Strong reasons make strong action

I discovered a quote on the tag of a teabag. "Strong reasons make strong actions" it said.













This is a principle of change management, from the Shakespeare play "King John" at the end of Act 3.










If we are going to make change happen, we must know what we intend to achieve and why. This is profound and difficult. The MD of a part of one of my clients told me she wanted to grow the division. Grow what, exactly, I asked, and why is growth a good thing? She thought that growth was so evidently a Good Thing that it did not need to be justified. Yet for people in her division, growth did need to be justified. They didn't want growth. They we OK as they were. The fact that their MD had been set growth targets from on high was not, for them, adequate justification for making any changes.
As she struggled to state the "strong reason" for the "strong action" she was requesting from her staff, she found herself saying that the division would either grow or die. Growth meant that her division would attract higher investment from the corporation, enabling greater opportunities for her people. And there was the question of bonuses, not this year, but next: growth meant higher bonuses.

So there were strong reasons. Now she had to tell people.

One of the most powerful things you can do in any change programme is to state, honestly, why this change is needed. Why are we doing this? How will it help the business make more money, save costs, or make the staff happy? If it doesn't do any of these things, why are we doing it?

Why don't people state their reasons?

I'm interested to know why reasons are not declared. Is it because they are not known?

If you are involved in a change programme, is the reason evident?

A change makes things different

If you want a change you can’t keep everything the same. Some people will find this so obvious as not to be worth stating. I know many others who will nod in recognition, remembering ‘change programmes’ which are tasked with improving customer satisfaction, while maintaining, in a perfect state of statis:

• the organisation chart
• the client base
• the products
• the management team
• the way we do business around here.

You can’t have a change programme that maintains all aspects of the status quo. Change makes things different. Look around to see how things are now. After the change they will be different. There must be a ‘From’ and there must be a ‘To’.

• The ‘From’ describes something that you can see happening now.
  
• The ‘To’ describes the same thing after the change has happened.
  
• The ‘From’ and ‘To’ must be noticeably different from each other.

I strongly believe that if you articulate the ‘From’ and the ‘To’ you can get coordinated action and you can make change happen. In my experience, if you leave it vague, something might happen, or it might not.

(If you want to find out more about describing the change in terms of ‘From’ and ‘To’, download this free excerpt from my forthcoming book Making Change Happen).

How to make change happen in meetings

We’ve all been in meetings where something has actually happened – we signed a contract, we set our budgets, we agreed the basis of collaboration – and in these meetings we get a real sense of achievement. We made progress and, importantly, we made progress together as a group.

Unfortunately, in most organisations, this is the exception rather than the rule: as you are probably painfully aware, change does not usually happen in meetings. I think the reason for this is that there is a default assumption that a meeting generates a list of things to be done (an ‘action list’ or ‘to do list’) and that the action occurs after the meeting.

But if we can get action to happen in the meeting then we can really speed up the process of making change happen. This is not always possible, but it’s always worth asking the question: ‘Instead of simply having actions from the meeting, can we take action in the meeting instead?’

Here are a few ideas for making change happen in a meeting:

• Don’t just decide, do: if the purpose of the meeting is ‘to take a decision whether to do X’, consider making the purpose of the meeting ‘to take a decision to do x, and if the answer is yes, to do it.’
  
• Get real customers in the room: For an annual planning meeting, it’s possible to create the plan in the room and, at the end of the meeting, to get some customers to arrive. Tell them what you plan to do. Get their response and incorporate it into the plan on day two. You’ve not only created a plan, but you’ve got some real world acceptance too.
  
• Get decision-makers in the room: If you are designing some changes to operational processes, get the people in charge of those processes to arrive at midday to approve the changes. In the afternoon, start work making the changes.
  
• Create the work product together in the room: Instead of simply discussing a service concept, create a marketing brochure or website for the service, using professional designers. These can be used to help communicate the results of the meeting, and form the basis of more polished products later.

None of these techniques is a formula for success. In my view the key is to think of meetings as part of the process of change. It’s an attitude of mind.
I’d love to hear about your experiences and ideas for making progress in meetings.

Don’t just change it, mend it.

There’s a science fiction story I read a long time ago, where a man goes into the future, into an unfamiliar urban environment. He picks up a device which is lying by the roadside. He can see that the device is broken, and though it is unfamiliar to him, he has a sense of how it might work. He mends it. It is this subtle sense, that of seeing how things might work, and mending them, that creates useful change in organisations.

We can’t always, or perhaps ever, start with a “blank sheet of paper”. As a consultant I go into a business which has people, processes, and things, all interacting and operating. The job is to create something new which both repairs what’s there, and makes the business more whole and alive.

When a business or project is initiated, there are gaps left between the parts. Sales doesn’t talk to operations. The management team is disconnected from the field engineers. The connection between the invoicing process and sales is somewhat disjointed. A new central sales group creates mismatches in roles and accountabilities.

So if my job is to create a Business Development Plan, then I try to do that in such a way that it makes connections across the gaps. The people doing invoices can see themselves as part of the sales process: after all they are dealing with customers. Creating and communicating the Business Development Plan can bring teams together. During the creation of the Plan, people see how their roles might fit together.

I see my objective as not only to create the Business Development Plan but also to improve the overall business, to bridge gaps and connect processes. Thus in a piecemeal way every intervention contributes to a business transformation.

Every intervention is a repair.

I first read this philosophy in Christopher Alexander’s book “A Timeless Way of Building” published in 1979. Although this is a treatise on architecture and town planning, he has much to teach us about organisational transformation:

“When we repair something in this new sense, we assume we are going to transform it, that new wholes will be born, that, indeed, the entire whole which is being repaired will become a different whole as a result of the repair”
(Chapter 24, The Process of Repair.)

The interesting outcome of the science fiction story about the time-traveller was that when he picked up and mended the device he found, the inhabitants of the city marvelled, because he had transformed it into a new device. He had given it powers beyond those for which it had been designed. In this way, in the spirit of mending and repair, we gradually transform our organisations.