Ground Control to Major Tom: Now it’s Time to Leave the Capsule if you Dare

This article concludes the series "Eternal Tango: Change and Resistance to Change". A mix of a space oddity, dog food and being British is waiting for you here. How is that possible? There is only one way to find that out...

Eternal tango: Change and Resistance to Change V

Ground Control to Major Tom: Now it’s Time to Leave the Capsule if you Dare

And without further ado, let us start exactly where we stopped, and let me be the first one to congratulate you on your promotion!

Congratulations! You have just been promoted to a time-machine operator! In your role as a change leader, you have a tricky task at hand: while you and your vision are somewhere in the bright future, your audience is in the present (and within a “disrupted reality” at that). Your challenge is to breach that gap and link the future results with today’s activities, translating them into clear and actionable steps. Remember, here you are facing a very fundamental challenge: time preference. You are requesting people to sacrifice the comfort and the security of the status quo in hope of some illusive improvement in the future. Not very appealing. Therefore, think about how you can link today’s (uncomfortable) actions with something of relevance, urgency or importance in today’s life. Creating a sense of belonging, relating the planned change to status, and assuring there is a healthy level of emergency associated with the change could be a good place to start.
Leverage your Change Agents. The Bell curve applies: Resistance to change will be normally distributed within your team. The majority will be between the two extremes: Even if they are skeptical or resistant at first, they will not mind following you. At one extreme, however, there will be a few very conservative characters opposing almost any change, as long as it is not a pay rise for everyone (but even in this case they might find something to criticize). And at the other extreme – a few of those very eager to jump on almost any change wagon around them, just for the pure thrill of it. These are your new best friends – your Change Agents. To move forward, you need to excite and turn them into your ambassadors. They will be able to propagate the change throughout the organization and create the sense “the future is already here”. The “somewhere in between group” will start getting curious and more receptive towards the ideas and gradually accepting the new reality and adjusting the behavior. With the skeptics, you can choose one of several strategies, depending on what their role within the group is, what kind of a change project you are working on, how many balls you have in the air simultaneously, etc. As such, your strategy could be to invest just as much energy as necessary in neutralizing the negative impact of the critics or turning the “leader of the opposition” into the biggest fan of the upcoming change, or maybe even just letting the skeptics be and accepting that their integration into the new reality will take slightly more time.
Lock the doors! Especially in the case when you are introducing new software or implementing a new process, the easiest way to institutionalize it, is to make an alternative not viable, unattractive, unappealing or plainly unfeasible.
Eat your own dog food. Keep in mind that once you embark on the change journey, all eyes will be on you and the overall progress will be largely dependent on whether you can lead by example. The irony is that even if you think of yourself as the one “embracing the change wherever you see it”, all that we have discussed about the resistance to change applies to some extent to you as well, especially the part about the force of habit. Therefore, it might require a conscious and continuous effort to behave differently.
Think “routine”. You might want to think about your change process as of an introduction of a new habit – because to a large extent, it is. As you might know from your own experience – these are the first weeks that matter the most when building a new routine, whether it is to start jogging in the morning or to read before you go to bed. It is your task as a change leader, albeit tedious and annoying (but rest assured, it is even more annoying for others), to point out all the deviations from the new process and to provide all kinds of reinforcement. Your communication strategy for this period will require creativity. You must make sure that you keep transmitting the same message over and over again, maybe using different wording, different communication means, and different approaches so that it does not become white noise. And when you think that you are overcommunicating and it starts being too much – congratulations again! You might be almost halfway down the road.
Discover your British gene. No change project will be perfect and of course something will always go not exactly according to plan – and this is still a very optimistic version of Murphy’s law. But the good news is that after a change project is before a change project. And this opens a multitude of opportunities to make it a better one, even if just by a small margin. Use the time in between to actually close the project, celebrate the milestone but also to gather the lessons learned – for you and for the team. Think “If there were only one thing that we could do differently to move the needle the most, what would this one thing be?” So, with all that in mind – keep calm and carry on!

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