One of the most powerful transformation methods does not require much support from management—in fact, it could even be hindered by a management mandate. This occurs because often seemingly insignificant changes in behavior can profoundly affect organizational performance. Yet those key, high-leverage behaviors usually cannot be determined by outsiders like management or other experts. Rather, the high-leverage behaviors are discovered by an individual or group through either learning or accident and then spread to others.

This theory of change underlies an approach called positive deviance, which was pioneered by Jerry and Monique Sternin. Positive deviance compares the behaviors of average- and high-performing groups to determine what the high-performing groups do that the average groups do not. The comparison process is done by the groups themselves, so that they are engaged in learning.

An insightful mini-case study is given in the 2005 Harvard Business Review article, “Your Company’s Secret Agents,” by Richard Pascale and Jerry Sternin. They discuss a situation that occurred at the pharmaceutical company Genentech.  In 2003, Genentech had created a drug called Xolair, which was considered a miracle drug for chronic asthma sufferers. Although the drug was superior to competitors, Genentech was unable to meet sales expectations.

An investigation was conducted, and it was discovered that within the sales force of 242 persons, not all were having equally poor results. Rather, two women were having wild success. Unlike the the majority of sales people who relied on making traditional visits to physicians and backing up their claims with data, the two women had a different approach.

The two women guided doctors and nurses through the process of readying the drug for infusion and administering it to patients. They taught administrators how to fill out the specialized paperwork. They pitched the drug’s lifestyle impact and described how children who took Xolair could own pets and participate in outdoor sports. In expanding the horizons of doctors, nurses, and administrators, the two sales people had discovered what armies of Genetech’s market researchers had missed. They were successful because they had morphed into change agents.

Wanting to get the other salespeople to follow the the new approach, Genentech management distributed it out as a best practice for others to follow. Surprisingly, this resulted in disappointment. The other salespeople were broadly not inclined to adopt the change. They felt that the two women were successful not because of their method, but because their situation was different. This was prime example of what is called psychological reactance—when people resist what they perceive is imposed on them. Consequently, Pascale and Sternin stressed that affected groups should be engaged in learning process, not just be told what to do.

A [change] design that allows a community to learn from its own hidden wisdom is, among other things, respectful. Innovator and adopter share the same DNA. Community members invest sweat equity in discovering the positive deviants, and, in the process, they become partners to change.

While there are certainly times when people need direction to pursue the strategic goals of the company, the dramatic results of positive deviance methods show us that how those goals are accomplished might be better left to the people who are pursuing them. Although it is common to ask,

     “Are they doing what I want? Are they doing what management wants?”

We we are often better off asking,

     “What are they doing that is working really well, and how can we create the conditions for others to discover things that work really well?”

 

Changing behavior is the heart of organizational change, so, I when I am getting started on an initiative, like to keep focused on the question, “What will people do different?” This helps sort out what matters from abstract concepts or technical conversations.

To that end, I’ve been in a lot of organizational change discussions where people emphatically called for things like “We need to be more collaborative” or “People need to stay focused on the important things.” These kinds of statements are obviously true, and they sound a bit like behavior changes: After all, they are activities people do. But, you can’t really make an announcement and say “you all to be more collaborative.” That would probably just make more people confused.

For example, suppose I am the CEO, and I say to my employees: “Be more innovative.” I have authority to make this statement, and it is an appropriate request in a business setting. What will they do? Employees who are fearful about their ability to be innovative might consider quitting their job. Others might start reading blogs and try to pick up some clever ideas to bring back to me.  Others might start wearing more artistic looking clothing to appear more innovative. Others will ignore the directive altogether. Whichever the case, when the directive is that vague, people must guess what exactly to do, and they might choose widely divergent and unexpected or unproductive things.

To make my request clearer, I could add some research (mentioned in my post here) that shows generating more options before deciding on a course of action leads to greater innovation. This is more specific. Of course, there are many other similar statements about collaboration that we could make. But is it clear yet what to do? Well, it is clearer. But many questions could still arise. Do we have to generate options every time we make a decision? Who is going to conduct the activity?

We don’t have a bona fide change behavior until it is specified as an action done by a person at a specific time. We need something reasonably concrete such as “When key decisions are being made, the project manager facilitates the exploration of other options before the group settles on one.” This produces a hierarchy like that shown in the graphiic, which I have adapted from an explanation in Leandro Herrero’s Viral Change.

As you can see in the graphic, I categorized the levels of statements and made them in a small hierarchy.  I used the three categories, called Concept, Guiding Idea, and Behavior because these fit to different levels of definition that can be useful in a change effort. Sometime later, I’ll explain it. But for now you can just know I have a reason for defining it that way.

Of course, “be more innovative” could have many other general practices and specific behaviors. The point though is that understanding at least a few key specific behaviors is critical because those are what can be understood by the people who need to do them. Also, those tangible behaviors can be measured, and effective influencing strategies can be devised to embed them in the organization.

People who are accustomed to traditional strategy making approaches that start with a vision and work down to strategies and process may feel like discussing behaviors is very “tactical.” They often want to talk about visions and organizational structures. But, those are not end results, and talking about them extensively often results in a lot of slideware and not much change.  To avoid getting caught in a spin cycle, it is important to realize that approaches like VSEMs, strategic planning, enterprise architecture, and process design are essentially just ways to get people on the same page about what to make or how to act.  They are ways to take a statement like “be more innovative” down to a concrete behavior. So, when going through those approaches, it is important to ensure the conversation is moving toward an understanding of concrete behavior changes. This is why I like the question, “What will people do different?” It keeps the discussion grounded in the end result.

 

Last year there was an article in Time about how the Obama administration was consulting experts in the science of influence to devise campaign strategies. The work of Robert Cialdini was mentioned, and I’ve since read his book Influence and thought it was excellent.

Additionally, the article said

The existence of this behavioral dream team — which also included best-selling authors Dan Ariely of MIT (Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions) and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago (Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness) as well as Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman of Princeton — has never been publicly disclosed, even though its members gave Obama white papers on messaging, fundraising and rumor control as well as voter mobilization. All their proposals — among them the famous online fundraising lotteries that gave small donors a chance to win face time with Obama — came with footnotes to peer-reviewed academic research. “It was amazing to have these bullet points telling us what to do and the science behind it,” Moffo tells TIME. “These guys really know what makes people tick.”

I’ve got the rest of those on my reading list.

 

The problem with getting people to change might be that we don’t make it fun enough. Check out this video below, where some people wanted to get more people using the stairs rather than the escalator.

This was part of a contest called “The Fun Theory.”

Here are the winners.

And here is a list of all the other entries.

 

Frequently, the intention to change and organizational inertia clash so that nothing ends up actually changing. Smart people spend a lot of time coming up with the change, but comparatively little time on the change plan, which so often involves only a launch email and an announcement that training is available. But the study of organizational change has taught us that an effective change plan must be carefully thought out and embody an understanding of organizational psychology. So this post will give you a sort of checklist for bullet-proofing your change plan.

Communicate Repeatedly and Creatively

Marketing and branding experts advise that between 6 to 30 contacts with a piece of information are required before the content sinks in. The exact number is debatable and also the reach and quality of the message are important, but the key is that the average employee is deluged by emails and other demands of varying urgency, so any single message is likely to be quickly filtered out and forgotten. Think about putting some of the following elements in your organizational change plan.

  • Frequently communicate the desired change and the reasons for the change over prolonged period of time (for example, 3–6 months). Advertisers don’t run a commercial just once. Even when you are sick of the message, many people will still not have heard it. People need time to process the message—even more so if it is a message that they don’t want to hear.
  • Use different methods (eg., voice, email, staff meetings, videos, etc.). Some people are more responsive to text than audio and vice versa.
  • Be creative in devising ways to catch their attention. People program themselves to filter out the messages that don’t seem to fit what they are expecting. Communicating the way they expect might actually trigger a programmed response to filter out the message.
  • Reinforce the reasons why the change is important, how employees are supposed to act in the new model, and the organization’s commitment to the change.
  • Have communications come from trusted people.
  • Ensure that, to the extent reasonable, change messages communicate clarity on what is expected (to reduce anxiety) and a sense of fairness. Studies have shown that these two elements have the most effect in reducing resistance to change.
  • Engage sponsors in communicating the change and their commitment to the change—through emails, appearances at staff meetings, and 1/1s with managers.

Create Community

One of the most powerful influences on behavior is the community, or the group of people with whom we interact. Through interaction with our associates, we shape the meaning of the change and what to expect from each other. We create a culture of shared meanings and values.

Culture emerges from the interactions of the community: it cannot be mandated. Information that is presented in powerpoint file or on a website is inherently incomplete and must be translated working knowledge in the manager’s and employee’s minds. Studies in adult learning have shown that presentations and reading alone have limited effect—for learning to occur, people must interact with the material. Change planning should include methods for facilitating the learning.

Numerous previous efforts have shown that embedding the change in the culture requires the community to interact with each other to learn the material and develop specific knowledge about how it will be applied. However, natural human tendencies and outmoded beliefs often discourage such interactions. We are used to interacting a certain way, which we often believe is the best way, and it is difficult to start new ways of interacting. So, in the beginning of an organizational change management effort, it is important to facilitate the opportunities for people to interact together with the content, to translate the explicit procedure into tacit knowledge of how to work together and what to expect from each other. Some ways to include this aspect in your change plan include the following:

  • Create forums for sharing best practices. Hold joint sessions with managers and analysts to discuss expectations, answer questions, and talk through concerns.
  • Enable people to be heard and to ask questions to clarify their understanding.
  • Hold periodic sessions to reflect on what is working well and what could be improved about how career discussions and career planning are conducted.
  • Have managers of managers emphasize the importance of career planning and make sure to allow their managers time for the development discussions.
  • Hold brown bags—perhaps invite experts in to talk, or bring in people who have done it before to share their experiences.
  • Identify ambassadors or change champions who keep the conversation going by initiating discussions, keeping up to date on the best approaches, and generally evangelizing the change.

Celebrate Wins, Big and Small

People tend to do more of what is most recognized and rewarded. Within any organization, there is always an existing set of both overt and covert incentives that support the current state. To shift the culture to one where career development is the norm will require shifting both formal and informal incentives.

Some ideas to include in your change plan are

  • Recognize first movers with incentives.
  • Have a group lunch or afternoon party.
  • Share success stories of people who have used the new change
  • Have executives send voicemail thanks to the first adopters.

1001 ways to reward employeesThe possibilities are endless for appreciating people who adopt the new process. These don’t have to be financial—the opportunity for creativity is huge. Consider such things as thank you cards, tickers with names, and small gifts. The incentive doesn’t have to be big: often the symbolism is the most powerful part of a communication. For example, if an executive makes a personal phone call, it conveys that the organization has a high degree of support for the change. The book 1001 Ways to Reward Employees gives many ideas.

Cultivate Feedback

Knowing exactly how a change initiative will unfold is impossible. So, it is critical to gather feedback and adjust as you go. This should be in the following forms:

  • Stakeholder perceptions: Create regular opportunities for both analysts and managers to provide candid feedback. This could be through forums and brown bags, mentioned above, as well as selective surveys and interviews.
  • Success indicators: It is critical to know if the change is being adopted. Find meaningul things to track that indicate success.

Maintain an environment for open and honest feedback. Although there is a limit to how much venting is useful, discouraging the expression of negative perceptions pushes the reaction into more covert forms. It is far better to surface discontent and misperception and deal with it rationally and fairly than to let it simmer beneath the surface. The urge to discourage open feedback is often fear of losing control on the change initiator’s side rather than an effective change technique.

Coordinate Training

A change plan often includes a training component. Besides the common areas of training on new tools or processes, consider training key sponsors and managers to carry the change effort forward. A lot of time can be saved by preparing managers with the skills they need to be successful. Do managers have the skills to execute the change? For example, if you are introducing a new career development process, are managers prepared to have development discussions with their staff? If not, encourage them to take appropriate courses or find a mentor.

Final Thoughts

Although these ideas may seem like a lot of work, incorporating at least some of them into your change plan will shorten the overall time for organizational change to take place and improve the chances of your change plan being successful.

 

When organizational change initiatives are first initiated, they are often vague and uncertain. Sometimes those who desire the change underestimate the effort that will be required; other times, they over estimate it. I use two questions to initially frame and qualify the proposed change.

  • How many people are affected?
  • How much of a change will they perceive this to be?

The number of people affected gives a indication of the scale of the project. That is, projects impacting a high number of people, more than 30 or so, require a lot more structure for communications, training, and employee engagement. This type of structure requires a team to organize and orchestrate it. Conversely, when only a small number of people are affected, roughly less than 30, the group can meet together in a single room and discuss the changes. Additionally, with a group that small, the initiators of the change can talk personally to everyone who is affected.

The second question explores the expected reaction of the affected population, or impact. Although this is a subjective estimation at the start of an initiative, it gives an indication what sort of change efforts will be needed. By combining the response for the size of the affected population with the anticipated degree of impact, the proposed change effort can be categorized into a 2×2 grid as shown below. The boxes give examples of the type of activities that will be required for that category of change.

Note that the items in the boxes are provided to illustrate the changes in scope by category , not to provide a comprehensive list. The implications of the categorization are further explained below.

  • Low impact, low scale. Projects that have a low impact to only a few people are not really organizational change projects. They can normally be handled by the manager (s) of the employees as part of regular responsibilities and skill set.
  • Low impact, high scale. High scale efforts require some structure for the communications and training of a large number of people. Since the impact is relatively low, it may not be necessary to engage a highly participative effort, although clear support from upper management is still important. Examples of this category of change include the following:
    • Upgrading the phone system or personal computer software
    • Rolling out a new code of conduct
    • New procurement or other web applications
  • High impact, low scale. These efforts do not involve extensive communications, training, or other employee involvement activities. So they can normally be handled by the manager (s) of the employees, perhaps with some coaching from human resources or a consultant. Examples include
    • Reorganizations of small departments
    • New group leadership
    • Major changes to the work and projects of small teams
  • High impact, high scale. Change efforts that significantly impact a high number of people require extensive planning and a fully staffed team of change professionals. Examples of this category include
    • Significant changes to benefits plans
    • Significant movement of operations offshore
    • Creating new project planning processes
    • Changing the leadership style of the company

 

I believe that change agent networks are an important tool for change in human networks and that is one tool where the Obama campaign provided a stellar example of how it is done. The Obama campaign has employed innovative, web 2.0 enhanced methods mixed with tried-and-true community organizing tactics to supercharge their ground effort. This accomplishment has been downplayed by the campaign, reportedly due to fear of drawing parallels with Howard Dean, but change practitioners will recognize the methods as similar to what we often call an “ambassador network” or “a change agent network” in organizational systems change. According to Rolling Stone,

Over the past year, the Obama campaign has quietly worked to integrate the online technologies that fueled the rise of Howard Dean—as well as social-networking and video tools that didn’t even exist in 2004—with the kind of neighbor-to-neighbor movement-building that Obama learned as a young organizer on the streets of Chicago. “That’s the magic of what they’ve done,” says Simon Rosenberg, president of the Democratic think tank NDN. “They’ve married the incredibly powerful online community they built with real on-the-ground field operations. We’ve never seen anything like this before in American political history.”

Here are some of the highlights:

1. Early on, the Obama campaign trained over 7,000 people to be community organizers. According to the campaign’s field director, Temo Figueroa, “We decided that we didn’t want to train volunteers…We want to train organizers — folks who can fend for themselves.” To get this started, Figueroa, and campaign manager Steve Hildebrand, held an intensive, 4-day event called Camp Obama. Master organizers and Harvard professors were brought in to train some of Obama’s most dedicated supporters in the best practices of community organizing.

2. Obama enabled his organizers to have freedom to operate on their own, and they did.

Before long, the campaign had transformed hundreds of thousands of online donors into street-level activists. “Obama didn’t just take their money,” says Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s campaign manager in 2000. “He gave them seats at the table and allowed them to become players.” This opened the door for much greater participation and and sense of ownership in the campaign.

3. Working with the founder of Facebook, the Obama campaign created a website where supporters can have their own profile and connect to other supporters. This personalized portal provides many different resources for the active supporter.

Figure 1. MyBo Dashboard

Figure 1. MyBo Dashboard

The website, my.barackobma.com, offers news about the candidate, a personal blog, links to action supporters can take, connections to fellow supporters, and a directory of events in the local area. It also provides feedback on the the supporter’s own activities, such as how many events attended, how many hosted, and how much money raised. This presents a powerful, personalized view for people who want to organize support for Senator Obama. According to Joe Trippi,

“They have taken the bottom-up campaign and absolutely perfected it,” says Joe Trippi, who masterminded Dean’s Internet campaign in 2004. “It’s light-years ahead of where we were four years ago. They’ll have 100,000 people in a state who have signed up on their Web site and put in their zip code. Now, paid organizers can get in touch with people at the precinct level and help them build the organization bottom up. That’s never happened before. It never was possible before.”

Figure 3. MyBo Tool Set Part 2

Figure 2. Tool Set, Part 1

4. The Obama campaign vigorously collects email addresses and supporter profiles. For example, events are used not only to draw out and energize voters, but to collect names, cell phone numbers, and email addresses. These names go into a database of people who can be contacted and mobilized for various efforts, from fund raising to letter writing. According to CNN:

The technique has already been used to counter potentially unfavorable publicity about Obama. A text message sent to his supporters directed hundreds of phone calls to a Chicago radio show where host Stanley Kurtz, a conservative writer, was discussing possible ties between Obama and Bill Ayers.

I noticed in a blog post by Jason Szep today that talked about Obama supporters showing up to disrupt a McCain speech, and I would kind of suspect it was an example of Obama supporters being able to “swarm” an event by calling together their people on short notice.

Similarly, during last night of the Democratic National Convention, Team Obama not only held a nationally televised speech but use the opportunity to organize thousands more supporters. “Doors opened at 1 p.m., hours before the speech, to allow the campaign to hold workshops on how to use text-messaging and the Internet to recruit friends and relatives as supporters.”

Figure 3. Toolset, Part 2

Figure 3. Tool Set, Part 2

In my opinion, what has made a lot of this come together has been Senator Obama’s sincere belief in participative democracy and bottom-up change. It would have been all too easy to make different decisions along the way.

According to David Axelrod, the campaign’s chief strategist, the bottom-up ethos of the campaign comes straight from the top. “When we started this race, Barack told us that he wanted the campaign to be a vehicle for involving people and giving them a stake in the kind of organizing he believed in,” Axelrod says. “He is still the same guy who came to Chicago as a community organizer twenty-three years ago. The idea that we can organize together and improve our country. I mean, he really believes that.”

 

“Philosophy” is word you don’t hear all that often in the business world. So, a few days ago, when I was asked to consult a project team that wanted to improve the client’s experience of the IT department, I was intrigued when the project manager said, “We want to create a philosophy of paying attention to what the client wants.”

Few people would dispute that paying attention to the client is a good thing. The problem is how we get there. By philosophy, it is probably safe to say that the project manager in this example was talking about the values, beliefs, and assumptions of IT employees. He was using the word “philosophy” to discuss what is often called “organizational culture.” But we cannot really change a person’s values and beliefs. More importantly, planning change activities as though we can leads to ineffective approaches.

Only an individual can change his or her beliefs, values, and assumptions. Although some core beliefs and values may remain fairly stable, others shift as we experience life. The beliefs that we have are based on a lifetime of experience lived in certain societies, with certain occupations, friends, encounters with managers, and so on.

When we think of beliefs as something that can be altered through a change initiative, the resulting plan is heavy on communications and training. We assume that telling a person to believe differently, especially when that telling is done by upper management, will cause it to be so. But when we understand beliefs as a product of temporal sociocultural experience, our understanding leads to different ideas about change. We start thinking in terms of how to create experiences for others that will lead them to different learning and different decisions about beliefs and values. We do not know exactly what they will change their beliefs and values to, but we can provide the conditions for change and have confidence that the change will be along certain lines.

 
managing change through conversation

Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block

I’ve always liked Peter Block’s statement, “To change the organization, change the conversation.” Creating organizational change is largely about organizing the right conversations between the right people—that’s how relationships and ways of working together are altered. Deepening that notion, I was at a dinner with Peter at a friend’s house the other night, and I got a new insight into what Peter really means.

Peter was careful to distinguish that his change approach applies when “you want tomorrow to be distinctly different than today.” In other words, it is not the approach for when you think things are going well and just want to improve them. Rather, Peter’s advice is directed toward radical change.

His approach focuses on changing the conditions of the conversation. In particular, he stresses the importance of the arrangement of the physical space and of organizing people in small groups that will encourage more intimate connections than are typically created in standard business practice.


Small group collaboration
One my insights from the evening was that, although Peter often expresses a general disdain for training, performance reviews, and 360-degree feedback, he’s not suggesting that we convince others to drop those methods. Instead, where possible, he says we should architect small, intimate gatherings that will enable people to relate to each other more authentically. From these, innovation and new insights will emerge.

Peter has for some time also offered Six Conversations that can be used to develop the right conditions for authentic conversation. These conversations, detailed in a pdf on his website, are

  • Invitation. What is the invitation we can make for people to participate in and own the relationships, tasks, and process that lead to transformation?
  • Possibility. This conversation creates a framework for focusing on the future, not the past. It is about postponing problem solving until the the interests of the group are “spoken with resonance and passion.”
  • Ownership. We must see ourselves as the cause of the present situation and “believe in the possibility that this organization, neighborhood, community, is mine or ours to create.”
  • Dissent. We must also respect diversity and differences of opinion. Peter says that “‘No’ is the beginning of the conversation for commitment.” Until we can express our true beliefs and perspectives, we are not ready to form real commitments. He says, “The leadership task is to surface doubts and dissent without having an answer to every question.”
  • Commitment. Once the conditions are right, we can discuss “What promise am I willing to make?”
  • Gifts. And finally, Peter calls for a focus on the gifts that each person brings. “The leadership task is to bring the gifts of those on the margin into the center.”

I’ve met with Peter several times, and I’m always struck by the similarities between his view and that of my mentor and dissertation chair, the late Dr. Bela Banathy. Dr. Banathy was also strong advocate for creating dialogue groups and transcending the current system by focusing on an ideal future state. Like Peter Block, Dr. Banathy believed that focusing on the current problems only led to more of the same.

There are strong parallels between the notions of participatory systems design and the conditions for forming community that Peter Block discusses. In each, we seek to unleash the “expert” that is in each of us and bring it together to form a new and mutually inspiring vision of the future. Once the community is formed, and only then, it has the potential for engaging in a design conversation that works out how we will organize our human systems for a better future.

 

Every few days, I hear someone say “We need more accountability.” Usually the person is  referring to middle management. It seems that the big problem in organizations is that middle managers are notoriously unaccountable. But, when you hear a call for more accountability, (unless it is directed at you, in which case you should probably listen up) you should be wary.

Calling for others to be more accountable generally obscures the real causes of the “lack of accountability” phenomenon. To assume that others are not accountable is to imply that they are lazy or somehow incompetent. They are falling down on their commitments. The call is then often followed by a demand for greater compliance and governance—an attempt to force them to meet their commitments.

In reality, though, most people working in organizations are being as accountable as they can to what counts in their worlds. We work in such complex social and organizational arrangements that there are many conflicting priorities, shifting resource allocations, and unpredictable obstacles that can arise. For the most part, the “lack of accountability” problem in organizations is not about lack of commitment but having too many commitments and unclear, conflicting projects.

Those who call for greater accountability from others are falling into what is sometimes called the Fundamental Attribution Error, which is that people tend to to attribute the behavior of others to the other person’s character and to attribute their own behavior more situational or environmental factors. This kind of thinking distracts us from considering the real obstacles to getting things done: the conflicting processes, competing priorities from managements, shifting goals of a management, resources stretched to thin, and the confluence of factors that limit productivity in the workplace. 

So, if you want more accountability, you have to make it possible for people to be more accountable.

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