Evaluating Change After Training

Following on from our interview with Sarah Castle and Janet Peel from the Offices of the Official Solicitor and Public Trustee about the changes they’ve experienced through their MatchFit CLIMB programme, we asked our Managing Director Bradley Honnor about how MatchFit help its clients to evaluate change.

If we agree that change is a metric, how does that manifest as something measurable? ?

“When you're running a phenomenological, experiential programme, there’s no doubt that this can be a challenge. But how we do that effectively at MatchFit is by measuring at four levels.

1) The first level is how people react to working with us – are they engaging? This tells us whether they are valuing it; enjoying it. ?One could argue at this point ‘so what?’ They value and enjoy it, but what does this actually mean?

2) So the second level we manage is are they learning new things? Are they gaining insights that they didn't previously have about themselves and the team, the business or the capabilities? ?But you could still ask ‘so what? They're enjoying it, they’re learning, but so what?’

3) Next, then is are they applying it? Is there any behavioural change resulting from their engagement and learning; are they putting that into practise? But even then, you could say ‘so what?’

4) It’s the result of that change in behaviour that we look to measure at the fourth level.

To anyone in organisational development, or learning and development, this isn’t a revelation in terms of a model for demonstrating return on investment. ?However, it's easier to have a framework, than to actually demonstrate. But it’s more empowering to allow the client to measure the results – for them to say ‘this is how we feel, this is what we've learned, this is what we've done, these are the results that we're seeing’.

The skill of achieving this as facilitators is in moving people on from their norms. Because if you work with a team that is set on maintaining the status quo, then by definition nothing changes. So, how do you create in someone's mind a reason to do something that's new and different, which is invariably harder than doing what they always do? When we always do something a certain way, it’s a habit, it’s natural and easy. It requires a lot more work to start to think about something more consciously, do things differently and apply them consistently, until they become a new way of working, a new norm. But that's how you shift culture in a team.”

What's the magic that creates a mindset shift and ultimately a behavioural shift in an individual and a team?

“If you strip back to these levels of measurement, it’s clear that initially, there needs to be belief in the value of the intervention. Exploring the concept of doing something different, or reflecting on how things are done now—what's good, what's not so good—needs to be seen as a worthwhile exercise. This then needs to move to an action stage.

There are a couple of useful models that support this. Whilst I don’t particularly like the language, the Conscious Competence Learning Model demonstrates the concepts nicely.

If you use the analogy of learning to drive - before you get behind the wheel, you're unconsciously incompetent, you don't know what you don't know. ?Then you see there’s a wheel, pedals and a gear stick, and you become consciously incompetent - you can now identify things you don’t know. So you start learning to drive, becoming consciously competent - you can drive, but it’s not habit yet, and you have to think about it. ?But you keep practising and before long you become unconsciously competent - suddenly you’re driving around listening to music, you're not really thinking about parking, you're just doing it.

The danger is that you can then go from conscious competence back into unconscious incompetence, because you develop bad habits over the years, and it’s not until you have advanced lessons, that you realise.??

A really useful framework for moving people through these stages is ‘the Cycle of Change’, often used in treating addiction. There are various different stages that people can inhabit, in relation to change. For instance: pre contemplation – ‘I’ve not even considered stopping smoking’.?To move someone from there, into a position of contemplation, you might start to have discussions around their health, how much easier their breathing would be without cigarettes. From there, they move to some type of action and maintenance, and so it cycles. It's about getting people through those different stages, step by step.

Ultimately, it comes down to intrinsic motivation. That’s the point. ?We can motivate someone externally, we can be the driving force and enthuse people, but it's only their intrinsic motivation, sense of purpose, commitment and drive that is going to make them do it themselves. There is science involved, but the art is to engage an individual to the degree where they feel intrinsically motivated to do something new and different, and then maintain it.”

What is a realistic time frame for intrinsic change to happen?

“Again, this happens in stages, and there is sometimes an assumption that change takes ages and is really difficult, but that's not always the case. If people start taking actions, then change can be instant. ?The challenge is the longevity of those actions, making them the new norm, even after the initial enthusiasm for something exciting and new has faded away.

This all very much depends on how people engage and how quickly they get into the action stages; then whether they are following through, rather than making commitments they don’t keep. So it depends on the team and the individuals in that team, but for a cultural shift, we typically look for a six-month engagement.

Certainly, between six months to a year you can see significant cultural change. But even after the first or second engagement, we start to see people doing things differently and thinking about things in a different way. It’s incremental, which sometimes people don’t appreciate. Sometimes they look far ahead to what they want their culture to be like, but they're not taking the steps day by day to get there. To use a smoking analogy again - my goal might be that I want to have not smoked for a year. But to achieve that, I need to not smoke today, and then tomorrow, and then the next day. Then I can look back after a year and see how much I’ve changed.?

Often there’s an underestimation of the significance of those incremental small steps. Sometimes when we start work with a team, they feel overwhelmed with the number of things they need to address, and it causes a paralysis. So that’s part of our work - it's about ‘what steps can you take that are going to impact some of that, today’.”