The practice of change management is a relatively young discipline. It got its start in 1983, when a McKinsey consultant Julien Phillips published a paper in the journal, Human Resource Management. His ideas became McKinsey’s first change management model that it sold to clients and set the stage for much that came afterward.
Phillips’ work kicked off a number of similar approaches such as Kotter’s 8-step model and the Prosci ADKAR model and an industry was born. Today, hordes of “change consultants” ply their craft working to communicate transformational ideas to inspire change. The results, unfortunately, have been rather dismal.
The simple truth is that change rarely fails because people don’t understand it, but that it is actively sabotaged by those who, for whatever reason, oppose it. That’s why any change strategy that depends on persuasion is bound to fail. The truth is that if you want to bring change about you need to identify those who believe in it and empower them to succeed.
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The late Clayton Christensen had a theory about “jobs to be done.” In his view, customers don’t buy products as much as they “hire” companies to do specific “jobs” for them. To be competitive, firms need to understand what that job is and how to do it well. In other words, no one wants a quarter-inch drill bit, they want a quarter-inch hole.
The same can be said for an entire society. We need certain jobs to be done and will pay handsomely for ones that we hold in high regard, even as we devalue others. Just as being the best blacksmith in town won’t earn you much of a living today, great coding skills wouldn’t do you much good in a medieval village.
This is especially important to keep in mind today as the digital revolution comes to an end and we enter a new era of innovation in which some tasks will be devalued and others will be increasingly in demand. Much like Christensen said about firms, we as a society need to learn to anticipate which skills will lose value in future years and which will be considered critical.
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On July 16th, 1945, when the world’s first nuclear explosion shook the plains of New Mexico, the leader of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Clearly, he was troubled by what he had unleashed and for good reason. The world was never truly the same after that.
Today, however, we have lost much of that reverence for the power of technology. Instead of proceeding deliberately and with caution, tech entrepreneurs have prided themselves on their willingness to “move fast and break things” and, almost reflexively, casually deride anyone who questions the practice as those who “don’t get it.”
It’s hard to see how, by any tangible metric, any of this has made us better off. We set out to disrupt industries, but disrupted people instead. It wasn’t always like this. Throughout our history we have asked hard questions and made good choices about technological progress. As we enter a new era of innovation, we desperately need to recapture some of that wisdom.
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One of the toughest things about change is simply to have your idea understood. The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. People need a reason to believe in change, but they never need much convincing to allow things to go along as they always have. Inaction is the easiest thing in the world.
This can be incredibly frustrating. It doesn’t matter if you’re a political revolutionary, a social visionary or an entrepreneur, if you have an idea you think can impact the world, you want people to be as excited about it as you are. So you try to describe it in vivid language that highlights how wonderfully different it really is.
The pitfall that many would-be revolutionaries fall into is they fail to communicate in terms that others are able to accept and internalize. Make no mistake. Nobody needs to understand your idea. If you think your idea is important and want it to spread, then you need to meet people where they are, not where you’d like them to be. That’s how you make change real.
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The Cold War was fundamentally different from any conflict in history. It was, to be sure, less over land, blood and treasure than it was about ideas. Communist countries believed that their ideology would prevail. They were wrong. The Berlin Wall fell and capitalism, it seemed, was triumphant.
Today, however, capitalism is in real trouble. Besides the threat of a rising China, the system seems to be crumbling from within. Income inequality in developed countries is at 50-year highs. In the US, the bastion of capitalism, markets have weakened by almost every imaginable metric. This wasn’t what we imagined winning would look like.
Yet we can’t blame capitalism. The truth is that its earliest thinkers warned about the potential for excesses that lead to market failure. The fact is that we did this to ourselves. We believed that we could blindly leave our fates to market and technological forces. We were wrong. Prosperity doesn’t happen by itself. We need to invest in an innovation economy.
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Mark Twain is reported to have said, “It’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.” Ignorance of facts is easily remedied. We can read books, watch documentaries or simply do a quick Google search. Yet our misapprehensions and biases endure, even in the face of contradicting facts.
The truth is that much of what we believe has less to do with how we weigh evidence than how we see ourselves. In fact, fMRI studies have suggested have shown that evidence which contradicts our firmly held beliefs violates our sense of identity. Instead of adapting our views, we double down and lash out at those who criticize them.
This can be problematic in our personal lives, but in business it can be fatal. There is a reason that even prominent CEOs can pursue failed strategies and sophisticated investors will back hucksters to the hilt. Yet as Adam Grant points out in Think Again, we can make the effort to reexamine and alter our beliefs. Here are three myths that we need to watch out for.
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When Barry Libenson arrived at Experian as Global CIO in 2015, he devoted his first few months to speaking with customers. Everywhere he went he heard the same thing: they wanted access to real-time data. On the surface, it was a straightforward business transformation, but Libenson knew that it was far more complicated than that
To switch from batch processed credit reports to real-time access would require a technology transformation—from an on-premise to a cloud architecture—and in order to develop cloud applications effectively, he would have to initiate a skills-based transformation—from waterfall to agile development.”
So what at first appeared to be a straightforward initiative was actually three separate transformations stacked on top of one another. To make things even more difficult, people had good reason to be hostile to each aspect. Still, by being strategic about overcoming resistance from the start, he achieved a full transformation in less than three years.
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Chester Carlson must’ve seemed like a hopeless dreamer. Working in the patent department at Bell Labs, he wrote down hundreds of ideas, the vast majority of which never amounted to anything. He was eventually fired from his job and went through a few more after that. Chester wasn’t the type of man satisfied with the mundane, everyday.
There was one idea, however, that would keep his interest. He worked on it for years, even while holding down a day job and going to law school at night. When his wife got tired of the explosions he made mixing chemicals in the kitchen, he moved his experiments to a second floor room in a house his mother-in-law owned.
Eventually he conjured up a working prototype and his invention truly would change the world. Yet that wasn’t the end of the story. It would still take decade to transform Carlson’s invention into a viable business and many twists and turns to the story after that. The one constant was that when a challenge arose, what saved the day was off the beaten path.
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Over the past several decades, innovation has become largely synonymous with digital technology. When the topic of innovation comes up, somebody points to a company like Apple, Google or Facebook rather than, say, a car company, a hotel or a restaurant. Management gurus wax poetically about the “Silicon Valley way.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean that other industries haven’t been innovative. In fact, there are no shortage of excellent examples of innovation in cars, hotels, restaurants and many other things. Still, the fact remains that for most of recent memory digital technology has moved further and faster than anything else.
This has been largely due to Moore’s Law, our ability to consistently double the number of transistors we’re able to cram onto a silicon wafer. Now, however, Moore’s Law is ending and we’re entering a new era of innovation. Our future will not be written in ones and zeros, but will be determined by our ability to use information to shape the physical world.
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There’s an old adage that says we should never let a crisis go to waste. The point is that during a crisis there is a visceral sense of urgency and resistance often falls by the wayside. We’ve certainly seen that during the Covid pandemic. Digital technologies such as video conferencing, online grocery and telehealth have gone from fringe to mainstream in record time.
Seasoned leaders learn how to make good use of a crisis. Consider Bill Gates and his Internet Tidal Wave memo, which leveraged what could have been a mortal threat to Microsoft into a springboard to even greater dominance. Or how Steve Jobs used Apple’s near-death experience to reshape the ailing company into a powerhouse.
But what if we could prepare for a trigger before it happens? The truth is that indications of trouble are often clear long before the crisis arrives. Clearly, there were a number of warning signs that a pandemic was possible, if not likely. As every good leader knows, there’s never a shortage of looming threats. If we learn to plan ahead, we can make a crisis work for us.
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