This most recent post is part 4 of a 5 Part Series sharing the powerful reasons to Let Go of Change Management. If you missed the first posts, you may want to circle back and go there first. We welcome your comments, feedback and insights as we explore the topic of transforming culture and business.
Why Let Go of Change Management - Top 10 - #7: Another Dog and Pony Show - staff aren’t stupid.
A Dog and Pony Show: An elaborately staged performance, presentation, or event designed to sway and convince people; a small circus, unworthy of the big top.
P.T Barnum did not say, “there is a sucker born every minute,” though it is often attributed to him.
However, he did say, “Clowns are the pegs on which the circus is hung.”
Communication in traditional change management is a thinly disguised marketing campaign designed to make change palatable, believable, and attractive. These campaigns consume massive amounts of time, energy and resources. And you can see from your own personal experience, when someone comes to you with an agenda to “convince” you of something, what it’s like to be on the receiving end of that. It doesn’t impact the person being “convinced” but it does create a lot of work for the communications department.
Once the campaign-of-convincing is in full swing, the Big Dogs are sent on the road to personalize and reinforce the message. This classic formula has leaders extolling the upside of the change, making lots of promises regarding the change, and providing token acknowledgement that “some employees will be impacted.” And the performance always mentions the “pain” of the transition, but immediately minimizes the pain with phrases like, “but I know that your are up to the challenge”. Translation: “Big boys and girls don’t cry. You’re going to be big boys and girls aren’t you?”
During this live portion of the presentation, carefully crafted future benefits are displayed on newly branded powerpoint slides. Executives, who truly do care about the people in their organization, have prepped for this by having their humanity sanitized in an effort to “stay on message” and “be consistent”. This, ironically, has them appear plastic, insincere and overly confident. The result of which is that they appear out of touch with employees “on the ground” experience of the change, and the potential for honest questions and detailed concerns is suppressed to almost nothing. Many employees are left with the experience that the CxO has shown up to say “I can’t really tell you anything, but you should trust us. After all, we flew all the way out here to tell you all about it. Which we’re not really going to give you any details, except in the most vague and interchangeable sense which could apply to pretty much any organization. But, we’ve got all your best interests at heart. Did I mention that you should trust us?”
This sense of disconnect, according to change management, is the cost if you want your “message” to get through. It gets through by repetition, employees seeing it and hearing it 5 or 6 times, without deviation. In other words, “stay on message”! In the end, everyone nods and smiles at the leader, biding their time as they contemplate the growing chaos of their suddenly doubled work load.
It’s an empty performance, unworthy of the performers, unworthy of the audience, and unworthy of the Big Top.
Why Let Go of Change Management - Top 10 - #8: You think you are a rational being... you’re not.
When Melanie didn’t want my Valentine in grade 3, my little heart was stomped on and I decided not to take the risk of giving any more Valentines out to “girls”. I decided this not just for Melanie, but for all “girls”.
Why paint all girls with the Melanie brush? Why then, for the rest of my life, did I become sheepish and careful when asking any girl out on a date? Why severely limit the chances of getting what I want in life by limiting what I was willing to say?
How am I just like YOU?
I. Am. Not. Rational!
Welcome to being a human being.
The “rule of thumb” I came up with to mitigate another potential rejection, untold possible rejections, is called a heuristic. A heuristic is a mental shortcut people use to simplify decision-making. It has some pros going for it. And, it brings along a whole lot of cons.
Over time you and I come up with a vast set of heuristics for life, and it results in limiting our choices. This is a massive, undiscovered and hidden factor that determines the choices we make. It is the broadest and furthest reaching factor in limiting all attempts to make change in an organization. And Change Management could care less about it.
How do we know that Change Management could care less about it? Because in the real world, change management does nothing to deal with it. According to change management, people are all rational thinkers who make appropriate decisions when presented with relevant data. Which is garbage. Check your last investment decision if you think you’re rational!
I’m not rational. You’re not rational.
We are human beings who use memory and past experience to survive perceived threats.
These perceived threats are both current and future, and what they threaten is to the status quo and/or your identity. You will continue to slam your head against a wall attempting to get your change implemented if you ignore the way that human beings actually operate when faced with change. The way people operate is through heuristics, and those short-cut mental models are on display all around you in the way people react to and deal with change. You’re just not seeing them, because change management ignores them and encourages you to do the same.
The perennial failure of change management to acknowledge the power of heuristics is illustrated by this study from the Joint Commission, the primary health accreditation body in the US, regarding hand washing in Hospitals. A lack of handwashing by health practitioners, as a single factor, costs the American health care system between and $4 billion and $29 billion annually and results in over 100,000 deaths per year.
This condition has persisted for decades despite the best, if ill-fated, efforts of change management. For decades only 30% of hospital staff, wash their hands between patients, when the relevant facts of hand washing are well known. If saving lives isn’t a powerful and logical enough reason for people to change their behavior, what makes you think your compelling story, burning platform, or corporate incentives, have a hope in hell?
Let go of change management.
By Vik Maraj and Kevin Gangel - Co-founders of Unstoppable Conversations
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As always, we encourage comments, feedback and welcome all, whether for or against. Our goal is to share new studies, results and perspectives for all to thrive.
Watch for Part 5 in this series next week. Get notice of these and other paradigm-shifting insights, Join Unstoppable Conversations on Facebook or LinkedIn to keep in the know for your business' future and culture transformation.
Unstoppable Conversations and the team of Vik Maraj and Kevin Gangel, are a unique consulting firm which produces radical shifts in the capacity of an organization’s leaders to realize extra-ordinary results within a surprisingly short time. Their work demystifies the world of change and simplifies everything to ONE key driver. Leaders discover that their organization’s culture shapes and limits all of their well laid plans and they discover how to practically address their culture with real-time actions that produce immediately obvious benefits.
