Making change happen- taking risks

Another excerpt from my life as a change manager. This week it's all about taking the leap into doing something different and how hard that initial leap can be. In a series of difficult conversations with people who were not making change happen I looked for ideas on how to break the deadlock.

They each agreed that the change was a good idea. Some of them felt it made sense in the current business climate and some even felt it was long overdue. So they could appreciate the "driving forces" for the change.

They were happy to discuss the advantages that the Change would bring to them personally, which reinforced their view that the change was a good idea. So there is strong support for the change.

But when I came to actually getting people to work differently they gave me a whole list of reasons why it wasn't possible:

• It will upset customers/suppliers/other parts of the organisation
• it isn't the right time;
• people (not clarifying who these 'people' are) are too busy, not yet trained etc.

This is a classic case of what Lewin called homeostasis i.e. getting stuck in the comfortable status quo.

What has worked to galvanize action and begin to make the change a reality is my ability to sell the changes as "a trial run", an experiment whose sole purpose is to collect data on what is workable. I am selling change as a temporary move not a permanent shift.

The conversations that produce the most action are those where we plan both the change and the back out activities. So we get into the details of how we will return to the original status quo, which reinforces the safety and security that people associate with how they do things today.

I think the reason this is so important is because if we just talk about the current state and the changed state we are dragging the assumption of permanency that people associate with what they do today to what we are planning to change. So the change feels like there is no going back. This is why so many people create delays associated with perfecting the change because they cannot conceive of a time when they could move back if it doesn't work.

So talk about how to return to the status quo before piloting any aspect of the change:

1. Make sure this conversation leads to a detailed description of the circumstances that would lead to a cancellation of the pilot.

2. Agree what to measure to indicate if the pilot is delivering the desired results.

3. Create as many indicators as possible, including things that can be noticed from the very start of the new ways of working.

- These can be measures of how many people have logged on to new systems, how many people have downloaded new templates or attended 'surgeries' to access help to work in new ways.

- Move on to measures of use and don't be frightened to include measures of mistakes and rework that will increase as people try things out for the first time.

- Make sure everyone agrees that increased errors are a success story because it equates to more people participating.

- Finally create a series of improvement measures. For example look for any indicators of time saved, less steps in a process, more completed tasks, less rework.

If you can have these conversations then in my experience you get two outcomes:

1. People give the Change a go because "it isn't forever" so it is less threatening to begin with.

2. Very few teams abandon the pilot and return to the old ways of working because all of the measures help them to see in a very clear way that progress has been achieved and that this would all be lost if they went back to the old approach.

I hope this helps but please share your own stories and advice.