The immovable object and the resistible force

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility, focus, metaphor, opportunity, Risk, selection, strategy, time management

In the second of my pieces on guiding principles for delivering effective change I want to talk, in a tangential way, about one aspect of how to handle resistance.

The one thing that is certain when you embark on a process of change is that you will meet resistance. Perhaps that ought to be two things of which are certain, because the other is that you cannot predict where, from whom or in what form that resistance will appear. But appear it will and you must address it. The point of this particular piece is one way of addressing it – not that  this is only one way, indeed there are several other tools that you will need to use. This tool is particularly useful in the early stages of the change efforts.

So, many moons ago I completed my masters degree in organisational change and my then boss asked me “What was the most significant thing that you have learned in two years of very expensive study?” My answer might seem somewhat glib, let me assure you it wasn’t and isn’t. The answer was “Do what you can, where you can, when you can”. And this is the second of my guiding principles for leading change effectively.

 Do what you can, where you can, when you can

When you get involved in change you will find some people who are really keen (the marketeers would call them early adopters), some who just sit and wait but will follow the crowd once they know which way the crowd is going ( I will call them ‘the herd’)and some who will actively or passively resist. My question to you is “Why would you want to spend time, especially at the beginning of a process, working with resistance when you could be creating change and generating enthusiasm by working with the early adopters?” As you work with early adopters they start to show the direction for the herd and slowly but surely the herd will follow. The contrary scenario is one in which your efforts are frustrated by and your energy sapped by resistors from whom the emerging messages to the herd are negative. All you do by working with resistors in the early stages is tire yourself out, build up more resistance and risk and entrenching yet further resistance in the herd.

So, perhaps my principle to do what you can, where you can, when you can is not so glib after all. I have likened the job of a change agents to lighting a series of small fires in an organisation. Sometimes the fire will take hold and it is those ones, especially in the initial stages, that you pay attention to, giving them whatever support they need to burn effectively whilst not becoming a wildfire. Some of your fires will just burble along, not dying out nor turning into wildfires – these you also support, looking for easy opportunities to help them along and maybe connect to different yet related places that are all part of the overall thrust of what you are trying to achieve. The ones you ignore are the fires that just flicker before dying out. Fire dies because it does not have enough fuel or enough oxygen, or enough people to supply it with fuel or oxygen. So let it die out until such time as you can find enough fuel enough oxygen (enough support and energy) to be able pay it some consistent attention.

To me this Principle –  “Do what you can, where you can, when you can” – is probably the most important principle in leading change. We only ever have a limited resource available so let’s make sure we commit our resource to areas in which we can make a short term difference, after all John P Kotter did talk about realising quick wins.

 

What stories could you share about how this division of effort, or perhaps lack of it, helped or hindered your change efforts?

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

There is no such thing as “Best Practice in Change Management”?

Geoff Roberts change, flexibility, metaphor, opportunity, Risk, selection, strategy

“ What is best practice in change management?”

This, and variations on the same theme seem to have appeared as questions in a surprisingly large number of the forums that I inhabit recently. And every time I read the answers with a falling heart.

Respondent A suggests the following six steps, Respondent B has a nine step process, Respondent C has a commercially secret process which they will sell you the several thousand pounds a day and so on… I can rarely resist the temptation, so I weigh in with my answer “There is no such thing as best practice in change management.”

 

Now I know that this is probably not what the questioner wanted to hear. Typically the questioner will be an enthusiastic, newly appointed change agent or middle manager who believes that you can manage change in the same way as you manage their process for producing widgets or appointing a new member of staff. I fear that most of these people are going to find out the hard way that change is more about leadership than management and that there is no such thing as a best practice process.

 

Now I am not denying – indeed far from it – that the likes of Kotter have a role to play, for indeed they do. But their role is to inform an emerging process which, if it is to be effective, also needs to be informed by the scale and scope of the change, the current and anticipated future culture of the organisation, the willingness of the participants, the capability of the change leaders and their teams and a host of other factors.

A recent piece by Alastair Dryburgh in Management Today reminded me that, in my experience, successful change rests upon adherence to some core principles rather than processes. His analogy, that if you cannot write an eight step process to guarantee winning a (deterministic) game of chess then how on earth can you write an eight step process to guarantee effective change in the much more complex and chaotic  human and physical environment of a corporation? Really illustrates the point.

 

The current reality of any organisation I have ever experienced is that they are a mess. Now admittedly some are more of a mess than others, but even the best tend to have a mess of policies that do not necessarily integrate with each other, an even more complex mess of procedures driven by those policies, an even more complicated mess of what actually happens in practice regardless of the procedures and policies and a way of working that has very little to do with the formal organisation charts so beloved of our colleagues in HR.

You don’t have to be involved in an organisation for very long to recognise that how things should work and how things do work are two different concepts. How things do work has typically evolved to get round the problems created by how things should work, and yet how often have I seen consultants trying to work with theory rather than reality? They are doomed to failure. So perhaps this is the first of my principles for leading effective change –

work with the current reality

I guess it is a bit like me setting off for London from where I live. In order for any map to be useful it needs to know where I am starting from. And that fact is not always easy to discover. If, in an attempt to understand the ‘As-Is’, you ask me what my postcode is you might reasonably assume that I live in Bradford. However if you asked me which city I live in I will tell you Leeds. So which map are you going to provide me with? In fact, because of the detail of where I happen to live, you will need to provide me with a much more detailed map than would be provided were I to set out from Leeds or Bradford. And always remember Korzybski’s compelling aphorism “A map is not the territory”.

So, in an attempt to keep this blog to a reasonable length, I will discuss some of my other guiding principles in subsequent entries. Meanwhile, what are the core principles that you use find a leading of facilitating change? I would love to know.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Risk and management/leadership – don’t delude yourself

Geoff Roberts change, choice, perception, strategy

riskPart of the work I do is to help implement risk-based decision making in respect of major capital assets for the water industry – contact me if you really want to know what this is about – and every time I think about the work we do here it leads me to the need to explore how ‘we’ approach risk in our lives and how that might affect our management and leadership practice.

Now, there are loads of articles and books written about the mechanics of Risk Management – this is not another one, this is about how we mis-perceive risks and the potential consequences of that. So let’s ask a few questions:

Would you rather have a nuclear power station in your back yard or a beehive?

The nuclear power station please. There is NO authenticated record of a ‘civilian’ dying as a consequence of the proper operation of a nuclear power station, yet (in the US – I can’t readily find UK figures) around 50 deaths per year are attributable to bee stings! I haven’t done the maths, but I suspect that eve after accounting for the extra deaths caused y the accidents at 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima you had better avoid beehives!

What are your odds, if you buy a single ticket, of your 6 numbers being drawn in the National Lottery? And would you prefer these odds to those of being killed by lightning?

Well, in a typical year 3 people get killed by lightning in the UK, so if we average that to a weekly basis (to enable comparison with the weekly lottery), the chances of being killed by lightning in a typical week (assuming a UK population of 60 million) are 1:385,000. Better put your £ on a random person you know being killed because the odds of your numbers coming up are 36 times less likely!

OK, so these are extreme examples, yet they do illustrate how poor many people are at knowing the risks we face in our daily lives. So how good do you think you are at estimating the risks you face in your daily decision making at work?

Health and Safety is the classic arena – it’s one of the few areas where, by statute, we are required to make risk-based decisions. Yet it is also one of the fields of greatest weirdness. How many times have you heard “We can’t do that because we might kill someone”? Well, how likely is it that someone gets killed at work? You might like to look here for the answer…and you might be surprised that you are probably more likely to be killed going to or from work that actually at work (according to the DoT road deaths currently run at ca 2000 per year) or indeed at your home!

Now, let’s come right down the scale of seriousness. How many systems do you know of, or have you even put in place, that are there ‘just in case’? And did you estimate (accurately, now) the chances of the event happening and of course the consequences of the failure if it did happen? And was the cost of the system/process higher or lower than your consequence estimate? I will admit to having been a bit of a radical when I had a ‘real’ job (actually, I was paid to be so) and a favourite trick was to stop doing things that I or my team didn’t think were worth while – it was amazing how few got resurrected.

So, this little rant was really a challenge to you to think more rationally about the risks you face in your work (and/or life), so that you can make better informed decisions. What examples have you got of weird decisions made on the basis of totally unrealistic risks?

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Am I deluding myself by studying world class leaders?

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility, focus, opportunity, strategy

So many article, blogs, books, presentations etc are based on the proposition that we can learn from ‘world class operators’ – if they can do it, so can you; if you just model how they do it, you can do it too, that sort of territory. Some NLP’ers even propound the view that “if anyone can do it, you can do it”.

I want to open an enquiry into the legitimacy of that view.

World class operators are, by definition part of a very small tail in a statistical distribution of performance, and many (most?) of these outstanding performers have physical or mental attributes that I cannot attain:

  • Usain Bolt is blessed with a super-abundance of ultra-fast-twitch muscle,
  • Richard Branson is dyslexic and didn’t really get on well at school,
  • many others around the world had ‘challenging’ childhoods.

So some have physical advantages that no matter how hard I try or visualise or set challenging goals I will never be able to replicate and others have a past that I managed to avoid. Moreover, their performance is so far removed from mine that it lies well outside my comfort zone, maybe even in the “Here be Dragons” territory that is more disabling than empowering.

What if we were to challenge ourselves with performance that lies in the stretch zone instead? What of we were to model our performance on those who perform 10/20/30%  better than ourselves, rather than the zillion% outperformers whose achievements are practically unobtainable?

Now, let’s be clear here – I am not saying that these people cannot be and are not inspirational, what I am suggesting is that their performance is so far from the norm that us mere mortals might be better off concentrating our learning on how our local business, charity, church, theatre etc leaders do it. When I look for a book on “What you can learn from you above-averagely successful but not world-class leader” they don’t seem to be there.

Is this a field for research? Do you find such global inspirations too far out of sight as to be really helpful? What do you think of this topic generally? Go on, comment away…

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Do pay attention!

Geoff Roberts focus, strategy, stress, time management

Pay attention to detailI came across this quotation (apparently from a movie – do you know which one, becasue I don’t?) recently…

“Wars are won one battle at a time. Battles are won one bullet at a time.”

We all need to keep our eye on the big picture, but when this gets in the way of the detail then there is a risk that the war will be lost one battle at a time.

A friend of mine, Julie Kay, recently wrote in her blog about ‘caring’ and it struck me that there is a resonance here – if I really care about what I am doing then I will do it to the best of my ability, getting it right first time and avoiding re-work and wasted effort.

Often getting the detail right can make or break getting the job right. If this is the case and someone says “I don’t do detail”, are they in the right job?

How about you commit to excellence to day? Do every job as if it really really mattered.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Change – management or what?

Geoff Roberts change, flexibility, focus, metaphor, opportunity, strategy

Chaneg ahead road sign

I was recently involved in a discussion about whether change can happen in organisations without the use of Change Management.

For me, the challenge of the phrase “Change Management” is an embedded belief that change CAN be managed. Yes, we may be able to manage the installation of some new piece of kit or software but when it comes to wetware that all changes because people are much less predictable (and more likely to bite back) than machinery.

To be sustainable, change needs to happen at the ‘right’ pace for the individuals (whoops, I nearly typed ‘people’) involved – push them too hard and you will end up going backwards to deal with resistance, move too slowly and you will lose followers’ enthusiasm. For this reason, any ‘change plan’ – and the existence of such a plan is implied by use of the term ‘management’ – is bound to fail.

I prefer to look at change as a strategic thrust – “This is probably where we need to get to, we will find out more along the way, do you want to go there, what can you do to help us get there?” Hold a Vision and then move as fast or slow as you can whilst keeping the people with you.

My metaphor is to light fires within the business. Some of the fires will catch, spread and maybe even attract others; some fires will die out and unless these are really critical areas (in which case keep stoking the fire in different ways until it catches) move on and find someone/somewhere more ‘productive.

One key piece of learning for me over the many years I have spent in change is to “do what you can, where you can, when you can”.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Personal Power

Geoff Roberts choice, strategy

power book cover
In an age of collaboration, does personal power still matter? Well yes, albeit perhaps it is more about how you use your power for ther greater good than for personal gratification. Power can be used for good (Mother Theresa) or evil (Hitler) – there’s nothing wrong with power per se.

This whole arena of power, how to acquire and use it effectively, is a key interest of mine, so here’s a rarity – a link to someone else’s blog!

Jeffrey Pfeffer has written such a useful piece of advice about building your organisational power base that I wanted to share it with you. So here you go to Power Rules

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Trying harder is not the answer

Geoff Roberts change, choice, opportunity, strategy

snake painted on eggI am walking along holding an egg in my hand when suddenly I manage to drop it and break it. Do I tell myself “Hold onto the egg more tightly” or do I find a better way of carrying the egg?

Does a stressful event start a cascade that ends up making even you more stressed?
When someone in authority challenges you or corrects your behavior, do you to push back and make the behaviour worse?
Does a failure set you on a path to more failure?

These questions seem philosophical or even paradoxical, but in fact I think they get to the heart of why some people succeed and others don’t. We can choose to create (virtuous) cycles that move us up or endure (vicious) cycles that drag us down.
A policemen hassles a teenager who is acting up. The teenager escalates. The cop escalates. Someone gets arrested – and you can bet it isn’t the cop!.
A sales call is going poorly because the prospect doesn’t perceive the salesperson is confident. She responds by becoming even less confident. No sale.
A mistake is made. The stakes go up. Rattled, another mistake is made, and then again, until failure occurs…

James Bond is a hero because the tougher the world got, the cooler he got. Symphony conductors don’t endure the pressure of a performance, they thrive on it.

If being a little behind creates self-pressure that leads to stress and then errors, is it really suprising that you frequently end up a lot behind.
Customer service falls apart when mutual escalation or non-understanding sets in. Management falls apart when power struggles or miscommunication escalate. Education falls apart when students respond to poor exam results by giving up.

Someone who gets better whenever he fails will always outperform someone who responds to failure by getting worse. This isn’t something in your DNA, it’s something you can learn or unlearn.
The useful response to ‘failure’ is not to try harder, to buckle down and grind it out. The response that works is to understand the nature of the cycle and to change it from the start. You must not fight the cycle, you must transform it into a different cycle altogether. It’s a lot of work, but less work than failing.
When the snake pushes you to recoil in fear, that’s your cue to embrace the trembling fear and do precisely the opposite of what it demands. This won’t work the first time or even the tenth, but it’s the path to an upcycle, one where each negative input leads to more productivity, not less.
Carry that egg in a bowl.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Pick Your Battles

Geoff Roberts choice, metaphor, strategy

There once lived a great mathematician in a small country village. He was often called by the local king to advice on matters related to the economy. His reputation had spread far and wide. So it hurt him very much when the village headman told him, “You may be a great mathematician who advises the king on economic matters but your son does not know the value of gold or silver.”

The mathematician called his son and asked, “What is more valuable – gold or silver?” “Gold,” said the son. “That is correct. Why is it then that the village headman makes fun of you, and claims you do not know the value of gold or silver? He teases me every day. He mocks me before other village elders as a father who has failed to educate his son. This hurts me. I feel everyone in the village is laughing behind my back because you do not know what is more valuable, gold or silver. Explain this to me, son.”

So the son of the mathematician told his father the reason why the village headman carried this impression. “Every day on my way to school, the village headman calls me to his house. There, in front of all village elders, he holds out a silver coin in one hand and a gold coin in other. He asks me to pick up the more valuable coin. I pick the silver coin. He laughs, the elders jeer, and everyone makes fun of me. And then I go to school. This happens every day. That is why they tell you I do not know the value of gold or silver.”

The father was confused. His son knew the value of gold and silver, and yet when asked to choose between a gold coin and silver coin always picked the silver coin. “Why don’t you pick up the gold coin?” he asked. In response, the son took the father to his room and showed him a box. In the box were at least a hundred silver coins. Turning to his father, the mathematician’s son said, “The day I pick up the gold coin the game will stop; they will stop having their fun and I will stop making money.”

Sometimes in life, we have to play the fool because our seniors and our peers, and sometimes even our juniors like it. That does not mean we lose in the game of life. It just means allowing others to win in one arena of the game, while we win in another arena of the game.

We have to choose which arena matters to us and which arenas do not.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post