Knowing when to quit on your change management effort

Change is difficult, and so what ends up happening is that many leaders and decision makers end up quitting right before the final stages of change take effect and success is a mere step away.

Or, as Thomas Edison put it, "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."

Knowing when and what to quit in your change effort is a skill that you need to develop if you are going to take on a change effort. Recognizing and understanding the three core reasons to quit is the first step in making sure that you can work through the "valley of despair" and create a positive and lasting change for your business. Let's talk about the three types of challenge that you will face and understanding when to quit.

One of my favorite books on this issue is "The Dip", from Seth Godin. In it, he characterizes these as 'curves' in the pursuit of excellence. I am going to borrow his terms, which are the Cliff, the Cul-de-Sac and the Dip.

The Cliff

The Cliff is a pursuit that will eventually lead to failure. Aptly named for the concept of driving your organization to a cliff with a long steep fall if you continue to move forward. This is difficult to recognize because you often cannot see the cliff until you are essentially upon it, but there will be clues for you to see, if you can open your mind. The first clue is that their is little enthusiam for your intended solution. For example, you define your vision, and begin to put that into market. The people that you present to are amiable, but rarely ask questions nor do they commit to seeing more from you on the subject. Additionally, employees seem a bit tentative to engage with the change you are pursing.

When faced with a Cliff, you need to stop your effort and redefine your solution to the problem. Go back to rethinking the issue and establishing a new team to help build a new path forward for your organization.

The Cul-de-Sac

This is a essentially a dead end where no progress is made. In effect, you keep going in circles attempting to resolve the problem, but it never really resolves and you are not making any progress to the final goal. You can recognize this when you keep seeing blockers and delays in your project or intended solutions to the problem keep falling short of actually solving the issue.

This is another place to quit. Stop what you are doing and either couch the effort or redefine the solution from a completely different mindset.

The Dip or The Valley of Despair.

This is the essence of your change effort. It is the long slog between your initial solution and the long lasting change that you are seeking for your organization. One should never quit in the Valley of Despair, you need to keep moving forward through the pain and get to the other side.

The key difference between this and the Dip and the Cliff and/or Cul-de_Sac is that your fixes to the small issues that arise move you forward to a better solution. That you are able to learn from the mistake and the solutions that you put in place keep moving you forward.

If you are developing a product, this often looks like the MVP development cycle. Your vision is really well received but your execution of that vision falls short with your Minimum Viable Product. But...you are able to get good feedback on what is missing and you can rapidly prototype your next version.

A colleague of mine recently used a metaphor that you were building an electric bike. The vision was clear to the clients and they were loving the concept. But as they were building the solution, they had to go through multiple iterations. The first version was simply a frame of the bike, and the feedback was, "to make this thing move you need wheels."

Right...Wheels good idea. So you put wheels on the frame and you take it back out to the clients. The next feedback might be, "This is great, but I cannot steer the bike. You should be allowed to turn this, yes?"

Good point, we need to make the front wheel independent of the frame so that it is easy to steer. So you do, and take it back out.

And so it goes in getting your change implemented. You might not have the 100% solution when you start, but each iteration moves you closer to the right solution. It gets exhausting, but the progress keeps the team going.

But, if your leadership or investors do not see that progress, they will pull the plug. So getting back to my earlier post...keep your sponsor informed of the positive progress.

Two stories to share with you.

The first story was around, what we thought was, an amazing idea that we took to market. The vision was well received by many of our clients and our execution was solid. But when we launched the effort, we only were able to sell it to about 3 clients. The rest struggled to wrap their heads around how they would implement the solution. Our investor pulled the plug on the concept...rightfully so. We had market feedback that it was not an item they could budget for nor implement. We were heading towards a Cliff and we needed to change. We stopped the effort on this idea and reframed the work we did. Eventually, success was found with the new solution.

The second effort we were charged with launching a new direction for the company because we had "ran out of market" on the old concept (Read this for clue's as to why that happened). We defined a vision and started launching MVP product into market. With every new release we were getting closer to the solution. We got to a point were our High Fidelity prototypes were resonating with the clients. We were essentially 60 days from matching the product to the vision we put into place. Then the board pulled the plug. They forced a huge layoff and the vision was destroyed.

As much as I agree with the investors in the first story I disagreed with the investors in the second story. It eventually killed off that business and it shuttered its doors within a year of that decision.

The lesson here is that recognizing the difference between the two struggles was a key to making it through the change effort. Coupled with solid communication with the sponsors and leadership through the valley of despair allowed for success in one instance and created failure in the other.

If you are facing any of the curves in your endeavors, reach out and we can talk them through.