Why successful change has to be inclusive

Change is an emotional topic. Moving from something familiar to unknown territory is often frightening and for many people resistance becomes instinctual in their desire to maintain the status quo. But change is also inevitable, permanence doesn’t exist in living things. This is true for individuals as well as organizations. An individual who doesn’t change stagnates and an organization that doesn’t change will at best become obsolete and at worst fall apart. We need change for our survival, but as anyone who has undergone substantial change knows, while change may be inevitable, it’s rarely easy.

I’ve been driving change throughout my career and the main insight I have gained from these 25 or so years is that sustainable change is about the journey. A clear target picture paired with a solid and compelling rationale, what it is you want to achieve and why, are essential and can even be considered prerequisites, but that’s not what constitutes change. The actual change happens on the path to that target picture - in the how. More often than not the journey is the hardest part, but if you want your envisioned target picture to become a reality, the how is where it happens.

At the start of my career I was a social worker and I worked with teenagers and young adults. They all needed change in their life but often the sole focus was on stopping negative behaviors, e.g. stop substance abuse, stop skipping school etc. One of the biggest deficits in the way these individuals were met was listening. Not in the sense that me and my colleagues didn’t listen to them, we did, but in the sense that by the time they ended up with us they were so used to fighting against other peoples’ vision of what needed to change and why that their own thought process had stopped. They were too busy with their resistance in the here and now to even think about what could happen tomorrow. They weren’t used to being included in the conversation about their lives. What has to be true for you to be able to go back to school? What are the steps we can take together?

I have seen the same in business. A need for change is recognized, and more often than not this need is driven by an increased need for revenue or efficiency, be that a cost saving process change or a more fundamental pivot to the company strategy - something has to change. This is when you start working on the target picture, the vision of the future that you want to construct. But a vision alone is not enough, not matter how inspiring and hopeful it is, you also need to figure out how to get there and to be successful you need the impacted individuals to be active participants in that journey.

Early on in my career in tech I was involved in a global project with the objective of changing a key documentation solution. This solution was a core system for many different roles in the company and changing it meant a huge disruption to the way people worked. By the time I joined the project it had been churning for a long time and the current delay had already passed the one year mark. It was clear something needed to be done and together with several other colleagues I started working on how to turn the project around.

The very first thing we realized was that not only was there a lack of buy-in for the project, it was also not well understood - the target picture was not clear to anyone. Needless to say the most common opinion about the project was “why are we doing this when the old solution works perfectly fine?”. Except it wasn’t working “perfectly fine” and further more it would not be compatible with other key solutions that were currently being developed, but no one knew this. Or rather, the target audience for the new solution didn’t know this. So the first thing we set about doing was articulating the target picture and the rationale - what would this new solution do and why was it needed? But we still needed to get the buy-in from the key stakeholders and in our case these were mainly the end users and it quickly became clear that they were not convinced it was even possible to get to the target picture. So how could we address their concerns and convince them? Well, we could ask them. Or put differently - we could start actively engaging with the stakeholders. Not by sharing fancy powerpoint slides or holding inspiration all hands meeting, but by engaging in a real collaboration on how to get there.

So we started involving the end users in the work. We identified a group of power users for different workflows and asked questions and sought continuous feedback from this group and their peers. We hosted workshops and held multiple review and feedback sessions. Solving problems became a collective effort and our power users contributed with ideas and improvements that we never would have been able to identify without their perspectives. Slowly we started seeing increased levels of buy-in and our power users became embedded change agents that didn’t need specific prompts to engage with their colleagues, but who were sharing the work they were a part of because it would have a great impact on their colleagues and they were genuinely excited by the improvements. The project was back on track and we managed to hit the new deadline.

While this is indeed a success story, the key point here is that only reason we managed to turn the project around was because we were all committed to collaboration and listening. We embraced the fact that none of us had all the answers and that the best way to get all the answers was to start asking questions and listen to the responses. We had the target picture but to actually get there we needed the collective effort to figure out what had to be true to get to that target picture - the how.

Throughout my career I have seen many change efforts fail, big and small, and the common denominator for all of these failures was a lack of attention to the path itself. Beautiful powerpoint slides filled with buzzwords from the latest iterations of agile terminology and flowcharts of hypothetical governance structures may help you articulate the target picture, but it doesn’t matter how beautiful your presentation materials are or how compelling the vision is, if you don’t have a clear path to get there you will inevitably fail.

When we talk about driving change we often forget that change is not something that’s driven in isolation. You can’t appoint a small task force and expect them to deliver the change for you. Lasting change has to be inclusive and that means listening to the perspectives of all those impacted, including their fears, because only then can you make sure that you fully understand the how and avoid blind spots. If you don’t invite the people impacted by the change to contribute to the how, not only is it highly unlikely that they will ever be on-board, it’s also unlikely that you will even be successful. It was the same thing when I was a social worker. Unless the person had a voice in the how the change would happen it never stuck.

While it might be perceived as faster and more effective to just take a complete top down approach that’s is almost guaranteed to derail you and what you’ll end up with is a lot of very frustrated and disillusioned people. There have been times I have been guilty of this myself, but what I have learned is that driving effective and lasting change requires embracing the fact that the path itself is the change, and to determine what the right steps on that path are you have to make sure that you give everyone a voice and that you listen to all those voices. Only then will you be able to actually drive real change. It’s almost never easy, but the only way to do it is to be inclusive and collaborative, there are no shortcuts.