Invite Change Don’t Induce It
The 2nd article in the 10 Steps to a Healthier Culture series.
“We are here to inflict help upon you.”
Please write that on a post-it note and put it on your monitor. Tattoo it on the back of your hand.
Invited change (asking staff to create and engage the change themselves) can be maddeningly slow, unpredictable, and stall out often. Induced change often (really often) results in attrition, confusion, and lots of consultants (sorry, I mean coaches of course) running around trying to make the change real. This is because change is hard.
There is a real difference between the social contract of change and providing operational imperatives that force it.
The conversation of change
How we have the conversation of change is important. There is a distinct difference between an introduction that says, “There are things that frustrate all of us, we are all professionals, let’s work deliberately together to create ways-of-working that make great stuff for the customer and make us satisfied professionals.” Or one that says, “I’ve decided we are under-performing, so we’re going to do some things I’ve read about in books from a guy who cures cancer with his mind, so you all get to work on that right now. Oh, and improve continuously starting now.”
When we induce change, when we force it, people go through a complex set of reactions based on unknowns, fear of failure, and their relationship with positional power. Behind all this, though, they deal with reactance. We are bringing in new sets of rules, new possibilities for failure, new ways to be judged, and a large helping of variation. It is sudden, it is cognitively violent, and people push back.
The fact is, even if the change will liberate them, induced change is almost always perceived as an attack on someone’s freedom.
Collaboration will yield better results, but we must be focusing on real change. Change must have a strong narrative, not simply make people’s marching orders clear. We need to be clear about what problem the change is actually trying to solve. Why is the change needed.
It’s not your dictate, it’s not someone else’s job
This means you must do the work in the other nine blog posts in this series. You can’t just tell them to change on their own. You can’t mandate nirvana. You can’t request your employees to get off their asses and build heaven.
You must invite change, complete with an honest conversation about why change is needed and how you can explore that change together. Your people are professionals and, believe it or not, they can help.
You need to find out what is bothering the people in your company (it’s likely that what is bothering them is a root cause of what you want to fix) and you need to give them the freedom to act — that means they can make decisions of corporate importance. That means they can define the problems to solve and solve them. That means they can build some ownership of the change and responsibility for the outcome of the change.
It is even more involved that a narrative. Change cannot happen without a structure. You don’t just invite people into your home to do whatever they want, you invite them for dinner or drinks or something bounded.
When you invite people to participate in change, you must provide the basic system, and you must not control it. What does that system look like? That’s a varied as dinner party menus.
At the highest level, it needs a way to communicate, safety to state problems openly, the ability to run experiments, a commitment not to overload staff, and a mechanism to reflect on what’s being learned.
You are inviting people to your change party, not by telling them to change and leaving, but by participating, by caring, and by being present. By being a host.
If you don’t, your change is just another mindless reorg.
Jim Benson is the creator and co-author of Personal Kanban. His other books include Why Limit WIP, Why Plans Fail, and Beyond Agile. He is a winner of the Shingo Award for Excellence in Lean Thinking and the Brickell Key Award. He teaches online at Modus Institute and consults regularly, helping clients in all verticals create working system. He regularly keynotes Agile and Lean conferences, focusing on the future of work.
