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?"	è	"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."	è	"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 universally admired and revered. But that is seldom the case. Too many leaders see managed change as their legacy, like Stalin's Five Year Plans. Allow daylight to creep between you and your idea. Any change that is inseparable from the leader who puts it in play has little chance of success.

3. Lay off the intimidation. The Push leader activates people by describing the need for immediate change, in the abstract. The Pummel leader goes further than that, motivating by threatening personal retribution. When people live in that kind of fear, they resort to their glands and park their brains at the door. x

     Growing You Own (Changemakers)

In the brutal business of separating human wheat from human chaff, there is a wonderfully usable rule of thumb called the 80/20 law. It states that 80 percent of good things come from 20 percent of your supply pool. Thus 20 percent of customers account for 80 percent of sales; 20 percent of products account for 80 percent of sales; and 20 percent of salespersons account for 80 percent of sales. For all we know, 20 percent of chickens lay 80 percent of eggs. [Carol -- I don't understand why we would delete this. It is the sort of thing people like about my writing.]

Now apply the 80/20 law to hiring and organizing. It would be lovely just to hire people who are eager beavers for organizational change -- the proactives we have been talking about. Simply identify the 20 percent that can achieve 80 percent of desired results. Use tests, interviews, and references to find the metaphiles, then hire them.

But there's a catch; a handful of catches, actually:

                 ƒ  First, there are never enough metaphiles to go around. People with proven change talents don't spend a lot of time in the job market; if no one snaps them up, they'll hire themselves and go into business on their own.

                 ƒ  Second, being in demand, born or trained metaphiles come at a premium. In the era of the new worker, the best workers will cost you. To hire one away from another organization in order to work for your organization, you will need to strategically place a pot of gold in your doorway. Two pots, maybe.

                 ƒ  Third, the best way to screen for metaphiles is not to hand out standardized personality tests looking for Expressives and Drivers, or Extrovert/Thinkers. Living live wires have better things to do than fill out multiple choice tests. Indeed, there is a glaring paradox in using a static form to seek out nonstatic individuals. Compound that error with the kinds of people in charge of hiring in some organizations, and you will almost certainly chase away four metaphiles for every one you lure inside. (Another 80/20 rule!)

                 ƒ  Fourth, your pressing objective in making a hire is not chameleon tendencies, it's the knowledge and skills to do a certain job -- patent attorney, plastics engineer, air traffic controller. Add metaphilia to this base job requirement and you have really thinned out the herd.

                 ƒ  Fifth, if every company hires only the top 20 percent of candidates, there will be blood in the streets. What's the difference between discriminating on the basis of one condition beyond people's control (the personality they are born with) and another (skin color, national origin, physical disability, etc.)? Change books shouldn't advise consulting with your lawyer willy nilly, but on this issue we'll make an exception.

So if your company or team can't effectively screen affordable job candidates for innate positive change attitudes, what can you do?

You can grow your own. Indeed, you have to. You can't send everyone now working for you away. All but a small fraction of them have the potential to move in the direction your organization needs to move, if they are engaged with the right combination of Push and Pull.

Second, you can commit your organization to a training regimen that unmistakably spells out your change plans, the tools at workers' disposal, and what is expected of newcomers and oldtimers alike.

Do not overemphasize existing skills when you hire. In the new world of work, the functional training your high-level applicants have had -- a degree in business administration, say, with six years of managerial experience -- is no guarantee the candidate will be able to move with your organization's motion.

At the lowest levels, people will be showing up at your HR door with nothing like the skills your organization needs. They need to be trained, so why not pick the ones who seem most trainable?

More important than skills is the attitude candidates bring to the work. You must not hire people accustomed to the extreme ends of the change scale -- those who have been Pummeled into slavish compliance, or Pampered into a sense of feckless entitlement. You will need people who are susceptible either to the guidance of a Pull approach or the unapologetic manipulation of Push.

When hiring for a change, heed the old injunction to "Hire good people." When we say good, we mean it quite literally. Good people are people with the capability for responsible ethical conduct. They have the underappreciated quality of considerateness, a willingness to consider other people's ideas as having equal weight with their own. Empathy is imagination, and imagination precedes change. This capability is the secret source of team strength.

Unless they are Ted Bundy-type sociopaths, able to fool you with psychotic sincerity, you don't need a personality test to identify who has integrity and who does not. They will have track records, solid references, and they will impress you with their ability to listen to what you are saying, adopt new ways of working, accept higher standards for accountability and communication, and meet you halfway in the change process. They may not be natural-born metaphiles, but they are good enough. x

     Organizing for Change

The coneventional system of organizing workers is no good. This system breaks down each job into a description, a pay scale, and intervals along that scale. It is the heart and soul of the machine approach to human engineering that so many change initiatives seek to change. Yet in organization after organization, everything is subjected to change except this machine.

It takes only a few questions to put this system on the defensive:

                 ƒ  If people are expected to do whatever needs to be done, wherever it needs doing, why limit job descriptions to functions? If everyone in a total quality or empowered organization is expected to do everything, what is the point of finely-detailed job descriptions?

                 ƒ  If people are expected to work on teams, and for team rewards, what good is an individual-based job classification and compensation system?

                 ƒ  If people are expected to be flexible enough to move quickly to meet customer and technology demands, what system of index cards -- and the long-term promises they appear to be making -- can keep up with them?

Can a modern organization get by without its job bureaucracy? One alternative model put forward is the free agency system in baseball. Individuals are paid according to the value they are expected to add, with incentive clauses for individual and team success. Free agency fits in completely with the global market that has developed in recent years: the demise of cradle-to-grave employment, the demise even of the concept of the job itself, as organizations have moved toward a system of contracts with leased workers, temporaries, and outsource partners.

We all know people who have lost their jobs to downsizing, and are "hired" back the next day as consultants, at higher pay but no benefits. They have been made free agents, and since they are good at what they do, they will prosper. Some companies farm out whole competencies, even mission-critical ones: Volvo and Chrysler don't even have in-house car designers any more.

But there are problems with the baseball analogy. A happy team cannot have stars whose high salaries are a ceiling quashing new players' aspirations. Individual incentives (pitching 250 innings, making 1,000 sales calls) cannot take precedence over team goals (making the playoffs, customer satisfaction). Though they do have their place: they signal to the individual that the organization wants to know and to meet their needs. This compact is the centerpiece of the New Age organization.

With thoughtful management, an organization can devise a system that organizes around group performance and individual needs, a system that knows what people want from their employment and rewarding them in kind.

 Motorola invites teams to help define not only what their goals and objectives should be, but also how they will be compensated. A 1991 study^[10] of workgroup compensation showed that 72% are moving away from the conventional system of job classifications and step increases. Some use gainsharing to augment conventional pay; others find ways to reward new skills and knowledge acquired; Some organizations tie rewards to success of the change initiative itself: Michael Hammer describes one system where employees are paid extra if the reengineering effort they are engaged in meets expectations.^[11]

One way to sidestep corporate hiring practices is to move hiring down to business unit levels. Instead of advertising corporatewide for new hires, turn the hiring process over to each business unit or team, as has been done at Eastman Kodak.^[12] That's where the people are who will know who will be suitable and who won't. Demassified hiring is a revolutionary move, and will rattle corporate cages, but it has worked wherever it has been tried.x

Consultants can be either the angels or devils of your change initiative. Or even both simultaneously.

They can be invaluable in that they can bring in ideas that a company has been unable to grow in its own soil. They have knowledge about what works and what doesn't that can spare an organization a lot of suffering in the implementation phase. An outsider can bring genetic diversity to an inbred organization, and that's good.

But this very asset can work against an organization's taking ownership of its changes. It's easier to resist an outsider's ideas, and easier to demonize them when things hit a rough spot. If your organization is so weak it needs outsiders to decide vital strategic matters, maybe it should just heave itself off the nearest cliff.

Then there is the matter of expense. Consultants often come to organizations during their hour of direst need. The consultant's, that is. How many shekels will you pour into their pockets before they pronounce you healthy enough to carry on without them?

Finally there is the question of originality. How unique is this great new idea, anyway? Don't the ideas of every change consultant or author seem awfully similar to the ideas of just about every other change consultant or author, yet they never acknowledge any intellectual debt to one another? Instead they create proprietary systems of organizational theory, and sell their ideas as unique. They may do this in the same breath that they advise companies against using proprietary systems of their own.

Next time you want to get a rise out of your consultants, tell them you overheard their staff use the phrase "full wax treatment." Ask what it means. x

     Communicating for Change

There are monasteries today that maintain a vow of continuous silence to shut out spiritual distractions. These places deliberately insulate themselves from modernity and change. The "businesses" all involve processes that were pretty much optimized ten centuries ago: fruit picking, hot metal book publishing, and brandy-making. They have to follow old methods because, unable to communicate the way most people do, it would be impossible for them to adapt to new ones.

The moral of this story: if you are going to spend your life working with people but not talking to them, you can't be in a cutting-edge industry. An all-monk skunkworks won't fly.

You might not think communicating is a difficult topic. All it is is people talking and listening.

On the contrary, everyday communication is fraught with misfires, miscues, and false starts, and communicating for change is not like ordering a sandwich in a restaurant or waving to a friend. Change is dangerous; sandwiches and hellos are not. Though the neocortex may leap at the chance to grow and learn, the amygdala bridles at threatening new information. The team leader who forgets that team members hear information according to their own needs is not team leader very long. Communicating change requires scrupulous honesty, because to be caught in a lie is to end communication. But it also requires artistry and delicacy; artistry to select words that cut straight to the emotional heart of the matter, and delicacy so as not to slice through an artery.

Selective perception

People hear things in radically different ways, all the while nodding as if they were tracking what is being said on radar. And they call the nodding communicating. ("I understand," he lied.)

When people are seeing the same thing in different ways, they start to wonder about one another. "Is he nuts?" "Wow, she is really off in la-la-land." "Is it smart for me to lay my cards on the table with someone this unreliable?"

This has probably happened to you. You'll be talking with a colleague about a proposed plan. You'll both be nodding and talking notes. You're thinking, "God, this is good. We're on exactly the same wavelength." The next day, you meet again, compare notes, and realize you're a million miles apart. She's doing one thing, you're doing something very different, focusing on an aspect of the proposal you weren't even aware of. How could you both think you were in such agreement, and be so far apart?

Perhaps you noticed the other person doing something totally different from what you thought you had agreed to. In reality, you both heard different things from the same conversation based upon each person's pre-determined focus or priority. Each was listening to their "inner ear," not what the other person was saying. The conversation founders on the shoals of each side's self-fascination. The conversation is nothing but a "dual-monologue."

When communication is this shaky, the trust that links teams and individuals begins to dissolve. To reverse this dissolution, we need to look inside human nature and understand the reasons for confusion.

First of all, we select what we perceive. We have to. If we perceive everything we see, our brains won't have time to categorize it all. So we all have different skills in pre-editing what we are going to think about. It is like note-taking during a lecture -- a select few of us can so successfully condense the meaning that a stranger could reconstruct what was said. Some take notes that only they can decipher later. Others think they're taking good notes at the time but can't read their our own writing afterward. The best some of us can manage is drawing pictures of Kilroy peeking over a table edge.

We select what we wish to perceive based on our expectations and our needs. In managing change, we need to know how individuals are perceiving the change idea, and present the change to appease each person's perceptions.

A team member who perceives the change as positive needs only to be Pulled by the power of the idea. One who interprets the change negatively may need to be jolted by the Push of fear, as a reminder that failure to change is also calamitous.

                 ƒ  Expectations. If our first impression of someone is negative ("She is a stranger. What is that language she's speaking?"), we will then pick out details which confirm the expectation. ("I hate the dress. And what about that thing in her nose.") We expect certain things to be true and sure enough, we find them. If our first expectation of a change program is that it will be annoying and unrewarding, we will almost be glad of subsequent information that confirms that dismal outlook. So changemakers have to sense from the get-go what expectations are in the air -- dispel the wrong or pessimistic ones, and allow more positive expectations to form ("Who would like to still be here a year from now, making more money?").

                 ƒ  Needs. Someone who is hungry is more likely to be on the lookout for food than a good detective story. Someone worried about job security is not going to tune in to your lecture on risk-taking. Before they start beating the drum for change, changemakers must sense what people's current and pressing needs are, and take steps to meet or at least, acknowledge them and their importance. In an organization in which change thrives, leaders have managed to address existing needs, and to then move the organizational change onto people's need list.

Organization

Information that we edit in our heads must then be arranged in some way, so it can be looked at. Human beings have devised two clever methods. One is called figure-ground. That is, one set of information becomes the figure we focus on and everything else becomes the ignored background. You can look at the forest, or you can look at the trees, but few of us can see both the forest and the trees at the same time. You may honestly think you are focusing on defect prevention in a presentation you're making to your group, because that was its broad theme, whereas several listeners may focus on the three or four processes you singled out for criticism in the talk, thinking that was what you cared about and the rest was just fluff.

Who is right? It's like asking if a zebra is black with white stripes or vice versa. You may both be right. But the burden is upon each of you to stop before the conversation concludes, and you stagger back to your offices to do the wrong thing, and ask one another if they agree what the main points of the discussion were, and what action each person intends to take. And write that action down, to prevent "action mutation" later.

The second way we organize information is through closure. Closure is one of the most reflexive behaviors in the human repertoire. We were talking about closure when we talked about the brain, and how we tend to fill in blank spots in our understanding with things we already understand. It is the principle that where there's smoke, there's fire. In the case of change challenges, unless we are among the select class of proactives, we paint in the unknown parts negatively, because we have all suffered through some great leap forward that left us with hoofprints on our backs.

Closure isn't necessarily negative; we could as easily paint in an unfinished painting in pastels as shades of gray. But it usually is. So if one group is briefed on a restructuring effort and yours isn't, you imagine the worst -- that your continued existence with the organization is a day-to-day thing. Many times we see only a part of what is going on, but will organize it by filling in what is missing. The parts we fill in are as real to us as that which we have actually observed. This is why rumors are so easy to start, so powerful once they have started, and so hard to put an end to.

The best way to overcome this reflex is, when you feel the hair on the nape of your neck starting to stick straight out, to stop and check out the facts. Ask the other party flat out what his intentions are, what will happen to you, or what else he has left out of the painting.

Workers confronting an ambitious change program have every reason to be distrustful. They know that management knows things that they would desperately like to know as well. So long as the atmosphere is contaminated by this distrust, there is zero chance that change will go forward.

To break the closure deadlock, team leaders and managers must disclose like crazy. Should you blurt out your most important confidence, the maximum concession you are willing to make in return for cooperation? Maybe not; politics is politics. But you can give hints as to what is important to you, or what matters most to you: changes in compensation, job stability, access to tools and information. Sharing information communicates the idea that mutual gain is a possibility — that I don't have to make you fail for me to succeed.

Does this mean that the enlightened manager promptly hands over all sensitive information to the other side? No. It does mean that people trying to push change through have to prioritize their concerns. They are not at the table to keep secrets or to gain personal credit for being “tough,” but to bring good deals back to their constituency. If sharing information moves the process toward a better deal, it is a sensible strategy.

The best way for changemakers to prevent these kinds of misunderstanding is not to give people half-painted paintings. The old management adage that you give information to people only on a "need to know" basis is a throwback to the bygone era; in the age of change people need to know almost everything.

Muddled interpretation

Selecting and organizing information only accounts for half of our confusion. To understand the other half, we have to look at the goofy ways we interpret things. Our interpretations are affected by the ambiguity of the situation, our attitude, our orientation, and the psychological context of the situation.

                 ƒ  Ambiguity. A favorite banner of ours was on the shop floor of a plastics plant in Rochester, NY. It said simply, "We stand behind our workers." It was a running joke among workers at the extrusion machines. They took it to mean that management was using employees as a human shield to deflect incoming flak. Ambiguity is not the fault of human nature; it's the fault of language and syntax. A given statement can be taken many ways. Changemakers need to stop before telling their favorite story and ask themselves: "Does this story clarify the picture we're trying to get across, or muddle it even more?"

                 ƒ  Attitude. How you say something is as important as what you say. If a speaker is exhausted, the message she communicates will also communicate exhaustion. Our moods and attitudes are always changing, and the rhythms are not always conducive to clarity. People can tell you are in a mood; it is transparent in the tone of your voice.

Then there is raw emotion, like anger or fear or contempt, which can turn a simple statement inside out. (Say "You're by far the best person for the job" twice, the first time straight, the second time sarcastically.)

You know what your attitude is when you speak, but others don't. Worse, since attitude is conveyed unconsciously in your tone of voice or facial expression, sometimes you don't even know, and others will see through you. They will see through you when you are distracted, or you know you are not telling the complete truth, or you are compelled to make statements you do not personally agree with.

Effective changemakers make no bones about communication being simple. They acknowledge the emotional pitfalls in any declaration.

If you're tired or distracted, acknowledge the fact and apologize for it. If you don't agree with your own words, something is very wrong. The worst thing you can do is give a "happy face" talk when inside you are one big pulsing stomach ulcer.

                 ƒ  Orientation. When a New Yorker woman and a South Carolinian man talk, the result is not always 100 percent agreement and retention. Culture, personality type, accent, race, geography, politics, philosophy, and education all wreak havoc on our ability to give one another a fair hearing. Imagine how different people, from different groups, will receive your pep talk about process reengineering if the following seemingly innocent words appear in your remarks: liberal-minded, sacred cow, sales ladies, kosher, plain vanilla, working class, orientation, local yokels, head of household, Christmas season, empty-nesters, crippling, unskilled, point man, upscale, gay, over the hill.

Every word and phrase has an emotional temperature, and our own temperatures rise and fall, often irrelevantly, with each one. Every moment someone dwells on an irrelevancy is a moment a relevancy falls through the cracks. Anyone thinking that the logical language of business automatically transcends these divisions should lie down and let the blood return to the brain.

 

Other considerations

                 ƒ  Process. People generally do not oppose the content of proposed change -- more attention to quality, flow, worker participation, etc. What riles them is the way it is rolled out. The how often matters more than the what. We all have a crawling dread of a bad process, loaded with miscues, miscommunications, eleventh hour revisions and the like. Effective changework demands continuous communication -- before, during, and after the change process.

                 ƒ  Anticipation. Good communication during change requires that you know what people are worried about and address their concerns in advance. Questions like:

„       How do we plan to get from here to there?

„       What is involved in this change process?

„       Who will do what, and how will they do it?

„       What do we have to learn that we don't know now?

„       When will we start to see results?

„       How will we be kept informed of progress?

„       What is expected of me?

„       Is this change the only change planned, or is it one of many?

„       Is management committed to this idea or is it a lone ranger pilot?

                 ƒ  Redundant retransmissions. Saying something one time, one way, won't get through to very many people. Effective change communication acknowledges that different people need to hear things in different ways, and that nearly everyone has to be reminded periodically of what the plan is all about. Use multiple channels of communication to answer and update individuals so they feel less a victim of, and more an active participant in, the change process. Examples of multiple channels: meetings, memos, Q&A sessions, bulletin boards, employee newsletters, pay envelopes stuffers, open discussions, ad hoc committees, informal networks, grapevines and one-to-one meetings with everyone involved.

                 ƒ  Two-way. It is an absurdity, but there are companies that have implemented employee involvement programs by decree. "You will be empowered -- that is all!" No matter what the initiative, people need the sense that the plan welcomes feedback before, during, and following its implementation. Suggestion boxes work, provided they are emptied daily and every suggestion is personally responded to. Even better are in-person give-and-take sessions with changemakers.

                 ƒ  Predictability. The more you keep your word, and the closer the future resembles the way you said it would be, the better. Change is easier to handle if your team has a clear understanding of what it will look like and feel like beforehand. Unless it is their birthday, no one likes a surprise. Even metaphiles do not like being thrown a steady diet of curveballs and sucker pitches.

                 

Sometimes people don't listen to their own words, and the misunderstandings that occur are hilarious, or embarrassing. Michael Hammer delights in recalling the words of Leonid Kravchuk, president of the beleaguered new regime of The Ukraine, in a speech to parliament: "Yesterday we stood poised on the verge of the abyss. Today we take a great step forward!"

Language difficulties also cause problems. John Kennedy's famous saying, "Ich bin ein Berliner," meant "I am a Berliner (a jelly doughnut)" to Germans. He should have dropped the ein.

Spelling counts, too. A devastating Dilbert strip recently showed the dimwit boss posting a corporate TQM manifesto. Workers clustered around the bulletin board reading of the company's lofty ambitions. One worker observes: "I thought quality had a U in it." x

     Training Versus Learning

Training and learning imply similar things. But they represent diametrically different approaches to solving business problems.

We know what training is. Employers identify shortfalls in what employees know -- what ISO 9000 is, what common causes are, what a feedback loop is and how to keep one open. Then they do whatever they have to do to get that information into the employee's head. "Training" is traditional education, symbolized in college coats of arms with the medieval icon of a lamp of knowledge pouring its oil in the passive student's ear.

Though training is a $45 billion industry, and a vital item in every organizational budget, it is typically concerned with the humdrum how-to side of organizational affairs -- how to do quality, how to do JIT, how to do business process reengineering. Training defines itself as an information delivery system. Whether it is conducted by people in classrooms or on the job, or by machine in the form of videotape or multimedia CD-ROM, it is a static, measurable thing that brings employees up to the present desired state, as defined by management. It is not a desired thing by itself; it is a means to an end. It is Push.

Learning is almost the diametric opposite of training. It is not a "business," yet it is everyone's business. Though it makes no one any money, it is the Pull allowing people in an organization to draw near to their cherished objectives. It happens entirely in the learner's head, and requires no technology whatsoever. It is by its very nature unmeasurable and undefinable. Learning is an end to itself, not a means to an end.

The two are seldom spoken of together, but they are like the two charged rails of organizational change. One Pushes ("Now hear this!"); one Pulls ("What do you think?"). No organization can leave the station without a determined effort to continually increase its knowledge base.

But the two are often at odds from one another. Training wants to cover the greatest amount of ground in the shortest time, with the fewest interruptions, and the highest degree of learner homogeneity. It wants above all to be finished and get paid. Learning, by contrast, knows no clock, respects no formal structure, and occurs in as many ways, and at as many paces, as there are learners.

A lot of lip service has been paid to "the learning organization," a phrase coined by Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline. In the Senge view, the long-term goal of any organization is not making and selling more and more widgets, but managing the knowledge process that allows the company to continuously discover better ways to meet the needs of its widget customers. Some organizations, like global consultancy Booz-Allen & Hamilton, are building it into their structure by creating the new top management position of "Chief Knowledge Officer." The CKO's task: to herd the superintelligent space cats mentioned earlier; to keep knowledge moving between membranes; to manage the company's smarts.

Learning is a component of the philosophy of continuous improvement; it holds that one is never done learning, that an organization continually expands its knowledge to create its future. The truly important items in a widget company's inventory are not its widgets, but the knowledge it has about its core competency to provide widget solutions, and the malleable intellect of its workers.

All this is a cautionary note reminding us to keep our priorities straight. Focusing on training as an end unto itself is great for the training company, but maybe not so great for your company. All the value for your organization is concentrated at the learning end of the horse, not the training one.

Training is product, and it is what you shop for. Learning is process, the goal of the training. As your organization grapples with its change initiatives, you will want to run reality checks to make sure you are learning, and not just training. A checklist like:

        ‚  Do you know exactly what knowledge you want to see increased? is it generic, like statisical process control or ISO 9000, or specific to your industry, like restaurant service quality management? Do you have that knowledge yourself? Are you competent to evaluate that it has been done well? How well does the program you are looking at mesh with your needs? Is it efficient -- does it overdo or underdo? It can be a great training tool for someone else, but the pits for your group.

               ‚  Good training overcomes workers' objections to it. We've all got bad attitudes, especially when the presumption is that we don't know something. Good training does something from the very onset -- uses humor, gets people involved, explains why the training is good for the organization and for the learner -- to knock the chip off learners' shoulders.

        ‚  Good training should have some kind of human component beyond the sales pitch of the person who sells it to you. We all need a hand to hold at some stage. It may include facilitation, consultation, installation, customization, tech support, or training of trainers. Even a CD-ROM can embed a level of human interaction (albeit a cold one) to relieve the mechanical flow of information.

        ‚  Is the training consonant with your organizational culture? A Cadillac company won't be happy settling for deliberately cheesy low-end, wham-bam materials. Likewise, an organization noteworthy for its diversity will want that diversity addressed. Training should adjust for the kind of people being trained -- even training in a box.

        ‚  What will be the outcome of the training? What proof will you have that the training "took"? Testing is the answer, either formally, with pencil and paper, or informally, by evaluating subsequent behavior. CD-ROMs teaching ISO 9000 or quality techniques are wonderful in that they self-test on the fly. If the learner is learning how to cut and paste, for instance, he cannot go on to the next lesson until he shows that he actually can cut-and-paste.

        ‚  What happens next? Is the training product a one-shot deal, or will you want to turn to the same source for repeat sessions, or extension products? Is it important to develop a longer-term relationship with the trainer as a sort of strategic partner? Or is it, See you later, facilitator?

Successful training does more than pour information in people's ears. At its best it engages the learner's imagination, triggering a positive change in behavior that Pulls toward greater organizational success. When training does this it crosses the boundary to learning.  x

     Rewarding Change

How can an organization move purposefully toward the future when its people are getting paid to live in the past?

We think too narrowly about the whole concept of compensation and reward. We consider only the positive side of the spectrum. If organizations can treat (compensate) their people in a full range of ways ranging from Pummel to Pamper, we can see th full range of rewards and compensations, from carrot to stick:

If you think of the whole picture of compensation, rewards and recognitions, there is much more to play with than year-end bonuses

Consider each of these, and consider their opposites, as well, because organizations reinforce negatively as well as positively. A Pummel company can "reward" you with insult and injury. A Push company can "reward" you with gnawing anxiety. A Pamper organization can reward you by destroying your reputation and employability.

The most important intangible is job security, the dimension most under attack in the age of downsizing. Can a company guarantee that the world will hold still long enough for it to move people back and forth, from opportunity to opportunity, and never lose one person or one opportunity? It is probably impossible. But workers will fight for a company that tries to hold onto them. When Federal Express dissolved its ZapMail effort, but found a way to retain its 1,300 employees, morale and productivity shot up companywide.

At the same time, job security must not be the only consideration. The market has been exceedingly cruel to Pamper companies in the last decade, and  the worst remaining Pummel organizations are the sweatshops and maquiladoras abroad. Far and away, most organizations are locked in a Push mode of compensation, driven by anxiety and individual performance.

Push rewards are often the wrong rewards. In sales, for instance, teams are usually rewarded according to individual sales. So four salespersons may be earning drastically different sums. If you have any regard whatever for the principle of teamwork, you have shot it dead by creating a system of haves and have-nots.

This is a difficult point for many managers to get beyond. They are proud of the spirit of competitiveness they have created because they like the numbers the stars put up, and they like the heat they get to apply under people capable of or approaching star status.

But Push rewards do not work long-term. The sense of stress they engender, with no pathways to safety, eats away at winners and laggards alike. The winner is likely to drift over time into feelings of smugness, which can create a Pamper-like cone in which one worker gets special treatment and choice prospects, and the rest of the "team" must fight for scraps. Or into feelings of paranoia, as the star realizes he is all that stands between his team's breakthrough success.

You get what you pay for. If you reward people for conspiring against one another's interests, a conspiratorial culture will be the result. If the quick kill is important to your organization, Push rewards will get you through the crisis.

But consider what your true objectives are, and what rewards will Pull your organization toward those goals:

                 ƒ  sharing, not hoarding information;

                 ƒ  actively searching for process improvements, not sweeping dirt under carpet;

                 ƒ  building market share, not cutting costs;

                 ƒ  breeding new cows, not milking old ones;

                 ƒ  an atmosphere that will attract people with potential, not pelt them with garbage.

If your rewards are top-heavy, your top performers will not cotton to an overhaul from Push to Pull, and it would be wise not to abandon performance-based rewards entirely. A challenge to management, however, would be to upgrade your stars from their current status as "indispensable performers" to "player-coaches." There is considerable honor in being called upon to teach, and much (not all) of your stars' talents can be taught. Make it a point of pride: anyone can do, but not everyone can show others how to do.

New Agers long for the day when the word compensation is abandoned for something more positive. The old word implies that the organizational vision is not one worth holding -- that people must be compensated for the distress of subscribing to it. In the New Age workplace that may or may not be dawning, work becomes an important component of its own reward system:

                 ƒ  the satisfaction of engagement and success;

                 ƒ  the stimulation of working with other talented people;

                 ƒ  the acknowledgments of people we respect.

Of course, that's the same future we will ride monorails to the office in, and swap sandwiches with Nobel Prize winners. It'll be nice.

Till then, work is work, and management's challenge is to find ways to keep people's eyes on the prize, and their nose to the stone. Along these lines, cash never goes out of style. . x

     Technology and Change

Is technology itself a change initiative? It can be. It often is. Information technology professionals use the word reengineering as if it were theirs alone. But technology isn't an initiative, no matter how wonderful it may be.

Many organizationssincerely undergo an ambitious regimen of self-improvement. Yet as they set out to implement the regimen, hey slide into the habit of seeing change primarily by adopting new technology.

In seeking greater product or service quality, or a more measurable degree of customer satisfaction, or quicker cycle time, or a higher degree of employee involvement, they turn the task over to machines:

Someone will bolt a great customer satisfaction module onto the organization's proprietary software system, or create a process map that clarifies, reengineers and enriches one job for every job it eliminates. In the interest of getting to know each employee on a personal basis, an immense database is created detailing every individual's pet peeves and favorite colors.

Paradoxically, a task with very human goals and requiring very human guidance is subtly taken over by a machine or a program. And once the machine or program is in place, that becomes the reigning reality. One day -- way too late for the realization to do anyone any good -- you see that you are working for it, and not vice versa. What was supposed to be a driver of change has become a millstone to a new regime.

Consider the kind of turnkey software system that small professional offices use. The salesman or consultant will rave about the fabulous new capabilities it will give the firm for billing, marketing, and people management. It will free the group up to do more creative things. Six months after it is plugged in, the system has become The System. Employees would no sooner be creative with it than the Cowardly Lion would snarl at the All Powerful Oz.

Technology curves plateau quickly. They are insidious in their ability to become the system they were supposed to improve. "Sorry, we're down." "Sorry, we can't access that information." "Sorry, you don't have clearance. "Sorry, we're not set up to do that."

Finally, it affects different people in different ways. we see computers as marvelously fair in treating all humans the same: we all sit down, we push the buttons, we obtain results.

But we aren't all the same. Some people take to machines like ducks to water. Other people experience terrific stress as they wrestle with their technophobic intuitions. When people are techno-crazed this way, their ability to cope with new stress -- the important stress, that comes with actually changing and improving organizational processes -- shrinks to nothing.

In a nutshell: You had a good, ambitious change plan. You brought in technology to expedite the plan. But people exhausted their comfort zone adjusting to the machine; they have nothing left to give the original plan. The plan ends up in the kill zone.

Computers don't really "work." They futz. They go through the mechanics associated with work. Real work occurs not in virtual space but the space between people's ears. People -- not computers -- must connect your organization's goals with your customers' needs.

 

Computers are a tool, and only a tool. They are not an initiative. The moment an organization forgets this, the change your organization needs to survive comes grinding to a halt. x

     A Change Checklist

In the din of battle, it is sometimes useful to whip out a checklist of tactical reminders:

                 ƒ  Are you low on oil? Oil is attention, the lotion you rub on people to let them know that you see what they are doing and that they are doing OK. The oil that smoothes the progress of a change initiative grease is recognition, reinforcement, and acknowledgment. You don't have to wait until the battle is won to slap some on -- in fact, you had better not wait that long. People are social creatures, and we need encouragement most when we are in the middle of the stress of changing. Public attention to small changes, especially early on, oils the path to achieving big changes long-term.

                 ƒ  Are you ready for the results you asked for? Sometimes initiatives founder because management is taken by surprise. Unless you have mechanisms for evaluating and implementing them, asking employees for improvement ideas is a hollow gesture. Toyota receives 2 million TQM suggestions a year, and implements 97% of them.^[13] If you can't support your own initiative, you shouldn't put it forward.

                 ƒ  Did you pack enough cash? An underfunded change initiative is an endangered change initiative. Short of pawning your organization's birthright, see to it that there is enough money to pay for the training and software the new system will require. You may have to cut deals with other hallowed projects to push this through, but change is all about money and politics. If you need more, ask for more. History offers few examples of initiatives that were funded without having to go begging first. What's the worst they can say -- no?

                 ƒ  How's your follow-up? The best-laid plans of mice and men go down the tube in a jiffy when you are not on top of change processes. The process of follow-up should be viewed not as a policing function, but a coaching one. Many people have habits or concerns which can get in the way of them making changes. This coaching process allows you and them to identify both personal and work-related barriers to change being experienced and talk about ways to address them. Follow-up can take place at either pre-determined times (once a week, month, quarter, etc.), or when people reach pre-determined stages in the change process (as when the phones are about to be installed). Let Just-In-Time training be the order of the day, learning what you need to learn at the moment the learning becomes necessary.

                 ƒ  Are you willing to make a down payment of pain? The high price of change is mistakes. Any organization that heads into new territory planning on a best-case scenario -- zero dead and zero wounded -- is likely to wind up with the exact opposite. Of course there will be mistakes in planning and communication and execution, and they will hurt like hell. One way to look at it is that today's pain is a down payment on future possibilities. Each one is a valuable lesson. Note: This doesn't mean you should maximize your mistakes in order to learn a lot of lessons quickly.

                 ƒ  Who is with you? Look around, and count the number of people you know who are solidly behind the idea. You can't do this alone. If you are the leader of a large organization, you will need a loyal cadre of top managers to keep the flame from going out. If you are leader of a team, you will need an even higher degree of unanimity. A change idea is never assured of success. But there does come a point in the development of an idea when the vision achieves critical mass. When a solid core of people believes in the idea enough to be held accountable to it, victory is at hand. x

     Rebounding from Failure

Quality minded companies talk about creating a prevention-oriented organization in which errors are anticipated and avoided. Then they laboriously go over their processes, "mistake-proofing" them.

There is one process that cannot be mistake-proofed, however -- change. Change error is hard to prevent because it cannot be anticipated in detail. Setbacks inevitably occur. Every change initiative "fails" at first. We can't think of one, ever, which was such a smashing success off the bat that no opponent couldn't stand by and say, "See? I told you it wouldn't work."

When you fail, as you will -- especially if you squint so you are only looking at the short-term perspective -- you must strive to hold onto psychological ground you won through the Push/Pull struggle. Confidence instilled with great effort can melt away at the first sign of slippage -- unless your organization or team is fortified against negativity.

 

Initiatives like total quality and employee involvement sometimes succeed for a while, as we encounter anticipated obstacles, "the usual suspects." It's when we bump up against an unanticipated obstacle, an uncomfortable new truth, something we never counted on, that we lose confidence in our still-fledgling idea. How do you deal with setbacks? We suggest that you embed the idea in advance: there will be setbacks, and they will feel like setbacks. People should know this letdown is coming and that it is inevitable, so when it comes it does not throw them for a loop. If you engineer the right frame of mind, people who have been knocked down can get up off their tuchises, dust themselves off, and say, hey, that wasn't so bad. And return to the task at hand with no serious diminution of energy.

Fashioning an attitude or culture that promotes learning from past setbacks creates a no-lose environment. Just as companies like Hyundai or Dow Corning or Marriott can reward the discovery of process mistakes and the information feedback they provide, so must they anticipate and learn from change problems.

But you must know what business you are in. Are you out to learn how to do things better, even at the cost of embarrassment? Or are you in the business of covering up and finding a fall guy to take the blame? This question sounds more rhetorical than it is. Lots of managers, and thus lots of organizations, are officially in the business of coming up with excuses when things go wrong. Don't you be.

Toro, the yard care company, uses a philosophy of "gritting out" what doesn't work, garnering whatever seems to have potential, jettisoning the rest, and using the new learning to make the next initiate work better. They scan the change scene for new initiatives which, based on their past experiences and learning, would fit comfortably within their culture. They do this to avoid adding to what they call "the fifth pile" -- add-on work that does not fit into the customary "four piles of work" most Toro employees are working on at any one time. The fifth pile is where projects collect that weaken the system instead of strengthening it. By waging war against the fifth pile, Toro's people focus on achievable victories -- and neatly sidestep no-win propositions.

By collaborating horizontally throughout the company and sharing past learnings, Toro has been able to gradually integrate changes into their culture. An important tool for them has been pilot TQM teams. Instead of rolling TQM out companywide, they do it one team at a time, sharing lessons learned as they go, so that each new rollout doesn't mean reinventing the wheel.

Incidentally, Toro distinguishes between two classes of change: initiatives and campaigns. The first is aimed at the core values and culture, their strategic initiatives, such as viewing the customer as the driving force behind their products and services. The second type of change initiatives are called campaigns. They are really short-term internal marketing efforts designed to communicate the values required to achieve the strategic initiative. Their goal is to have people learn new behaviors, try them out, and share their results with others. Ultimately, the company hopes to create a pyramid of experiences, each reinforcing one another and strengthening the overall change.

Toro feels it has beaten the change blues by defining "failure" as opportunity. It's like the Chinese symbol for "change," two symbols in one: one for danger, the other for opportunity. People are metaphiliac or metaphobic to the degree their organizations let them. The smart organization sees that when people stumble is no time to Push them back upright with stern warnings. Instead, Pull them to their feet with a reminder of the value of each misstep.

Push does have a role to play here. Push makes it clear that there can be no backtracking, no return to the way things were. Change efforts may be stymied, but the paths back to the old way of doing business have been plowed under. If you are stopped today, you have no choice except to start again tomorrow.

Set your old linear learning paradigms out at the curb for pickup. Now is the time to put zigzag learning into practice. Two steps forward, one step back, every lesson ruefully learned contributing to eventual victory. x

One thing the happy talk books never tell you is that all organizations do eventually die. They run out of business, the owners die leaving no successors, or the corporate headquarters is struck by a comet.

The good news is that anything that was bad in those organizations also dies. When your organization changes from one kind to another kind, you will not be so lucky. The evil residue of the old will linger on in the new, like the after-image you see when you look away from a bright light. The reason is that the old will survive in the memories of the people, particularly the people who derived benefit and power from the old ways. It will be in their interest to keep the old ways alive in the new entity. x

     Rebounding from Success

Sometimes success creates worse problems than failure. In 1994 GTE Directory Services won the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. They won it using an eroding customer base as a Push alarm to get people started. Workers responded wonderfully, and everyone in the division was delighted with that outcome. But the award had a sinister downside.

The organization had pushed itself to its limits to bag the Baldrige. While sweet, the victory confused the troops. To many workers, it was like Alexander's army reaching the wilderness and bursting into tears because there were no more worlds to conquer.

Of course, in the continuous improvement world of the Baldrige, there are always worlds to conquer. But with the trophy glistening in the corporate showcase, the incremental improvements that lay ahead were not very interesting to many people. Many sat back on their laurels.

Managers fretted at the difficulty if getting people juiced for the next level of changes. Since they had won the award using stretch goals, they turned to stretch goals again, raising the bar on key quality measurements, and taking aim at still other awards. But people were unable to respond this time. Their change space had shrunk. They needed time to regroup. The division canceled plans to reapply for the Baldrige for 1995.

GTE knows that future advances will be harder than the ones made in the past. By picking the "low-hanging fruit," the company was able to make tremendous, visible, rapid improvements. Higher up, the advances called for greater effort, but with smaller visible result. What do you do when the bar is raised but it doesn't look raised?

One answer is to move the bar to a different operational sphere -- away from zero defects, say, and toward community involvement, or safety, or leadership training. Or maybe give people in the trenches a break, and put management to work on honing the vision thing a wee bit finer.

Just as "failure" plants the seed of doubt, "success" breeds overconfidence. While it's great to win a plaque, people must be made to understand that there is no sunset on success, no imaginary boundary that tells you you've made it.

"Another day, another dollar" is a good philosophy for coping with the stress of striving for ambitious goals. It keeps us loose, and reminds us that we are, after all, in the change boat for the journey as much as the destination. It works just as well when you have attained them.

A company that excels at change understands its stop-and-go rhythms. When you hit the wall, whether it is the wall of success or futility, study it well, stay calm, and learn from the experience. You will hit other walls again, but you need never hit this one again.

The next section is about hitting the wall, and what it's like from initiative to initiative. x