3 Questions Every Change Consultant Should Be Able To Answer
Managers are trained to lead operations, not change. You usually get promoted to management by being good at your job. You try to keep things running smoothly, service your customers, develop talent, take care of your employees, and improve things where you can. It’s often a struggle to keep the trains running on time.
So when the need arises to pursue a transformational initiative, an organizational change management team is usually brought in, either from a consulting firm or from a vendor. They will usually bring a formal change management model like Kotter’s 8 steps, Prosci’s ADKAR or something similar, formulated internally.
Don’t get fooled by fancy charts. These models are notoriously unsuccessful and you shouldn’t just accept them. McKinsey has found that 69% of transformation efforts fail. A more recent study by Bain found that only 12% succeeded and 75% had mediocre results. Change is an investment and, like any other, you need to ask good questions. Here are three:
1. What Evidence Is The Change Model Based On?
We know a lot about change. Everett Rogers published the last edition of The Diffusion of Innovations in 2003, which contained hundreds of studies of how change spreads. These ranged from the seminal study of the adoption of hybrid corn and the spread of hate crime laws, to the doctors use of the antibiotic tetracycline and the uptake of mobile phones.
On a parallel track, Gene Sharp spent decades researching political and social movements and developed principles which have proven to be successful in the Color Revolutions, the Arab Spring and many other real-world contexts. In my book Cascades, I showed how these same principles can be equally effective in an organizational context.
Unfortunately, as Alex Boulting points out in this excellent article on LinkedIn, popular change management models tend not to be rooted in any body of serious research. They are mostly based on case studies and executive interviews, which are problematic for a number of reasons. There is rarely, if ever, any reference to any scientific study or data.
We have decades of research in fields ranging from psychology and sociology to network science and political science that offer a rich basis upon which to build a strategy. There is simply no reason for a change strategy not to be evidence-based. For a quick guide to what the science does support, you can consult this article.
2. How Will You Overcome Resistance?
Change doesn’t fail on its own, it fails because people resist it. Any strategy that doesn’t anticipate and plan for resistance, especially irrational resistance, is bound to fail. Yet the popular change management models say almost nothing about how to deal with opposition, besides some vague, unhelpful talk about “root causes.”
Resistance doesn’t have to have a rational basis and often doesn’t. The truth is that any time you ask people to change what they think or do, there will always be some who aren’t going to like it and they will work to undermine what you are trying to achieve in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive.
That doesn’t mean that they’re bad people, it just means that human beings have attachments and when those attachments are threatened we tend to act in ways that don’t reflect our best selves. As much as we may hate to admit it, we all do it from time to time. Anyone who has ever been married or part of a family knows that.
That’s why one of the first things we do when we work with an organization is to sit down and do a Resistance Inventory, in which we walk through five evidence-based categories of resistance, think about how they are likely to arise and proactively build strategies to mitigate them. You can’t anticipate everything, but doing the work early to start thinking seriously about resistance will vastly improve your chances of success.
3. How Do You Intend To Leverage Organizational Dynamics?
Most popular change management models are based in communication. The basic assumption is that once people understand the idea, they will embrace it. So by creating awareness about the core value proposition and its benefits, they will be encouraged to adopt the idea and put it into practice.
The problem is that we have decades of evidence that shows that’s not true. One body of research refers to this concept as the KAP-gap, the idea that shifts in knowledge and attitudes will result in a shift in practice. Unfortunately, study after study has shown that it doesn’t work, just because we know we should do something doesn’t mean we’ll do it.
Another area of study, focused on scientific communication, is referred to as the Information Deficit Model. Most of these studies focus on cases where you have significant scientific evidence and practitioners thought that supplying the public with that evidence would influence their decisions. Largely, it did not.
At the same time, there is extensive evidence that we conform to the opinions of those around us. The best indicator of what we think and do is what the people around us think and do. Moreover, this effect extends out to three degrees of influence, so it’s not just people we know personally, but the friends of our friends’ friends that shape our opinions and actions.
There is also significant evidence that ideas spread through social ties. For example, one study that researched recruiting civil rights activists during “Freedom Summer” and another that looked at the spread of air conditioners in the 1950s. So rather than working to wordsmith slogans, you’d be better served by focusing on organizational dynamics. Instead of focusing on trying to shape opinions, work to shape networks.
Caveat Emptor
The ugly truth about change management is that the traditional change models simply don’t work. They aren’t based on any serious research and have shown themselves, over a period of decades, to fail consistently. Often, organizational change management units are used by consulting firms and vendors to cheerlead a larger engagement.
That isn’t to say it’s some sort of con. In my experience, organizational change management practitioners are well-meaning and under the impression they make a positive impact. They are hired for engagements, make proposals, deliver on what they promised and leave their clients happy. They usually aren’t around to see the wreckage after the engagement ends.
You can’t just cheerlead change. It’s not a communication exercise and wordsmithing slogans will get you nowhere. That’s why you need to ask hard questions like, “What evidence is our strategy based on?” “How will we overcome resistance?” and “How will we leverage organizational dynamics to gain traction and scale the transformation?
All too often, we treat people who ask tough questions as enemies who seek to undermine what we’re trying to achieve. But good questions don’t close doors, they open them. In fact, asking hard questions in the beginning will help you identify obstacles that you can then work to build strategies to overcome.
Today, every enterprise needs to adopt and scale change. That doesn’t just happen by itself. You need to go into it with open eyes and be ready to accept hard truths. The best way to start is by asking the right questions.
Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.
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