We Have Decades Of Research Telling Us How Change Works. We Need To Start Following The Evidence

Jennifer was a rising star when her boss tapped her to lead a transformational initiative. She was told that it was a “burning platform” moment and her success was absolutely crucial to the future of the organization. She could set her own budget, choose her own team and would have full executive support to move forward and scale quickly.

Jennifer wasted no time. She hired an outside firm to help her craft an emotive message to create awareness for the initiative as well as a sense of urgency around the need for change. She designed a training program to help employees adapt to and embrace the transformation. In six weeks the project launched with a huge kickoff meeting.

Initially, it seemed to be an enormous success. But soon Jennifer noticed the excitement fizzling out and, about eight months into it she realized that she was being actively undermined. Executive support diminished, the project was abandoned and her career was derailed. It all could have been avoided if she had taken an evidence-based approach.

1. Transformational ideas Come From Outside The Community And Incur Resistance

We tend to think of transformation as a journey to some alternative future state, but that’s only half of the story. The underlying truth is change always involves a strategic conflict between that future state and the status quo, which always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. For change to take hold, the status quo must be addressed.

As Everett Rogers noted in his seminal Diffusion of Innovations, from the earliest studies on the spread of innovations like hybrid corn and tetracycline in the mid 20th century, transformational ideas tend to first take hold with people who have ties and interests outside the immediate community and incur resistance which must be overcome.

Jennifer’s rush to launch a big kickoff meeting worked against her. It may have created some excitement and buzz, but it also triggered those vehemently opposed to the idea, who quietly began campaigning against it. Unfortunately, in her haste to get things moving, she didn’t notice the opposition until it was too late.

It is a simple truth that humans build attachments to ideas, people and other things. When those attachments are threatened, we tend to act out in ways that don’t reflect our best selves. That’s why whenever you set out to change what people think or what they do, there will always be some who will work to undermine what you are trying to achieve. It’s important to build strategies to anticipate and overcome that resistance.

That’s why when we first start working with an organization on a transformational initiative, we start with a “resistance inventory,” going through reasons why people resist change, what form that resistance is likely to take and how we can best mitigate it.

2. Transformations follow an “S curve” pattern 

One of the most consistent findings over decades of innovation diffusion research is that transformational ideas follow an S-shaped diffusion curve, meaning that innovations take hold slowly amongst a group of enthusiasts, then hit an inflection point at 10%-20% participation, start accelerating exponentially before reaching a saturation point and begins to level off.

There’s no need to try to convince everyone at once. Getting to that 10%-20% inflection point is what needs to drive your change strategy. Rather than trying to persuade people who are skeptical, go out and find those who are enthusiastic about the idea and empower them to succeed, so that they can bring in others who can bring in others still.

One way to go about this is to design a basic workshop and begin presenting it to small groups. Then wait and see who comes up afterward. Those are the early apostles you can enlist to achieve an initial keystone change which has a tangible goal, involves multiple stakeholders, and paves the way to greater change.

This keystone change should be low-risk enough that a failure won’t be noticeable enough to impede the overall change effort, but meaningful enough that success will provide some traction to get to the 10%-20% tipping point.

3. There is a common and persistent “KAP-gap”

Many change management efforts focus on large communication campaigns to promote knowledge, awareness and desire around a transformational initiative. Outside consultants are hired to help wordsmith slogans and develop powerful imagery. The thinking is that shifting attitudes is the first step in changing behavior.

Once again, decades of studies suggest otherwise. In fact, it has been consistently found that shifts in knowledge and attitudes do not correlate highly with changes in practice. This so-called KAP-gap has been observed across a variety of different contexts. So relying on communication campaigns to drive change is not a dependable strategy.

Research shows that people tend to conform to the opinions of those around them. The best indicator of what we think and do is what the people around us think and do. So rather than trying to shape opinions, a much more reliable approach is to focus on shaping networks. It is through building dense groups of enthusiasts that an idea can build traction.

So rather than trying to convince everyone at once, start with a small local majority of early apostles. While we can’t control everything, we can control who we start with. Even if that majority is three people in a room of five, we can always expand a majority out. Once you’re in the minority, however, you will feel immediate pushback and things will begin to fizzle out.

4. Transformational ideas are propagated socially 

Another reason why communication strategies rarely determine the outcome of an initiative is that change tends to be propagated socially, rather than through mass media. This was noticed in early research such as the spread of air conditioners in the 1950s and recruiting civil rights activists during “Freedom Summer” in the 1960s and has also been observed in more recent movements.

For example, in 1998 a group of five young activists met in a Belgrade cafe to discuss how they would end the regime of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević. The next day six friends joined them and the Otpor movement was born. It spread slowly through social ties over the next year to number a few hundred members. From there, it grew exponentially and, a year later, Otpor numbered 70,000, Milošević was overthrown and on his way to trial at The Hague, where he would die in his prison cell.

It didn’t stop there either. The Otpor members went on to train activists in the Georgian Republic and Ukraine, leading directly to the Rose Revolution and the Orange Revolution, respectively, which continue to reverberate even now. As I explain in Cascades, all of this spread organically through social ties.

Thanks to some breakthrough research into small world networks in the late 1990s, we know how ideas spread in this way. It is not the mode of communication of even the individual influence of early adopters but the structure of the network that determines how fast and far an idea travels. In effect, it is small groups, loosely connected and united by a shared purpose that drive transformational change.

Taking An Evidence-Based Approach

The biggest misconception about change is that once people understand it, they will embrace it. That’s almost never true. If you intend to influence an entire organization— or even an entire society—you have to assume the deck is stacked against you. The status quo has had years—and sometimes decades or longer—to build connections and form networks.

The good news is that we have over a half-century of research and practice that can inform our efforts. Yet to be effective, we have to put that learning to work. It makes no sense, for example, to “create a sense of urgency” around change when we know that transformation follows an s-shaped curve, starting slowly and then accelerating after a tipping point. Doing so is more likely to trigger resistance than to move things forward.

In much the same way, if we know that shifts in knowledge and attitudes don’t necessarily result in changes in practice and that ideas about change are transmitted socially, we should focus our efforts on empowering enthusiasts rather than wordsmithing and broadcasting slogans. People tend to adopt the ideas and actions of those around them.

We need to think about change as a strategic conflict between the present state and an alternative vision. The truth is that change isn’t about persuasion, but power. To bring about transformation we need to undermine the sources of power that underlie the present state while strengthening the forces that favor a different future.

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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