The challenge of yoking Push and Pull together, to elicit the strongest change response from the widest range of workers, presents a knot of paradoxes.

It means being a good cop and a bad cop almost simultaneously. It means being open to other people's visions while having a plan of your own. It means being simultaneously Machiavellian (doing whatever works to drag your organization through change) and caring (being genuinely interested in where others are at, and incorporating their individual dreams into the larger dream of the organization at large).

We name this nexus of perplexities the "come-as-you-are masquerade party," in which we all arrive disguised as ourselves, each of us a bundle of internal contradictions, as amygdala wrestles with neocortex, and our lesser selves get the better of our better selves. From this confusion we are expected to create a new clarity.

Download Why Teams Don't Work in its entirety here.

How do managers and team leaders unravel this tangle? Let's break change down into its functional parts and apply Push/Pull thinking to each.

     Hub and Spoke Planning

We talked about the three kinds of change -- personal, organizational, and global. Global change, such as inflation, a new technology, a sudden new demand by customers, or war in the oil fields, is the kind of change that can't be planned or controlled. All you can do is wear rubbers if it's raining, and stand in the doorway if the house starts to shake.

Organizational change not only can be planned and controlled, it must be. Indeed, if an organizational change is not carefully planned, you are no more managing it than you manage rain or an earthquake.

We plan for change in order to have our say about where we're going and what we're going to become. A plan is not the words of a plan on paper, or the timeline for rollout marked on a calendar, but the understanding that exists in the minds of participants. It is the organization's vision of the future reduced to clear, comprehensible action steps describing how to get there, and who will do what.

Planning is too complicated for leaders to do by themselves. It requires a team of people from every part of the organization, both at the hub of the organization and out along the spokes -- support people, suppliers, customers, distributors, and other secondary parties.

These people do not need to meet as a team -- if they did, the group would be bigger than Congress -- but hub members will need to meet often and intensively with members out among the spokes. A common mistake managements make is to cook up a plan on their own, usually at a swanky resort, and spring it on workers as a done deal -- no improvements invited. Leaders must get workers behind a plan and involve them in it from the very beginning. Not only does this elicit valuable information and practical feedback, but it starts the change juices flowing in everyone.

Issues to resolve:

                 ƒ  Goals. Does the entire team agree on what the objective of the change is? It should be easy to state in a few words: faster production, better communication, fewer re-dos, better customer feedback. The goal must fit in with the larger organizational mission (serving the best danged hamburgers you ever ate) like a glove.

                 ƒ  Strategy. What Push and Pull engines drive the plan? Have you identified which goes where and when and why? Push is your starter engine -- use it to goose people and get their attention. Then provide a pathway to a long-term Pull orientation -- a vision of the future that people can buy into, each person in his own way.

                 ƒ  Behavior. Change initiatives are all about changing what people do. Whose behavior is targeted by the change? Do they understand what is expected? Are they equipped to make the adaptation? Who is a believer and who still needs to be converted?

                 ƒ  Outcome. What result do we want from this change in behavior? Is it something that can be measured? Is is it something that can be broken down into winnable units?

                 ƒ  Contingencies. If the plan doesn't work, what then? A backup plan? A prayer service? How do you respond to unexpected events?

                 ƒ  Resources. Is a major operational overhaul being conducted on a bake-sale budget? Where is the money coming from? Where are the support people coming from? If you run into trouble, who can run interference for you?

                 ƒ  Timeline. If there is no schedule, there is no plan.

                 ƒ  Personnel. Who's in charge of the plan? Who's planning the plan? Where are these people coming from? Why, if they are valuable people, are they available? I.e., why aren't they swamped with prior mission-critical tasks?

                 ƒ  Evaluation. How will you know when the battle is over, and whether it has been won? Finally, if the battle is won, was it worth it? After all that travail, was it in fact a good plan?

So when the change is finally formalized and rolled out to people, they are already behind it, from the furthest spoke to the closest hub. Subteams within the planning team can attend to many of these spoke issues. Keep your hub focused on the overall goal of the change, and the spokes focused on knocking down barriers to the change. All together you can get the wheel rolling.

 

     Introducing Change

Say the word "change" to any randomly selected group, and you will likely get three different types of responses. Some throw up their hands and say, "God, not again." Others say, "Well, it's about time." The third group will simply throw up.

Your team, your organization, is full of all three types. The question is, how do you lay out a change regimen that takes into consideration the various ways people will react?

First, you take into consideration what has been people's past experience. Think of a bell curve, with people revolting on either extreme. On one extreme, you've got your avalanche. This is cataclysmic change, major change that must occur in a very short time frame. It's the organizational equivalent of a tornado picking your neighbor's house and dropping it on your house: much must be done and quickly. Or a new technology or delivery mechanism has made your product line obsolete overnight, and you've got to reorganize, streamline, and catch up to your competition toot-sweet.

On the other extreme you've got trickles of change. These are little inoffensive changes that, taken one at a time, would be quite manageable. The problem is that management sends one down about every two and a half minutes. If you've been to a bowling alley, think of the changes as having a ganging-up rhythm: for every ball you bowl, three are sent back to you by the ball return.  . It's too many, too quick. Pretty soon, one ball is going to smunch your finger as you reach for another. After this happens a few times, , you just want to sit down and watch.

In the illustration above, the best place to to introduce change is at the high point of the curve.  Then take the change step by step:

                 ƒ  Announce to your team or organization what you want to outcome to look like.

                 ƒ  Lay out the vision for them, till they begin to see it, too. Engage their imaginations.

                 ƒ  Now designate an enthusiastic pilot group made of as many proactives as you can spare to try out the new change.

                 ƒ  Have them play with and modify the idea as necessary.

                 ƒ  Give them enough time and resources so they can make the change and show measurable success.

                 ƒ  Then broadcast the heck out of the success.

Have those who have lived the change and survived come in and mentor and teach others how they did it. Metaphiles make great teachers because they are natural enthusiasts; they teach in order to further their own understanding. Let them play the role of storytellers and pathfinders.

Then roll the change effort out exponentially. First with two groups, then four. Then eight, then sixteen. Then everyone. x

     What You Can Do and What You Can't Do

In his book What You Can Do and What You Can't Do,^[1] psychologist Martin Seligman lists the most common psychological problems individuals suffer from and the degree to which each problem can be addressed and resolved. Here are items from his list:

 

What emerges from this list is that problems are changeable in proportion to their difficulty or depth.

Is it possible to create a parallel list of organizational problems that can and cannot be changed? We took a crack at it and came up with one. Note that these ailments are all internal; they do not include items such as product pricing, market muscle, stock price or the quality of the competition. The happy news is that the problems receiving the most attention in change initiatives right now -- quality, processes, participation -- are the most easily remedied. American business is putting its change efforts where they can do the most immediate good.

More good news is that there are no flat-out "unchangeable" conditions. Nearly every organizational problem has a solution, if one is willing to take extreme measures. The bad news is that most solutions create undesirable side effects, and that most solutions do involve extreme measures.

 

 

     THE ETHICS OF CHANGE MANAGEMENT

Push is best exemplified by the core teaching of Nicolo Machiavelli: whatever gets people to do what you need them to do, is good. It generally means the deliberate application of one kind of stress to distract people from another kind of stress. Creating or naming a "common enemy" is an oft-used Push strategy. Push can be cynical in other ways, as well, as when a leader pits one group against another in order that the strongest group will survive. Or it can be benevolent, "cruel to be kind," deliberately hardening workers through arduous work and long hours in the short term to make them more competitive for the long haul. Either way, it hurts. In Push, the leader is a uniter of muscle, and Machiavellian tactics are acceptable.

In Pull, such manipulation is absolutely unacceptable. Pull is best exemplified by an insight Viktor Frankl had in the concentration camps of World War II. He noted that people could withstand almost any present condition, no matter how deadly, disturbing, or disgusting, if there was reason to hope for the future. But the choice is left to the worker, whether to slog on or to give up. In the Pull approach, the leader may seek to remind the team member of the goal, but the leader is under no illusion of being a "motivator." People find encouragement from leaders, and incentives; but true motivation arises from within.

We call the Pull approach living in the future because that is how it works. People look beyond current unpleasantness. Then they look backward to the present, and imagine the steps they had to take to get where they wanted to be. It is as if they were already living in the state they are working to create. In their hearts that is exactly what they are doing. In Pull, the leader is a uniter of hearts.

Push and Pull work best together, but there are times when they can be used individually. Push is a burning platform. If your platform is really on fire, Push is the way to go. Leaders use it in wartime, and survival in business can be likened to war.  It is rude, and the fine points of etiquette may have to be set aside for the short term. If your platform is merely smoking, however, or if your workforce is already attuned to the danger surrounding them, Pull may be the better option. You have time to teach people about a new kind of organization where things do not routinely burst into flame, and enlist their cooperation in building one.

The conventional wisdom in the change business is that no one changes when the going is good. Like the drunk who must first hit bottom and admit he is out of control, an organization is unlikely to admit it is in trouble so long as its defense mechanisms allow it to explain away shortcomings as anomalies or one-time market events.

Fortunately, the conventional wisdom is wrong. It makes several assumptions: that the change being undertaken will inevitably be seen negatively by workers, and therefore there must be a more powerful and more negative perception about the status quo. And it overlooks the fact that there have been many good companies, such as Hewlett-Packard, 3M, and have proven themselves capable of innovation and renewal without dramatic swings, back and forth, into and out of the danger zone.

But the point that a wake-up call (like layoffs, restructuring, or the sacking of senior managers) is sometimes necessary to focus us on change is valid. Leadership is defined in part by the ability to get people to agree both on present dangers (Push) and a vision of the future that will enable them (Pull) to overcome those dangers.

Some leaders are so talented that they can motivate people to change with only a modestly frightening present (Pull alone). These are the true visionaries.

Some are more talented than that -- they can concoct a catastrophic present out of whatever is handy. Sometimes it is necessary to isolate one group to build a coalition, to name a common enemy to compete against. But beware the leader who can lead only by dividing and demonizing. Inflaming the passions of one group against another is galvanic, but it is wrong. It is mind-Pummel of the sort practiced in the ever-shifting alliances of George Orwell's 1984, in which Oceania was a blood brother one day and a blood enemy the next. Those whom you scapegoat today have a way of browsing on your grave tomorrow. In an age of relatively free information, people quickly learn. "Fool me once..."

      

 

     Big Change Versus Little Changes

One of the arguments in the change game is whether organizations should take on a whole lot, in hopes of achieving a whole lot, or just a little, on the grounds that something is better than nothing.

Reengineering is on of the "big change" initiatives. calls for a structural overhaul of the way a business does business. So does Richard Pascale's notion of corporate "reinvention" -- changing an organization from the inside out, from its outward behavior to its inner status of "being."^[2] Federal Express is a company committed to total overhaul, and ongoing all-out revolution, to provide the most reliable service at the lowest cost. They don't mind installing whole new information systems costing billions every couple of years because information -- where is a package? when will it arrive? by what means? -- is their lifeblood.

 

On the other end of the spectrum is the incrementalist philosophy implicit in the continuous improvement movement -- the idea that many positive little changes lead to a greatly improved overall performance. United Parcel Service, FedEx's over-the-road rival, embodies this incremental philosophy, always looking to shave a second off a given task -- carrying the truck keys in the left hand, for instance, rather than slipping them into a pocket from which they will have to be extracted a minute later.

The big versus little argument is remarkably like revolution versus evolution. Is a company better off betting everything on an all-out assault on its future? Or is that too ambitious, and so susceptible to early discouragement that the company will be worse off than when it started? The fashion is to say that complex problems require complex solutions. But initiatives that throw a team into an uproar, that draw people out of their comfort zones and shrink their change space, will result in great resistance. Like eating an elephant, complex change must be accomplished incrementally.

Meanwhile the revolutionists sniff at incremental change as the trifling of mere "management." Leaders pursue a vision, they say, while managers -- you can sense the distaste with which they utter the word manager-- tinker with the existing system. Michael Hammer will not consider any process improvement to be "reengineering" unless it passes the acid test of being radical. To him, incremental is fine for TQM, but inadequate to the visionary warp change demanded by reengineering.

Which is better? There are two considerations. First, the question is skewed. Your organization doesn't need to decide between big and little. It merely needs to decide what it needs to do. Whether the answer is big or little is immaterial.

Second, both sides are right about something. A grand vision is an inherently better motivator than an incremental waystation even if the actual change of an incremental one. Compare the motiovating power of:

                 ƒ  "world leadership in the semiconductor industry"

                 ƒ  "zero defects"

                 ƒ  "customer satisfaction absolutely guaranteed"

... with these narrow goals:

                 ƒ  "receivables improved from a 51-day cycle to a 48-day cycle"

                 ƒ  "overnight delivery replaced by instantaneous email"

                 ƒ  "turned off lights in storage area when no one is in there."

All "stretch goals" are big visions. An example was British Airways decision ten years ago to become the airline with the highest quality service and best overall reliability. At the time, BA was a stronghold of Pamper and waste. The airline adopted a Pull philosophy straight out of Viktor Frankl: imagining that they were the industry's top service performer, then taking steps to make the vision reality. The goal lifted everyone's eyes out of their lunchbags and toward the horizon.

 

 

Organizations predispose themselves to failure by attempting so ambitious an undertaking that success is impossible. Stretch goals can be laudable if they are ambitious but doable; or diabolical if their stretch exceeds any human reach.

But "stretch goals" that are too hard to attain, or prove too distracting to workers, or take too long to attain, or involve too many prior failures before it is attained, can knock the stuffing out of your team, morale-wise. Wang, the creator of dedicated word processors, set development and production goals that were just too much for it. The company overextended and went sought bankruptcy protection in the 1990s, reemerging from it only recently to a world noticeably lacking in dedicated word procssors.

Likewise, IBM Rochester won the Baldrige Award in 1990 for its ambitious commitment to teams. Prt of the division's metholodogy was to see all organizational processes through team eyes; at one point it counted over 2,000 separate, formal teams. But the division got so caught up internally in teaming that it took its eye off the technologal scene unfolding outside the company. When the division's cash cow, the AS400 server, began to fade, the division's obsession with teams blinded it to the obvious need for a new flagship product.

The word revolution will ignite metamaniacs; but it will put everyone else's fires out, dead out. Solution: plot ambitious, revolutionary changes, but break them into staged, achievable increments.

James Collins describes a psychological experiment showing the power of small changes. Imagine, he says, two sets of houses. With the first set you knock on each door and ask if they would mind putting a two-inch sticker on their porch saying, "I'm for a clean environment." Nearly everyone will agree to this. The other set of houses you ignore until the next round of the experiment, four weeks later. This time you haul giant four-by-eight lawn signs to both sets of houses, asking if people would mind posting the big signs on their lawns saying "I'm for a clean environment." As you might expect, the houses with the stickers were far more likely to opt for the bigger signs than houses not given the sticker offer. The little allowed them to contemplate the big.

 

Our view is that big and small can be combined. Dream giant dreams, but make them come true by breaking into discrete, achievable parts. Celebrate the little wins as if they were big ones. And avoid breaking them into parts so small they actually make the job harder.

It is said that a mountain disappears more easily if you move it a grain of sand at a time, than putting your shoulder to it and trying to move it at once. But first, try moving it in fistfuls -- it's less aggravating. x

 

     Crossing the Swamp

Making an organizationwide change is like a frog crossing a swamp, hopping from one lily pad to the next. We count six leaps that must be made, and they must be made in the sequence we describe. You cannot skip one, or trip over one, and ask for a do-over.

Here are the six critical moments in the change process. Each activity must meld with the activity leading up to it and the activity immediately following it. It is a loping, leaping dynamic, in which rhythm is everything.

    1)   Catalyzing. This is the initiating task of leadership: to bring an abstract idea into concrete fruition. It first appears as a sharp spike, an exclamation point in the sand. Change starts with a single individual, or a single team. They will be its champions throughout the life of the change. Starting with other leaders, and drawing momentum and clarification from them, the idea begins to make its way through the organization.

    2)   Encoding. Before people can subscribe to an idea they must understand it. The task of communicating the necessity of the change falls to the champions. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle applies equally to ideas: the act of taking their measure can alter their meaning. Care must be taken to keep the language alive and in service to the idea. The great danger in the encoding process is that the act of preserving it will also embalm it. Engaging the imagination means going beyond structure and how-to -- it requires humor and empathy with the people who will be bringing the idea into the work world.

    3)   Imagining. Encoding happens in the leader's mind; imagining
happens in the minds of close followers. The leader's words become a picture. What was not visible before, a picture of the living future, is now swimming into view. People who will be affected by the change are able to imagine it. Understanding prevents surprises. When a critical mass of people see the vision and are willing to held accountable for it, that is the first sign the change is succeeding.

    4)   Uniting. Once the vision is clear to a few key people, it quickly becomes visible to others. Like dominoes, most people fall in line behind its momentum; some key people may not. Leaders obtain commitment and support both formally and informally, at every level of the organization. Dissenting views are met halfway, heard, respected, and responded to. If their views cannot be incorporated into the change, they must decide what their role in the change will be: in or out.

    5)   Fitting. Leadership throughout the organization is mobilized to identify aspects of it that don't mesh with the new vision, rooting out contradictions in systems, structures, and processes. Do your measurements, hiring, training, communications, development, rewards and other systems advance the idea or weight it down? While the fitting stage should not be a witch-hunt, neither should any rule or detail be safe from challenge. An organization that absorbs the new without scouring out the old can only be a mess.

    6)   Gelling. (Not hardening!) Leadership drives the change down through the organization or the team, challenging everyone to make it a part of their thinking. Work is monitored to ensure that efforts do not go slack. Achievements are celebrated, and people are rewarded for making the change succeed. What began as vague vision is now institutionalized reality -- with all that implies about the next wave of organizational change. x

     Organizational attitude

 

Organizational attitude is what organizational culture creates, and it is generally horrible. In a way all change initiatives are about altering this fundamental disposition, about replacing images of impossibility with images of possibility.

Anyone who thinks working in a free country is light years different from working in a totalitarian country should open their ears and really listen to the way people talk. That talk indicates that, while many of our institutions are democratic and participative, most organizations are still run, or are perceived to run, with all the thoughtfulness of a gulag.

Think about all the places you have worked, all the lunchroom conversations you have ever participated in. Think of the attitude you see where the workers seldom smile: Toys R Us, Kmart. Think of places where the organization has been the butt of so many jokes the people seem defeated: Denny's, USAir, the U.S. Postal Service. What is the constant element? A thread of contempt for a enterprise that is losing battles and hammering its people:

                 ƒ  "We sell it but we don't buy it."

                 ƒ  "Not invented here -- might be good."

                 ƒ  "Why try, we'll never win."

                  ƒ  "Quality is our least important product."

 

Most workers see themselves as so remote from the vision and leadership of their own organizations that the distance has created a strange rift. In this rift, non-compliers think they belong, because they know change doesn't work. The outsider is the leader who cooked up the latest change initiative. He or she hasn't gotten the full, dim picture yet.

The reason is that years of competition against one another, the brutality of restructuring, hypocrisy on topics such as quality and empowerment, and the simple unlikelihood of maintaining a top market position for very long gives most work groups a group inferiority complex. For all the stories we hear about teams and companies that have trained to think of themselves as "winners," "predators," "eagles," and "warriors," most people at most places have the attitude of "who, us?"

A lot of "imagination" goes into this game -- bad imagination. It is negative and self-deceiving. The message of workplace gallows humor is that nothing good can come from this place, and nothing good can come from us. The self-insulting is a form of self-protecting, carefully veiled. The game goes like this:

                 ƒ  "If we say hurtful things about ourselves, it is a charm against someone outside telling us the same thing, or worse, someone above us in the organization, wielding actual power."

                 ƒ  "If we give a change 50 percent, our failure will be less than if we gave it 100 percent. That would be really depressing."

 

This adopted inferiority complex might be healthy in a gulag, but in an organization needing to choose between positive and negative, it is toxic. When people are technically free to express themselves and do thoughtful work but slide instead into neurotic habits of indirectness, self-loathing and going-through-the-motions work, a great betrayal is taking place. Workers are betraying their own talents and good intentions. And managers who let this continue unchallenged are betraying their workforce and their organizations.

This attitude may be well-deserved in the light of history, but it must be undone for the sake of the future. Rebuilding confidence means teaching cynical  teams how to dream again. We need to turn pessimism into optimism, and negative imagination into positive. x

     Igniting Organizational Imagination

 Most people are brilliant at imagining negatives and miserable at imagining positives, at giving the future the benefit of the doubt. Our friend the amygdala has negatives on our front stoop before our neocortex gets out of bed.

A few people are naturally adept at imagining positives. They are the metaphiles and, on the extreme end, the metamaniacs among us. If you ever come across a true metamaniac, you have someone like Dostoevsky's character Prince Mishkin in The Idiot, constitutionally unable to think anything but the best of people. Dostoevsky's title kind of gives away the downside of a beatific imagination -- the rest of the world, hiding behind its shield of pessimism, regards you as a fool, a Pollyanna. In all fairness, that's often what you are.

But there is a middle metaphiliac ground that we can all be led to. It is simply a willingness to keep an open mind. It is an attitude of optimism.

Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism^[4], says that there is much to be gained from cultivating greater innate positivity: better health, diminished stress, greater success on the job and at home.  [Carol -- this aside is typical of the balanced approach we try to present; and it's interesting. Hark back to our admission that we see ourselves as "skeptical optimists."

If you are ambitious, you may want to think about strategies for increasing your people's ability to imagine positives. This does not mean doffing your critical acumen, donning your rose-colored glasses, and assuming that any proposed initiative will succeed if only you believe, Tinkerbell-style. It does mean striving to overcome your own lazy pessimism and negativity, which in its own way is as far-fetched, and as unreliable, as a knee-jerk mindset of optimism.

Here are some techniques for quashing your own pessimistic thinking before it quashes your organization:

                 ƒ  Disagree with your own negative assessments. Listen to what you say to yourself, and the myriad judgments you make every day. "This will never work." "She's lying through her teeth." "What do they think we are, automatons?" "We'll never make that schedule." Most people stumble each day through a hailstorm of self-manufactured negativity. Studies have shown that the average elementary student hears 400 negative comments daily, versus 10 positive ones. Negativity is like the air we breathe, it is everywhere we turn. Naturally we give it credence after a while. You can't change your negative assessments until you first acknowledge that they are a fact of life -- and that they are generalizations, lazy, and not a little stupid.

                 ƒ  Reprogram inferior judgments with better ones. When you make these awful pronouncements to yourself, dispute them. Get in there and act as traffic cop. Some thoughts need to be refined a bit, made more specific. Some are just not worthy of passing through your brain. It won't be easy, at first. "Well, I suppose it could work, if we had air support."  "She might be lying, or I may just be unwilling to hear what she's saying." "That's a tall order. I wonder how close we can come to achieving it." "That's faster than we've ever worked before, but not by much."

                 ƒ  Smash the box. The customary way of thinking about the world, or paradigm, is like a box people crawl into, and find they cannot crawl out of. The box becomes fused to our thought patterns, it is as much a part of us as our memories and habits. In fact, that's exactly what it is. Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline^[5], talks about the need to trash the old paradigm or way of doing things (he calls it a mental model) and either retailoring it or replacing it with a new one. the old saying, "It is easier to tear down than build up," is exactly wrong when applied to our own thinking. We can all imagine a better life, with us successful and sexy and employed; but so tough to pry away a paradigm that has imprisoned our thinking for years, and to chase it out of our heads for good. To smash the box, you need the combined power of Push and Pull. Use Push to remind you how vital the change is -- it is life versus death -- and Pull to think it through and make the exhilaration of success more important to you than the comfort of failure.

                 ƒ  Deck the halls. One way to overcome negative imagination is to subvert its imagery. If an organization's folk culture holds that nothing good can come from within its walls, take a torque wrench to the culture and show them otherwise. Hold up images of honest effort rewarded in the marketplace. Small improvements that led to greater sales. Thoughtful planning that overturned years of bad habits. Ordinary people coming up with dynamite ideas. Let people know how the marketplace works when it really works. The competitor that enjoys greater market share than you isn't any smarter. It's got the same proportion of lunkheads to rocket scientists as your organization. What it has that you lack is dream and discipline.

                 ƒ  Spell it out. Organizational imagination means having employees and managers alike visualize what life in the new changed environment will be like. What their new roles will be, new responsibilities, new behavioral expectations, new relationships, new knowledge requirements -- specific things that will change for the positive. Create a time, space, and method for employees to create their own future. Use what-if scenarios to expand their views from the "now" to the tomorrow:"

It is January 2000. Our company has doubled market share in five years without resorting to offshore alliances and without layoffs. Every employee knows what the profit goal of his or her product team is. Money we used to spend on employee turnover is now spent on continuous training. My title has changed from class 1 asssistant administrative officer to customer satisfaction agent. I have an office with a door, and a hook to hang my hat.

                 ƒ  Try logotherapy. This is the survival technique Victor Frankl observed in concentration camps. He noticed that people who made it through the horrors of Auschwitz and other places went to another place in their minds -- to the future. Instead of specific details, they focus on the important themes of life, the things that had meaning for them, They imagined what the future would be like, a better time in every way.

"It is the future. I will have provided for my family. I will have taught myself how to learn -- the most important thing one can learn. I worked regularly for 40 years, without burning out. I came to understand our customers, and how the system works. While other organizations struggled and failed, ours struggled and prevailed."

With that vision of the future, they plotted the steps they needed to take to make it reality. First rule: survive. Second rule: build a fire to keep the imagination alive.

                 ƒ  Win small battles; pick low fruit. Look for opportunities to pilot change initiatives in areas where people are willing, able, and enthusiastic to try something new that makes sense for them. As they try out their new behaviors, they are rewarded for approximate successes at first and then, after a while, only for correct behaviors. Once success is achieved, broadcast the results like crazy throughout the organization, as an inspiration not only for those who achieved the success, but as an example for those who are considering the same change but were too hesitant to be first. Before you know it, people who would have been classified as foot-draggers before will be sprinting to get in front of the change parade.

                 ƒ  Maintain a sense of humor. Sometimes, this means acquiring one. But it is important to realize that humor is how people cope with insanity. If it helps people survive in the negativity of the gulag, it can be put to work coping with the tensions and doubts of a more positive enterprise. Get people laughing and poking fun and you have, at the very least, made a team of them. Our observation is that change initiatives screw themselves by taking themselves too seriously. If you have a great cartoon or aphorism that nails your initiative to the wall, nail it to the wall. An ounce of Dilbert is worth a ton of Drucker.

The battle to ignite organizational confidence is the most important one your change initiative must fight. Do not think you are going to turn your team into a platoon of gung-ho optimists overnight. They will still be who they are.

The truth is, we have to smash one another's boxes every day, every hour, every minute. The old paradigms never go away. Like ethanol to the drunk, the whiff of it is always in the air, enticing and easy. Push frightens us away from a destructive course of action; Pull taps us on the shoulder and says, hey, there may be a better way.

For reactives in your organization, imagination will be a foreign concept; for the occasional metamaniac, it will be a chore to drag them out of the world of imagination and back into reality. For the majority of employees, the people capable of being coaxed to a position of intermittent metaphilia, the world of imagination must be re-lit and fanned fresh every morning. The flame you ignite in them is the vision of future successes that change can bring.

It isn't a game. When things as important as survival, continued employment, and community prosperity are at stake, you are willing to take greater risks. With your livelihood and your kids' future meals on the line, you don't dismiss an idea out of hand. Push gets you moving, then Pull draws you along. You engage with the dream, as it engages you. x

negatives they express to you		positives to replace them with
PUMMEL		PUSH
"We're going to lose our jobs."		"You've got a chance to earn your future."
"The change is an excuse to get rid of people."		"The organization wants to become more efficient in the long term, not ruin some people and demoralize the rest in the short term."
"Why don't they just come out and say it's our fault?"	θ	"Management accepts responsibility for ideas that fail. It is unfortunate that your future is hostage to our wisdom, but that drives us to decide as wisely as we can."
"We're better off the way we are."		"Competitors are improving their processes, so we have to improve ours."
"Notice how we never got to vote on this."		"Vote with your enthusiasm, your willingness to try, and your honest effort."
"This place was a drag to work for before and it will still be a drag to work for when this is implemented."		"Tell us how to make it better. If don't know how to make it better, you might be happier somewhere else."
PAMPER		PULL
"This is just another stupid idea."		"If it's stupid, can you make it smarter? Your wisdom is hereby solicited."
"No one told us this was coming."		"We're telling you now. Tell us what you think about the idea itself. We're sorry if we're not communicating well; what should we do to communicate better with you?"
"This thing will do more harm than good."	θ	"If we do not enter into the process with optimism, that prediction is self-fulfilling."
"I'll bet we can continue the way we were if we can get through this 'change period.'"		"The way we were is the reason this change is necessary. To survive the organization must be alert to changes, not hide our head in the sand."
"We're closer to the customer than you are. Why don't you go away and let us do our job."		"There is no 'away' to go to. We are all in this together." x

     Overcoming Resistance

Though we wish it were not, resistance is a fact of human nature. It is an ancient pattern:

1.        Good idea creates aura of hope.

2.        Hope inspires some people but causes others anxiety.

3.        Anxiety prompts  resistance.

4.        Resistance trashes good idea.

It doesn't always happen like this. Few lottery winners decline to take possession of their winnings, to sidestep the changes that wealth brings. If we win a prize, get a promotion, find money, or make a new friend, most of us react positively. It's when we perceive negative consequences to change, or continued uncertainty, that we resist.

 

Resistance can come from a number of sources:

                 ƒ  fear ... people are afraid of failing; of losing (identity, sense of belonging, control, meaning, security, etc.); of the unknown that is out there; of paying the consequences for missteps.

                 ƒ  low energy ... unwillingness to commit to the change; laziness. These people see only the short-term Push and miss completely the big picture of long term Pull.

                 ƒ  inertia ... we've been doing it the other way for so long., and going through the motions is so easy.

                 ƒ  memory ... people have been challenged before and lied to before. Changemakers must overcome the history of the organization they want to change. People will want to "get even" with you, even though you aren't the party that offended them.

                 ƒ  percentage ... people want to know what the payoff for them will be. One task of leaders is to clarify the payoff for each individual team member.

To reduce resistance, try moving the change out of the shadows of negativity and into the light of day. Encourage people to participate as partners in the change, and reward them when they do. Resistance will drop and willingness/commitment will increase.

Participation can be active, directly involved in asking and answering the questions above. Or it can be passive, simply receiving continuous communication and feedback on the process. For example, bringing problems to the group and soliciting their inputs to possible solutions tends to overcome many negative expectations of change. Cunningham Hamilton Quilter, the architectural firm that helped design Las Vegas' new Stratosphere, schedules weekly head sessions to do this.

The most important aspect of involvement, however, is getting people oriented towards the future -- helping them anticipate and embrace future outcomes. Determine all the stakeholders in any change and try to reach an agreement on "what is a desirable outcome?" What these future behaviors will be must be identified now. How people are to begin practicing them must be laid out, in detail, today.

What will that outcome look, feel, taste and smell like? Is it OK? The pathways of change towards the future have many twists, turns, and off-ramps. Encouraging people to help be the drivers of the change vehicle (determining what maps to use, what off-ramps to take) builds a commitment to the outcomes of change. It also allows them to move within their comfort zones -- to keep the process moving forward. In other words, it makes the change their change.

     The Roles of the Changemaker

No change ever succeeded without talented leadership, whether at the top levels of an organization or at the team level. But the definition of leadership varies crazily from place to place. It varies from the dynamic (lead rhyming with deed) to the static (lead with the atomic symbol Pb).

Larry Bossidy, CEO of Allied Signal, and coiner of the burning platform metaphor, qualifies as the former. Any number of CEOs, who pursue connect-the-dots restructuring strategies, fail liek all the others, and are then sent packing like all the others, their pockets stuffed with stock options, qualify as the latter.

The key figure in successful organizational change is the changemaker. Changemakers may be a CEO or a manager or a team leader or team member. They are individuals who not only champion the idea, but help steward it through the organizational ranks. A changemaker may have little position power. What is essential, however, is power of personality. Not charisma or personal dynamism; the greatest changemakers are often a little dull. We are talking about the powers of commitment, integrity, and consideration that can provide great leverage to even a shaky idea. x

The changemaker as pathmaker

If your team or organization is living in the present, the changemaker lives a week or a year in the future, relaying descriptions of what lies ahead. Most important, the changemaker creates a pathway people can follow, to bring them out of the wilderness and into the promised land.

The idea of the pathway is vital because it links the notions of Push and Pull. The leader who announced that the platform is on fire, but does not point to an escape exit, a path leading away from the fire, is not a Push leader. He is just somebody yelling "Fire!"

The pathway is the vision of safety that allows people to endure the distress of the current emergency. For a burning platform it may mean lifeboats, life preservers, helicopters plucking people from the waves. For an organization it means new rewards, policies and procedures, that give hope that people can continue to commit to the company's prospects; and it means compassionate treatment of those who don't make it through the emergency. The pathway is the positive outcome that all our work is about. x

The changemaker as integrator

Changemaking requires the use of both your brain halves. Any knack or openness you have for change arises on your right side. But your ability to identify, analyze, critique and monitor your change occurs on the left side.

If you tilt too strongly to one side or the other, you will not be an effective, changemaking leader.

But finding a balance is tricky. By definition, a left-brain orientation can only analyze what is, what has been safely corralled, defined, and systematized. It takes imagination and a kind of creative recklessness to accept things that are still taking shape, and that may never be subdued to the analyst's satisfaction.

But even right-brain people get spooked by the unknown. It is a natural human inclination, upon encountering an unknown entity, to fill in the blanks with negativity. The footsteps you hear behind you on a dark street are never a beneficiary, until you turn and it is someone returning your wallet. The boss's new merit-based compensation plan sounds like pure pain until the particulars are spelled out. The phone call in the middle of the night always means someone has died, until you answer, and it is a man calling about the Irish Sweepstakes..

A changemaker's job is to make change safe for the people it affects. If you wish to be one, but your strengths are one-sided, team up with another or two others, who can bring balance to the change leadership and help you push it through. x

The changemaker as negotiator

We use the word negotiate to mean different things. We negotiate a river, making our way past the snags and shoals to our desired destination. And we negotiate deals, cutting away extraneous issues, many of them chaged with emotion, to obtain the ends that we desire.

Both senses of the word apply to negotiating change. Change is both an intricate waterway to make one's way through, and it is a thicket of conflicting wants and tensions that must be resolved to the satisfaction of both parties.

In circumstances where you know you never will have to deal with the other party again, as in a house sale, win/lose negotiation can't be beat. Yet business gurus pooh-pooh win/lose negotiation as antediluvian. They're right, it's Pummel.  And it has no place in intra-organization dealings. A leader who tries to saddle all the pain of change on one constituency squanders any chance he or she will have of being trusted by that group later, or by any group who witnessed what was done to that group. The essence of successful negotiating between parties who must continue doing business with one another is therefore trustworthiness.

A union steward praised British industrialist Sir John Harvey-Jones, as a man who, when he makes a promise, never lets you down. "He's the sort of fellow who, when you have a pint with him, you don't have to look to see if he took your shoes off."^[7]

Jim Kouzes, author of Credibility, tells the story of Patricia Carrigan, who in her first official act as plant manager at the GM Parts plant in Bay City, Michigan, took several days to travel through the plant and introduce herself individually to each worker. It was an unprecedented gesture, and it left many workers open-mouthed. A few remarked that, in the fifteen years that the previous plant manager had held the job, they had never once seen him, much less spoken with him.

Just seeing her come by, say a few words, and smile had a powerful impact on employees. People rally around self-revealing behaviors. Physical proximity sends several messages: I acknowledge your existence. I do not think I am too good for you. I am not hiding from you. I do not have eleven and a half heads.

Said one of Carrigan's front-line workers, "There ain't a phony bone in her body."^[8]

 

 

A proper change is a negotiated partnership, by which parties within an organization create a deeper relationship by agreeing to be open with one another.

Negotiations are by no means guaranteed success. Bad faith is a fact of life, but it must not be presumed -- for that is bad faith itself. Think of the negotiating situation as a balancing act between intelligence (what you already know) and information (what they tell you). The two should grow together and merge into a seamless whole. When the two begin to diverge, something is wrong.

Negotiations don't have to nail down every last contingency. Why not define certain contingencies to the advantage of both sides? Max Bazerman and Margaret Neale suggest that parties negotiating a change lessen the risk by offering rewards and compensations for successes and shortfalls. They call it "making a bet."^[9]

If the two sides disagree on the outcome or value of a change proposition, why not word the agreement so that it reflects and rewards those differences? Labor can tell management, if we fail to achieve your productivity goals, we'll give up our raise. Management can come at it from the opposite perspective: achieve the goal, and the bonus is yours. It's not real money until and unless both sides win. I won't mind paying you money if you helped me make more money. You won't mind paying me more if I gave you greater value than you expected.

The bottom line in change negotiation is to break out of the irrational straitjacket that the two sides conspire to create by withholding information. The changemaker takes the lead in disclosing information, and laying cards on the table for all to see.

All change is negotiated, and all negotiation is learning. x

The changemaker as game player

Organizational politics can be likened to a game in which no party wants to yield any advantage to any other. Too many years of departmentally- and functionally-divided operations, and too many years of management-labor conflict, have turned most organizations into battle-scarred turf zones. Intra-corporate adversarialism ("The enemy isn't the competition, it's those people in finance/strategic planning/engineering/quality management") is too often the order of the day. Tip-toeing through this minefield of bad feeling requires an unlikely combination of delicacy and forthrightness.

First and foremost, if the game in the organization has been interteam feuding, then the game must be changed. If the game was competition within the company, it must be changed to competition against other companies. What was once a hot war between management and workers may be replaced with a true peace, in which both sides work together in harmony, or, more likely, a cold war in which people acknowledge disagreements, but agree with the larger purpose of survival in the marketplace.

Game theory trains us to see from other sides’ perspectives. We all know managers and team leaders who whine that they can't get their employees to see things from the customer's point of view.” But has that manager or team leader tried seeing things from his own workers' or team's point of view?

Game theory is a Push discipline. It can be cynical, and it is unabashedly manipulative. But it can be an invaluable tool in focusing a group on the things it is good at -- its best game.

Played well, enemies can become collaborators, and a pattern of years of distrust and demonization can be reversed. x

The changemaker as confessor

A fashionable role for leaders in American business is that of the organizational messiah. The organizational messiah always has all the answers, and plays to the hilt the role of indispensable know-it-all, without whom the organization would founder. This person is less a leader than a statue of a leader: everything is about him. As a changemaker he's a walking disease.

True changemakers operate outside themselves, their ego, and their need for recognition. It is in their nature to be interested in the well-being of all parties in a change effort, because without their success, the change has little chance of succeeding.

So their method is essentially Socratic, eliciting information, asking questions, never satisfied with the surface explanation, always going deeper to learn more.

Listening is a Pull discipline. If you are a changemaker, you have faith that people will lend their support if it is in their interest to do so. It is great to go into negotiations with a dossier full of information prepared by your own analysts. The data are usually better, however — more accurate, more reliable, more balanced — if the other party simply tells you what they are.

Changemaking is hard mental work, and there is a temptation to keep the gears turning at all times. Resist the temptation. When the people are talking, listen without worrying about your response.

Just listen. The information in their remarks is valuable and provides many clues, without which the changemaker will not be making much change. x

The changemaker as sales person

Making a change is like making a sale. The best sales people understand that success lies not in pushily driving through your selling and personal agendas, as Willie Loman tried to do in Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman, but in demonstrating imagination and empathy -- getting outside your agendas long enough to learn what the prospective buyer's agenda is. And tailoring the product to meet that customer agenda to a T.

The best sales person is like a tailor, always measuring to see what will fit, unafraid to lay hands in unfamiliar places. The changemaker must treat the organization, or the team, as a customer, to be listened to, understood, fitted and served. The mistake most often made is to confuse the changemaker's first change solution -- his or her "product" -- as the final, most satisfactory one, and the task of change as a simple matter of convincing the organization to buy the off-the-rack product. The ideal solution is a co-creation of the changemaker and everyone else in the organization or on the team. The "product" of change must be everyone's; it is always tailor-made.

There are a million opinions on what it takes to be a good sales person. Some are visions of undefeatable confidence -- keep knocking till someone lets you in. Some are invitations to flimflammery -- mastering the tricks of persuasion and beating customers over the head with them.  But one can imagine a model for honest, proactive conversation that attunes itself to identifying customer needs, and meeting them in concert with the customer. That's the kind of sales person that can effect change, not the Willie Loman kind. Tough but detached. Tough enough to be turned down the first few times, and keep coming back. Detached enough that the change idea is never yours alone, and is always a work in progress. x

Mistakes get made in organizations. But there are mistakes that must never be made, as recovery from them is virtually impossible.

1. Lay off the duplicity. Leadership can't play internal groups off against one another, telling one group one thing and another group another. People have too much information today to be consistently fooled. They will find out, and you will be out.

2. Lay off the executive ego. Senior managements routinely doom change initiatives by investing too much of themselves in them. The idea quickly becomes equated with the individual, complicating the picture for the unpersuaded. It's great when the executive in question is un