What is happening when your best attempts at true revolutionary of transformational change end up being diluted to only a few incremental or evolutionary changes in reality or even worse, the change started but the organization seemingly just “snapped” back into place with no changes at all – it fizzled out? The simple answer using language you might find in physics is that the forward momentum and power of your change process was not sufficient to overcome and create true movement of the inertial object — the deep structure of some or all of your organization — so the object only moved slightly, or simply rocked and fell back into the same place.
Consider Newton’s first law of motion (the law of inertia) – “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.” There are two very important lessons to learn from this physics sidetrack:
- All organization (structures, patterns, processes) tend to come to a “rest”, a place of equilibrium where deep structures and patterns operate and are ingrained in the culture. Unless some unbalanced force (i.e., your organizational change effort) acts upon this object at rest with enough force to change that state of inertia, nothing is going to change (move from a state of inertia).
- Even more importantly, this unbalanced force must remain strong enough and constant enough to move the object (your change process must be strong enough and consistent enough) to the desired new position where it again comes at rest.
What are some best practices you can consider to ensure that your organization does indeed move forward and make consistent progress towards your desired change goals?
First, you must ensure you have enough force to “unfreeze” (Kurt Lewin’s “unfreeze-change-refreeze” model) the organization. The keys to this are:
- Create sufficient sense of urgency by demonstrating the true and lasting value of the desired change. This “urgency” may be avoiding some truly terrible outcome of NOT changing, or this may be attaining some new state that brings favorable, positive results. Either way, you must create a true sense of urgency that is real and demonstrates true value.
- Ensure that those involved in change can see how they “personally” gain from this change. Unfortunately, just saying “you will still have a paycheck” is likely not going to generate sufficient momentum even if some leaders believe that is perfectly legitimate. Let’s be real here. You must truly take the time to map out some wins for those involved to help them embrace change and put forth effort in the process.
- Communicate more than you believe you should!
Next, you must keep the organization moving forward to the new position where it may come to a rest. There are a couple of tips that can immediately be applied based on corresponding common mistakes:
- Your change effort must be communicated, practiced, and observed from the top down and must completely engage mid-level managers. A common mistake is that an organization ramps up for a big change, makes a big announcement, has a few big meetings, and then… well… no momentum due to lack of follow-through. What causes this? Generally, it is a clear sign that the mid-level managers either mid-level managers were not sufficiently engaged, those managers are not demonstrating the change themselves in action, or they are actively resisting the change themselves and giving their team the “this too shall pass” wink.
- You must carefully design the series of small changes to push forward, practice, and observe that are like waves vs. believing you can change everything at once. These “incremental” change steps are key steps to making revolutionary or transformational changes and are not necessarily far apart in terms of time. These steps represent practical expectations of changes that can be digested, understood, practices, and then observed and reinforced before moving to the next change.
Finally, you want the organization to fully embrace the new “state” or position and come to rest — or “refreeze”.
- You must ensure that all “structural” elements are in place to support the change. This could be actual systems (mechanical or technology) compensation/reward changes, or performance appraisals that include specific observed behaviors/actions related to new models.
- Continue to communicate support and encouragement and also communicate to effectively relate the success in gaining the “values” stated as the reason for change.
- Keep listening to those involved to find areas for improvement that assist in keeping changes in place — we know it’s not likely to get everything right initially.
