3 Types Of Change Problems (And How To Solve Them)

When asked about how he solves problems, Albert Einstein is purported to have said, “If I had 20 days to solve a problem, I would spend 19 days to define it.” Whether he said it or not, it does accurately portray his approach to problems. He would spend years engaging in thought experiments to correctly define the problem before working out the math.
This also underlines a crucial difference between the manager mindset and the changemaker mindset. Managing everyday operations is done in an environment of consensus and predictability. The main task is to execute consistently. Pursuing change, on the other hand, requires us to operate in an environment of uncertainty which requires exploration.
That’s why not all change initiatives can be approached the same way. Some demand communication and coordination across large groups, while others focus on shifting individual behaviors. Still, others rely on collective action, where adoption among some people is necessary to influence others. In each case the solution needs to fit the problem.
1. Strategic Shift
By the early 1980’s, Intel’s President, Andy Grove, realized he had a problem. The company had pioneered DRAM memory chips and had built an enormously successful business on that foundation. But competition from the Japanese was killing its profits and there was no clear path forward. Certainly jettisoning its core business didn’t seem like an option.
As he described in his book, Only The Paranoid Survive, things came to head in the middle of 1985. He turned to Intel’s Chairman and CEO Gordon Moore and asked him what a hypothetical new CEO would do if they were both fired. Moore replied without hesitation that the new CEO “would get us out of memories.”
It was right then and there that a decision was made to focus on microprocessors. But given that Intel’s history, culture, investment and identity were so tied up in DRAM memory chips, making the change would take an enormous amount of communication and coordination. Factories would have to be closed down, people’s jobs would have to change. Customers would be disappointed. Inevitably, there would be layoffs. Some would resist the change.
Yet Grove and Moore unquestionably had the authority to make the change. This wasn’t a persuasion problem, it was a communication and coordination problem. Marketing and salespeople would have to understand the change in order to sell effectively, engineers would need new design briefs and everybody would need to get on board. But once the decision was made, for better or worse, it was happening.
There are a number of frameworks that can help with this type of change. Kotter’s 8 Steps and ADKAR focus on communicating the need for change and providing people with the knowledge to succeed in the new environment, the Bridges Transition Model focuses on helping employees through the psychological challenges and Jessica Kriegel’s Results Pyramid helps change the cultural beliefs that underlie actions.
2. Individual Behavioral Shift
While top executives like Grove and Moore focus on strategy, they can do little to directly impact the performance of individual teams. Yet a major strategic transition like the one at Intel relies on thousands of managers to shift individual behaviors. It is often the performance of those individual managers, rather than the strategic vision itself, that makes the difference between success and failure.
Yet anyone who has tried to change their own behavior—let alone influence others—knows how hard it can be. As Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey explain in their article in Harvard Business Review competing commitments get in our way. For instance, we may aspire to delegate more but also take pride in being a hands-on leader, creating an internal conflict.
It’s impossible to read Kegan and Lahey’s article and not see yourself in one of their examples. One woman, Helen, wanted to move up in the organization, but wanted to continue to show loyalty to her boss in a subordinate role. John wanted to communicate effectively with his colleagues, but also to maintain social distance to preserve his identity. We tend to sabotage ourselves in subtle ways.
As with strategic change problems, there are a number of techniques that can help change individual behavior. Kagan and Lahey give their own in their article and book. David Burkus, who focuses on evidence-based feedback, offers great advice in The Best Team Ever. Many have also found BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model helpful.
A key point to remember is that to help someone change their behavior, they have to trust you. You need to invest time to build that relationship and create an environment of psychological safety.
3. Collective Action
Any comprehensive approach to change needs to contend with the fact that the nature of transformation itself has changed. Consider that 1975, when the practice of change management was just beginning to develop, more than 80% of corporate assets were tangible assets, things like factories, equipment and real estate.
Today, however, more than 80% of assets are intangible, which means most transformations will involve shifts in individual behavior on a large scale, such as the case with skills-based transformations like design thinking and agile development initiatives, or culture-based programs such as those related to DEI and ESG.
These types of collective action problems can’t be dictated from the top, yet are far out of scope for individual managers. They are more akin to a social movement than to a typical corporate initiative. What makes these types of transformations fundamentally different is that individual teams influence each other. If one team succeeds with it, that will empower others to adopt it as well. Yet if one team resists, it will have the opposite effect. Contagion works both ways.
The good news is, as I explain in Cascades, we have decades of evidence and learning that can help us with this kind of transformation. The key is to understand that it is futile to try to convince everyone at once. These initiatives are necessarily non-linear and transmitted socially through networks. You’ll want to proceed carefully in the beginning, empowering early enthusiasts to succeed, so that they can bring in others who can bring in others still.
Collective action transformations are never top-down or bottom-up, but always move side-to-side. It is small groups, loosely connected but united by a shared purpose that drive collective behavior.
Taking A Comprehensive Approach To Change
People love to quote the pre-socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus about change. Yet pithy aphorisms like “Change is the only constant” and “You cannot step into the same river twice,” are popular because they are so imprecise. They point to, as Kafka put it, “some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least.”
Every change effort represents a problem, or set of problems, to be solved. A strategic shift starts at the top and needs effective communication and coordination for everybody to play their role. To build high performing teams, individual managers need to help and empower their people to adopt new skills and practices, see blind spots and kill bad habits.
Yet often the most important changes involve collective action, which can be maddeningly complex. People adopt things when they see others around them adopt them. Success begets more success, just as failure begets more failure. Big communication campaigns can ignite early resistance and backfire. Individual efforts don’t scale.
For collective action problems, we need to focus on, as network science pioneer Duncan Watts put it to me, “easily influenced people influencing other easily influenced people.” You build momentum and reach critical mass not through persuasion, but by empowering early adopters and helping them to build connections with others.
To be an effective change leader, you can’t take a one-size fits all approach.. Solutions need to fit the problem, not the other way around. There is no silver bullet.
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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