Why they won’t change
“How do you work with a team who is resistant to change?”
Being involved in transformation, coaching and consulting for a few years, I certainly have said and heard this numerous times. It has become a typical Agile Coach interview question too.
The premise: perhaps you’ve just come up with a new process, a new operating model and you’re excited to roll it out. But your excitement is crushed the moment you present it to a team and expect them to adopt it, because they won’t.
The system pushes back
Organisations are complex adaptive systems and resistance to change is the signal that you’re pushing against the system, so it pushes back. Nothing more, nothing less. And that is great because now you know that your approach is not working so instead of pushing harder you have an opportunity to try a different approach.
“They won’t change” is in itself a question and an answer: they won’t change because change should be self-led and self-motivated. When you take ownership of a problem that in fact you don’t own, then finding a solution for it and expecting whoever owns that problem to adopt your solution is a long shot at best. This is why consulting is a bad idea if you’re trying to transform your business. Sure, the consultants will know what’s considered state-of-the-art, they will know what has worked elsewhere, but that’s not enough to radically change your organisation from the inside.
Change or Compliance?
Notice how the conversation evolves: there is ‘you’ and there is ‘them’. We haven’t built a ‘we’ space yet, a space where we build a shared vision and understanding of why change is required. This is an essential step towards finding a solution collaboratively.
When we experience resistance to change we should ask ourselves: are we trying to facilitate change or are we trying to push change onto others?
Are we after compliance or are we trying to build an environment where change can happen, it’s self-led and supports everybody’s growth?
How can we expect teams to be self-organising, autonomous and in pursuit of continuous improvement if change is something that is imposed onto them?
The Reason for Change
It might sound obvious but often the reason for change is not known to the people who are expected to make the change. Going back to the world of “agile transformation” for example, I’ve come across scenarios where even the people rolling out the change (new job roles, new processes, new frameworks) did not have a deep understanding of the business reason behind the change initiative.
This is because especially in large organisations ‘the transformation’ becomes a large programme of work and as such it is executed through roles, hierarchies and layers of management. The primary risk of this approach is that Coaches and Transformation Leads find themselves in a management hierarchy which in itself is subject to becoming resistant to change over time.
Without an elevated goal, we’re not putting a light at the end of the tunnel. We’re simply replacing this tunnel with another one.
Ways of working and Operating models
When we talk about change we often think of it as the replacement of the status quo with something new: in terms of organisational design the status quo is the current hierarchy, the current goals, the current processes, tools and artifacts.
However change is the transformation process that breaks down the status quo and creates a new reality which is better aligned to individual or collective goals. We often make the mistake of treating this last step as a one-off but it’s obviously an ongoing process which takes shape one experiment at a time.
Once we’ve collectively realised that our way of working is no longer the best way to achieve our goals, the next step is to run experiments to move beyond the status quo.
When the transformation is a programme of work, we — Coaches, Consultants, Transformation Leads, and Operating Model Designers — often fall into the trap of trying to do this the “most efficient way”, going from the old ways to the new ways in the shortest possible time (for cost reasons too). But that’s not the point: a deep understanding of why change is required is essential; if we don’t change the way we see our system we are not going to be motivated to change it. Once the motivation exists then coming up with a new operating model, collaboratively, becomes the easier step.
To promote a culture of sustainable ongoing change psychological safety is crucial: we need to build an environment where colleagues collaborate safely, run experiments, develop a holistic view of their system and have fun while doing it. The middle step where we throw the building blocks back on the table and rebuild the system together is the real essence of what we’re trying to do. It’s like playing with Lego: you’ve got an old model and want to build something new …so now you undo the old one, throw all the pieces back at the table and start building again. When it comes to change culture, the journey is the destination.
Don’t overlook the status quo
When I began my coaching journey, I (mistakenly) felt a sense of ownership over the change made by the individuals and the teams I was working with: if they made the “right” change quickly then I would feel accomplished as a Coach. Because of this I had an undeniable bias towards the status quo which prevented me from looking at things with the right level of neutrality.
Over the years I have learned that the status quo exists for a reason. It solves a problem and it has a purpose. The status quo is the result of past decisions, conversations, collaboration patterns and anti-patterns. Before we try to move on, it’s essential that we understand what kind of culture led to the way things are now: it’s the (intangible) culture we’re trying to influence more than the (tangible) processes, artifacts and tools.
The middle management dilemma
According to Larman’s laws of organisational behaviour, organisations are implicitly optimised to avoid changing the status quo for middle managers and specialists. Let’s look at why this is more closely.
Middle managers and specialists are not inherently resistant to change, obviously. But these roles are the result of an optimisation: when the org system was defined (hierarchy, roles, structure, processes, tools and artifacts) middle management and specialist roles were a solution to a problem: “how do we execute our strategy using our operations with the current organisational structure?”
In other words middle management and specialists roles is what happens when an organisation thinks it has found its way to operate and now optimises it for execution.
In fact, if you are a Transformation Lead, an Agile Coach, a Consultant working as part of a large transformation effort there is a strong possibility that you will become a middle manager by role and by behaviour: ironically, the people driving the transformation may be the ones resisting change, eventually.
This is why if you’re a Coach, you shouldn’t hold on to a hierarchy. Even when coaching is fully developed as a capability within your organisation (thanks to your hard work!) and career paths and management lines are in place, you’ll want enough fluidity to be able to continually support change — in an agile fashion.
Change will happen anyway
Organisations are complex adaptive systems: formulating problems in terms of “if this happens then that will happen” is much harder than we might think. In reality, instead of trying to establish a cause-effect relationship between the variables at play, it’s much more likely that all these variables will be correlated. These systems inevitably change anyway, whether we’re driving the change or following the change. But luckily System Thinking offers us a set of principles and tools we can use to drive change iteratively and collaboratively. In summary:
- Following the flow of value, identify the system you belong to and its boundaries. Go as wide as you possibly can, but not wider — you want to be able to take actionable steps within it.
- Build a common understanding of why change is required with everyone who belongs to that system. This is where facilitation and coaching can really help.
- Formulate a hypothesis (if we do A then perhaps B might happen…)
- Run experiments to in/validate your hypothesis
- Reflect back and repeat
In future blog posts we will expand on these topics. In this blog post I thought it would be useful to set the stage and discuss the complex and adaptive nature of organisational change. Let us know what you think!
