As the year winds down and the New Year approaches, many organizations will be formulating strategic plans.
Naturally, just like all improvement plans, these New Year plans will involve a necessary but most often unpopular component — change!
While change is not always perceived as being good, without change comes stagnation and potential loss. Examples include: Converse in sneakers or Kodak and Polaroid in photography, Blockbuster, Blackberry, and so many more… each experiencing significant declines in market share (or worse!) as competitors introduced new and improved, lower-cost alternatives.
The first step in any change effort is to help people develop the right mental attitude and understand that change is a constant part of long-term success.
Here are a few tips that might help people develop a better attitude toward change or a heightened “readiness” to change:
Plan ahead. If you know change is on the horizon, do some prep work. …
Reframe your thinking. Figure out what’s going on in your mind when you’re feeling sad or anxious, and break negative patterns.
Recognize that improvement or change is not an indictment of the current way but rather a never-ending search for a better way.
Take time to reflect. Is my “resistance” putting my career in jeopardy? Am I being overly stubborn? Am I afraid to try?
Strive to maintain some normalcy/routine.
Take a long term view. Sure, a new process or procedure will feel foreign at the start, but how will it feel six months from now? Next year?
Test yourself! Look at upcoming change as a challenge; remember that we tend to learn the most when we step outside of our comfort zone!
Recognize that it is a lot easier to change when you “can” rather than when you “must”
In the past 10 years we have seen an unprecedented acceleration of the rate of change. In his book, Thank You For Being Late, Thomas Friedman chronicles the breadth and pace of disruption in today’s world, identifying 2007 as an inflection point in our transformation — also noting that inflection points are spotted only in retrospect.
In or about 2007, an extraordinary number of new developments began transforming the world we once knew:
The number of internet users crossed the one billion mark
Apple introduced the iPhone
Google bought YouTube and launched Android
AT&T led the other telecoms in a huge expansion of transmission capacity to handle a data deluge
Amazon launched the Kindle
Airbnb was born
Intel introduced non-silicon materials
Bitcoin was created
Similarly, when speaking at an investor’s conference in 2020, Peter Diamandis, Founder of XPRIZE Foundation, suggested that the pace of change had shifted from linear to exponential!
This acceleration of change and the associated disruption has important implications for business — specifically for the organizational traits and capabilities that determine who will thrive, survive, or fail. The capabilities, knowledge and expertise that got us where we are today are not likely to get us where we need to be tomorrow.
For example, economies of scale once conferred substantial efficiencies that smaller enterprises had to work hard to overcome. While organizational size still enables efficiencies, it also can slow and distort the information flow from customers and markets to the strategic decision makers.
The size of the organization may also increase the difficulty in turning the ship to take advantage of new opportunities and avoid the iceberg ahead.
Simply stated, the speed of change in the market, competition, and technological capabilities has increased desire for greater agility.
Agility has long been a valued practice in software development and project management; but what is organizational agility and how can we get some?
We’ll address this and other questions in our next post.
Our previous post noted that Continuous Improvement involves change and that, in a high percentage of cases, people tend to resist change. A past post also recognized this fact, and shared a popular change management method known as ADKAR, which is an acronym representing five steps for making successful changes:
Acknowledgement
Desire
Knowledge
Ability
Reinforcement
Despite the hopes of many, simply getting people to “acknowledge” the need for change has not proved to be sufficient for brining about the “desire” to change. Fortunately, there are things that organizational leaders can do to motivate people to accept change or to increase people’s desire to change.
During a recent discussion with Continuous Improvement leaders, various approaches to the motivational component of change management were shared. Some of the key points made include:
Financial enticements or rewards did not necessarily produce the best results.
Recognition of desired behaviors exhibited by some can increase motivation for change in others; however, timeliness and making the recognition public are important factors.
Peer-recognition programs often increase people’s desire to change.
Communication is a critical component of successful change, and the recommendations for daily conversations about progress and achievement during change initiatives were unanimous.
Motivation for change is often easier to achieve if leaders shift their focus beyond individual measurement and instead focus on group or system achievements. As Deming said, over 90% of problems are caused by the system not the person.
Frequent communication about what an organization needs greatly increases the odds that people will be more motivated to implement and accept change.
Spring boarding off of our previous post about engaging people around the work, it’s important to recognize that achieving new and improved ways of completing that work requires change.
But despite the fact that change is a critical component of growth and ongoing success, it is not always perceived as being good. In organizations of all types, people tend to look with skepticism at innovations and new methods, processes, policies and procedures; and people at all levels sometimes cringe at the suggestion that there might be a different or better way to do their jobs!
Yet without change comes stagnation and potential loss. Examples include: Converse in sneakers or Kodak in photography, each experiencing significant declines in market share and profits as competitors introduced new and improved, lower-cost alternatives.
The first step in any change effort is to help people develop the right mental attitude and understand that change is a constant part of long-term success — a readiness for change. This step typically involves assessment, positioning, and establishing “why” change is necessary (and good!).
Additional steps that can help people prepare for and embrace change include:
Making continuous improvement a permanent part of your corporate culture…that gets people at all levels to change the way they think, talk, work, and act
Establishing new perspectives on work, work processes and value-added work
Effectively using various statistical tools to identify, analyze, understand and communicate variation
Enlisting the help of people operating the work processes
Quantifying how continuous improvement benefits all stakeholders
Improving leadership and coaching skills that lead to increased employee engagement
Reinforcement
The goal in successful change efforts is not only a change in how people think, but also a change in how they feel about the changes you’re trying to make. As John Kotter, a recognized pioneer in leading change put it, “The most successful change initiatives involve winning over both minds and hearts.”
A high tech firm was studying a group of competitors and one of the team members explained that when the firm sent people to visit other companies, each person was given a specific “learning goal.”
In addition to their task at hand, the visitor was expected to learn as much as possible about a particular issue and then share it within the firm. The organization believed their competitiveness could be improved largely based on how effectively they brought knowledge into the company.
Consequently, they invested in gathering, disseminating and using learning as a catalyst to change.
Similarly, we recently saw how powerful knowledge transfer can be when conducting a “Lean Office” training session during which we helped a cross-functional group map their value stream. All the participants had thorough knowledge of their own piece of the process, but no one really knew much about the processes of their internal customers and suppliers.
Value Stream Mapping is inherently a ‘knowledge sharing’ or learning process, so there were plenty of Eureka’s! When individuals learned how their work fit into (and often slowed or hindered) the work of other parts of the value stream, they were able to identify ways to shrink the time required to deliver their service by well over half.
To quote the innovator, Doug Hall, we must ‘feed the brain’! In order to develop new insights, newsolutions, new opportunities for competitive advantage, we must actively mine for knowledge that can trigger solutions.
All sorts of learning can become a catalyst for change. Learning about the market and the customers can help you see possibilities for innovation that you have overlooked before.
As a follow-up to our previous post, which shared an introduction to this concept, this video shares some new perspectives about the current pace of change within the business world and adapting to the “new normal.”
It also raises more than a few questions about how your organization might best adapt — and how quickly you’ll be able to do it — and provides ideas and examples for doing so.
We all know the pace of change has significantly accelerated over the past ten years and is continuing to do so. This faster pace is often referenced as being exponential!
People most often agree that change is an important and necessary element of success but, truth be told, we don’t really like it. It is far more common to feel that “change is good and I think YOU should.”
Yet the value of change is clear. Consider that 100 years ago the average life expectancy in the United States was 53.1 compared to 78.8 today. Only 35% of households had electricity in 1920, and only 1% had both electricity and running water.
Business examples of what happens without change include Converse in sneakers, Kodak in photography, and Blockbuster in video. Each of these established and successful entities experienced significant declines in market share (or worse!) and profits as competitors introduced new and improved, lower-cost alternatives.
What Could or Should Be? We have defined “waste” as the difference between the way things are now and the way they could or should be if everything were right. While this definition still rings oh-so-true today, what has changed is the expectations many have of what could or should be.
Who, ten years ago, would have thought there could be self-driving cars? Who would have envisioned a supermarket without checkout stations? Who could have imagined a printer that could generate 3-D objects? Yet all of these things, and many others of similar proportion, have suddenly become real.
As noted in previous posts, the start of a new year is often a time for making resolutions or strategic improvement plans, which is another way of saying “a time for change.”
As we all know, change is a critical component of growth and ongoing success; and, to be effective, change initiatives must involve not only a change in attitude, but also behavioral change.
But, as we also know, change is not always perceived as being good. In organizations of all types, people tend to look with skepticism at innovations and new methods, processes, policies and procedures; and people at all levels sometimes cringe at the suggestion that there might be a different or better way to do their jobs!
Yet without change comes stagnation and potential loss. Examples include: Converse in sneakers or Kodak in photography, each experiencing significant declines in market share and profits as competitors introduced new and improved, lower-cost alternatives.
Readiness… the Right Attitude The first step in any change effort is to help people develop the right mental attitude and understand that change is a constant part of long-term success. We have found that this “readiness for change” is best brought about through assessment, communication, education, empowerment, measurement, and recognition.
Components of helping people prepare for and embrace change include:
Making continuous improvement a permanent part of your corporate culture so that people at all levels change the way they think, talk, work, and act
Establishing new perspectives on work, work processes and value-added work
Clearly identifying the necessary or desired changes to actions and behaviors
Effectively using statistical tools to identify, analyze, understand and communicate variation and to measure improvement
Enlisting the help of people operating the work processes
Quantifying how continuous improvement benefits all stakeholders
Improving leadership and coaching skills that lead to increased employee engagement
The point has been made, in prior posts, that “change” is not always perceived as being good, and instead tends to promote fear, uncertainty, doubt; and even resentment!
Consider that, in organizations of all types people tend to look with skepticism at new policies and procedures, and look with deep concern at new compensation plans or updated benefits programs. Similarly, in their daily quest for new customers, sales people constantly struggle to overcome buyers’ comfort with the status-quo; and people at all levels regularly cringe at the suggestion that there might be a different or better way to do their jobs!
Yet without change comes stagnation… and potentially worse things too. Current-day examples include Polaroid in instant photography, Blockbuster in video, Xerox in copiers, or the Yellow Pages! Each of these household name enterprises experienced significant declines, or worse, as competitors introduced new and better alternatives.
The cassette tape replaced the eight-track, but was then outdone by the compact disc, which was undercut by MP3 players… and the list can go on.
A Selling Mission… If we’re to learn from these examples, then we must accept the fact that change — either in the form of innovation, continuous improvement or both — is a critical component of growth and ongoing success. Without innovation and change we run the risk of losing our competitive position or potential obsolescence.
“Whatever made you successful in the past won’t in the future,” said the late Hewlett Packard CEO Lew Platt.
But if people tend to resist change as previously noted, how might managers or business owners best go about getting the team to accept it — to buy in? How can we help people more readily embrace improvement programs, try new protocols, accept new pricing models or generally believe in the up-side of change?
Simply stated, we must sell it.
Just like the sales and marketing experts who create the “new and improved” ad copy, slogans and selling presentations, we must sell the concept of change to our staff members before trying to present or roll-out new policies, procedures, campaigns, programs or plans.
And just like any sales mission, this will require forethought and planning.
We might start by identifying how the team will benefit from a proposed change. What’s in it for them? What are the consequences of not changing? What will it cost? What opportunities might we lose?
What’s the competition doing?
The next step is to determine how to properly position a proposed change. Since we know there is a tendency toward defensiveness, it’s important to make people understand that they are not the problem. In other words, a change in policy or approach need not mean that the team has been doing things the wrong way. Rather, it means the world is changing and we must change too, lest we fall behind.
Finally, once the presentation is made and the new whatever is launched, there must be follow-up reinforcement and assessment. Has everything worked as we’d hoped? Should we modify the new plan? Are there unforeseen consequences? While we don’t want to send a message indicating we’re not resolved to the new program or approach, it is also a good idea to let everyone know we’re fair and open-minded — that at the end of the day we’re all on the same side.
Change may be unsettling, but without it our futures are at risk; and there are clearly ways to minimize the negative effects. It will require effort, planning and, like any selling mission, persistence, as behaviors and attitudes are not easily influenced.
Margaret Thatcher may have summed it up best when saying, “You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it!”
Rapid acceleration in the pace of change has taken place within the business world over the past ten years. This fact has also accelerated the need for organizational agility, in both thought and behavior.
Agility and change are inextricably linked. The goal in most change efforts is not only a change in attitude, but behavioral change.
But of course change is not always perceived as being good. In fact, people at all levels tend to react with fear, uncertainty, and doubt (the “FUD” factor) when new ideas, processes, policies or procedures are introduced; and many cringe at the mere suggestion that there might be a different or better way to do their jobs !
Yet without change comes stagnation and potential loss.
The first step in any change effort, and in maintaining organizational agility, is to help people develop the right mental attitude and understand that timely change is a constant part of long-term success — this readiness for change will require:
Making continuous improvement a permanent part of the organization’s culture…
Getting people at all levels to change the way they think, talk, work, and act, and fostering a culture of open-mindedness and amnesty.
Establishing new perspectives on work, work processes and value-added work.
Effectively using various statistical tools to identify, analyze, understand and communicate variation.
Enlisting input from of people operating the work processes.
Quantifying how continuous improvement benefits all stakeholders.
Improving leadership and coaching skills that lead to increased employee capability and engagement.
Challenges and best practices associated with continuous improvement
