How To Design A Keystone Change In 4 (Not So Easy) Steps
Every change starts with a grievance. There’s things people don’t like and they want them to be different. At any given time in any organization, there are things that aren’t working as well as they should. Employee turnover is too high, sales are down and customers are complaining. For whatever reason, things need to change.
Smart leaders know that they can’t just stay mired in grievance. If you’re only focusing on problems, you’ll get caught up in an endless to-do list. It is no longer enough to simply plan and direct action, we must inspire and empower belief and that means creating an aspirational vision that can form the basis of a shared purpose.
Yet you can’t just jump to the vision all at once. In the beginning, the idea is flawed and unproven, the organization isn’t ready for it and it is bound to incur visceral resistance in some quarters. Early on, ideas need to be protected and nurtured until they begin to gain some traction. As I explained in Cascades, the best way to do that is with a Keystone Change.
1. Define The Vision
A strategy is never created on an empty canvas. While we can make rational assessments about whether we want to pursue a strategy based on low costs, differentiation or an attractive niche. We can, through investments and divestments, fill in missing pieces on a PowerPoint chart, but the fate of a strategy ultimately hinges on personality and ambition.
The success of Apple can’t be separated from Steve Jobs’ ambition to weave technology and design into products that were “insanely great.” Southwest’s dominance in the travel industry is a direct consequence of Herb Kelleher’s mission of being “THE low cost airline,” which drove everything he did from the planes he bought to which routes he competed on.
Vision is inherently aspirational. It shouldn’t be reduced to metrics or specific objectives. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision wasn’t simply about voting rights—it was about creating a Beloved Community. Microsoft’s original mission was a “computer on every desk and on every home,” but when that was attained, it needed to shift to the broader vision to “empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”
When we work with organizations in one of our ChangeOS workshops, we always start by getting the team focused on the initial grievance—or the problem to be solved. Then we ask participants to imagine waving a magic wand: what would the world look like if that problem were fully resolved? That picture is the vision.
Yet if your vision is sufficiently aspirational, you can’t get there in just one step and that’s where the Keystone Change comes in. A good Keystone Change has a clear and tangible goal, usually with a metric attached. It involves multiple stakeholders and paves the way for future change. Once you achieve a successful Keystone Change, you’ll be well on your way.
2. Start With A Majority
One of the most common mistakes change leaders make is to try to start with a bang. They come up with a snappy slogan, create a sense of urgency and excitement, then set up a huge launch event to generate energy around the initiative, get off to a fast start, build momentum, and create a sense of inevitability around the initiative.
But that approach rarely works—and often backfires. Every new idea starts out weak and vulnerable. While a launch event may create excitement among some, it’s also likely to trigger resistance before the initiative has any chance to gain traction. Any time you set out to make an impact there will always be some who will work to undermine you in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive.
So instead of trying to create and maintain the energy yourself, go to where the energy is. Find people who are already enthusiastic. Keystone Changes are done with allies. You should never have to convince anyone about a Keystone Change. The urge to persuade is a red flag. It means you either have the wrong change or the wrong people.
That’s why when we seek to bring about large-scale change, it’s important to start with a majority. Once you are in the minority you will get immediate pushback You get to choose where you start. It might be a small, local majority of, say, three people in a room of five. As long as supporters outnumber detractors, you can move forward and gain traction.
As I explained in Harvard Business Review, you don’t need to convince everyone at once and you shouldn’t try. Start with a core team that’s already onboard.
3. Iterate Towards A Successful Solution
One of the hardest parts of change is accepting that your ideas can only be validated going forward, never backward. You never know if you have the right idea until it’s tested in the real world and, even then, there could be some confounding factor you may be missing. The truth is that your initial idea is always wrong. Sometimes it’s off by a little and sometimes it’s off by a lot. But make no mistake, it’s always wrong.
That’s why it helps to take a Bayesian approach. Instead of clinging to the notion of a “right” idea, focus on making it less wrong over time. As Rita Gunther McGrath has put it, it’s no longer as important to “learn to plan” as it is to “plan to learn.” We need to be more iterative, see what works and change course as needed.
This is also why it’s critical to start with a core team that’s already on board. They’ll help you push through early setbacks and learn from inevitable failures. If you expect to iterate, then failure is just data. Your job is to collect enough of it to uncover the solution that truly moves things forward.
And once you get it right, you have something to build on. We know from decades of evidence that the tipping point for change is typically between 10%-20% participation. Once you have a proven model, you can start building to that.
4. Scale With A Co-Optable Resource
Traditional change management practices focus on communication and training—a holdover from an earlier age, when leaders had more control and the goal was simply to inform and coordinate. Today, however, most change initiatives involve behavior—what people think and do every day—and that naturally triggers resistance.
To create genuine transformation, we need to get out of the business of selling ideas and into the business of selling success. That’s what a Keystone Change—a clear and tangible goal, involving stakeholders that paves the way for future change—allows you to do. The next step is to design a Co-optable Resource that will help empower people to spread the idea themselves.
For example, in the 80s and 90s, Don Berwick pioneered quality practices in healthcare and founded the Institute for Healthcare Improvement to advance them. Despite clear results, adoption lagged—until the 100,000 Lives Campaign equipped hospital allies with “change kits” and how-to guides. That broke the logjam, and quality practices began to take hold.
That’s the model for successfully implementing large-scale change: start with a core team of enthusiasts that will help you iterate and achieve a Keystone Change. Once you’ve gained some traction, help people spread the idea through peer networks by supplying them with a Co-optable Resource so that they can bring in others, who can bring in others still.
In the final analysis, transformational change is driven by small groups, loosely connected, but united by a shared purpose. It all starts with a Keystone Change.
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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