’t, because I already had feature enhancement set to max in Zoom, but the implication was clear: we’d ended up doing exactly what I’d told our team we mustn’t do: build a car that no one wants to drive. We’d built another Ford Edsel.

So how do you avoid doing that? Well, I believe you should start with the piece that will resonate the most with those whose buy-in you need.?

I used to write pantomime scripts, and I never wrote the story in linear fashion: I always jotted down a scene in my head that I knew would work - some comic situation or a spectacular of some sort - and then I’d write backwards, establishing how we’d got there, and also forwards - to set out what happened next. It doesn’t necessarily take you where you expect, but it creates a story that flows and to which people can relate. Make somebody’s life easier, and they will back you to the hilt with the bigger steps you also want to take. Put their interests ahead of yours. But it means that you’ll have to go and actually talk to people. I believe this to be worth it; any communications strategy that doesn't involve the propagation of word-and-mouth spread is always going to suffer from a lack of traction. And, in case you disagree, ask yourself how many corporate comms emails you've read thoroughly this last month.

Not that long ago, I was involved in a piece of work very interestingly entitled Change Efficiency; whoever called it that had either a very well-developed sense of irony or none whatsoever. The task was simple: establish why it was that different Change functions in the Bank had such widely differing ratios of what they called Producers - that’s people who write software, test it, deploy it, people who deliver things - and non-Producers - project managers, PMO’s, portfolio leaders - people like me, apparently.?

As I was going through this, I came across a bunch of project managers in a non-change function. How could this be? Gasps of consternation were audible in the corridors of power. So I rang up the manager of this group and asked her what these people did. “Ah,” she said, “they’re my Change Absorption team. You see, whenever the change function delivers anything, it’s completely incomprehensible to our operations people, or it’s irrelevant; so this team receives the change in, and they then write guidance that enables operations staff to use it, or to see value in it.” We’re talking about a piece of change that will have gone through the hands of business analysts, subject matter experts, developers, testers and release managers; yet it needs a further group of people to turn it into something usable.

And that brings me to a further observation. When, in the course of seeking Change Efficiency, I was scrubbing people data to try to make sense of the thousands of differing job titles and profiles people seemed to have and to reduce them to a few generic roles that everyone could understand, I would always lump change managers in as project managers: how wrong I was. I now realise that one of the great misconceptions in our business is that they are indeed one and the same; they couldn’t be more different and are equally necessary. Understanding how programmes work and driving what is unfortunately entitled execution is clearly a skill in its own right; but helping people to understand the change that’s coming their way, and helping them to adapt to it, requires a totally different set of skills: of empathy, listening, and relationship-building.

There is another way too, and that is to embed your users at every stage of what you’re doing. Make those checkpoints early on with those whose lives are directly affected and keep them going. You might call this an agile approach; well it is, but there are lots of apparently agile programme teams that wouldn’t know what a user looked like if they joined a stand-up and punched every member in the face. Why on earth should anyone be willing to bend themselves to a change about which they’ve not been consulted?

And that’s how we came up with the Voice of the Customer. It’s a very simple premise: you treat internal staff just like the external customers you aim to serve. You don’t allow anything to emerge from your backlog or even get into it unless there are customers that recognise the need and agree with the solution. And let me be clear - when I say customer, I don’t mean a Business Management Head, or a Departmental Chief: I mean the branch clerk, the software engineer, the junior admin. Hear their voice and orient what you’re doing around them, and it will become their idea, their mission. We’ve had terrific success with this approach, even if it means having to make the same pitch several times over and answering an awful lot of questions. But it’s completely altered my view on how we communicate.?

But a note of caution; for those who would come forward to be the voice of the customer are self-selecting. They become the people that you know, whose opinions you value, your go-to representative of a business function. They become self-reinforcing and risk being about as representative of that function as I am of fashion icons. If you’re going to bring about true behavioural change, you must seek out those who do not step forward; those who would disagree with you, those who are sceptical of your ambition, And you must be prepared to accept what they say. Right or wrong, that's their perception.

So what about those senior people that do look to the stars, who do see those celestial objectives and who do crowd around them like moths around a light bulb? Well, it’s not wrong to do that. We wouldn’t get very far if there weren’t people like that to push us on. But it remains an inescapable fact that, at a senior level, people become numbers - an abstraction - and the senior communities they tend to inhabit tend to become increasingly closed, the higher you go. Days consist of back-to-back meetings, largely comprising the same set of faces, creating their own knowing whirlpool of imperatives. The fact that this now happens chiefly on Zoom doesn’t make this a new phenomenon.?

If you were one of those who used to stride briskly through the floors, trying to get to the next meeting on time without once stopping to sit down and ask anyone at random how they were getting on; if your primary means of contact with people in your teams is through town halls or virtual presentations that you’ve prepared in accordance with your agenda or your priorities; if you’re spending time in your meetings telling people what the organisation has achieved; and if you’re concerned about avoiding any negative feedback from what you’re doing; then there’s a very good chance that you will have brought that resistance upon yourself, and that your people will only rally behind your change ambitions and needs when they happen to coincide with their own.?

The phrase “we’re all in this together” fell into disrepute during the COVID pandemic, because it was blatantly clear that we weren’t. But it it’s our job as business leaders to demonstrate exactly that. Your problem is my problem and my problem is also yours. That’s not just something you can say to bolster your image, to burnish your credentials, because if that is how you see it, then you’re already in your own personal Authenticity doom loop.?

An authenticity doom loop, so a Times columnist explained it to me, is a situation where every attempt to show off your relatability is seen as proof of the opposite. Here’s an example. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton was accused of being unapproachable. So, she made efforts to reveal her personality, only for this to be greeted as a “cynical marketing ploy” to get voters on side (which in a way it was). Think Ed Miliband and burgers. The exact same thing applies here and you will have instantly recognised the people in your organisation who are already in their own loop.

Now, you may think that this is a long way removed from the original remit of this talk of mine; but I’d contend that this lies at the heart of the problem. We’re entering an era where talent will move freely to those employers whose values align most closely to their own; where companies need to be worthy of the people they employ, not the other way round. Retention of people will be conditional on the same thing: acceptance of change too. In bringing about the transformations we all need to make, it may just be that the behaviours that need to be changed are yours: not those of the people you lead.