Surviving transformational change

Surviving transformational change

Our world can be turned upside down by what leaders do or by events outside anyone's control. How can we survive and thrive despite these challenges? In particular, what resources lie inside us or close at hand? During lockdown on 2 June 2020 twenty people gathered for an hour on Zoom to share their experiences and insights. You can watch their conversation here. Facilitated by Sonya Shellard, introduced by Niall Trafford, Douglas Board and Cassandra Woolgar, the discussion was written up by Tom Connolly (and reproduced here with permission).

70% of transformational change is unsuccessful and the experience of it can be challenging and leave scars. Given this, “What,” Niall asked, “does it take to survive being on the receiving end of transformational change?”

The role of the roundtable in June and of this written piece is as a contribution towards, as Douglas said, “people realising they are not alone, that they can encounter something that relates to them.” This is not a guidebook or a set of solutions; it’s a series of shared ideas to help our thinking.

In an hour of discussion and sharing, we were led consistently and from different perspectives to the observation that high quality communication and leadership are what we need from those driving change. We will look at leadership in due course but begin with another question posed at the outset: what can we control and how can we exert control?

SELF-AWARENESS & NARRATIVE

Whatever is being thrown at us by outside forces, we can use our innate resources as well as external ones to take control of our own self-awareness and narrative.

Let’s start with self-awareness.

If you type the words “motivational need theories” into your search engine of choice, you’ll discover there’s no shortage of them. The American psychologist, David McClelland, described every person as having one of three needs – achievement, affiliation, or power – and described how these needs are not inherent but learned. Abraham Maslow's highly popular hierarchy of needs, whilst much debated, is credited with explaining “human nature as something that most humans immediately recognise in themselves and others." (Abulof. 54, 508–509. 2017).

Motivational Need Theories offer a contribution to our professional and personal self-awareness and the chances are that most of us have already encountered the concepts of some or most of the better known ones (say, McClelland, Maslow, Douglas McGregor, Frederick Herzberg, Victor Vroom, Porter & Lawler and Urwick, Rangnekar, and Ouchi’s Z theory.)

In the opening statements of our discussion, Cassandra offered us a specific insight into self-awareness. Her work includes looking at our own understanding of the behaviours we exhibit when we react to transformational change. Using the Hogan Assessment – based essentially on the role of personality in organisational and workplace performance – her work looks at derailers, a tool used to help people understand how they react to change, what behaviours they display in these situations, their impact and how to get support.

“If something important or valuable to us is threatened by change, it can trigger some of these derailers. Derailers can mean a ramping up of typical behaviour or a complete flip of behaviour. We categorize them into three broad areas.

"Moving against others: This is where we may become either really overconfident, you may go into a transformational change feeling like you can take on the world, that everything is achievable, and actually, although that can be really positive and can move things forward, those people around us who are a bit more nervous, a bit less confident, may feel completely overwhelmed and not able to cope with the additional pressure of this confidence. It could be somebody becoming really vocal in interactions during these pressure situations, where you're dominating the interaction, talking a lot, not listening to people around them as much; people feeling that they can't contribute or that their views aren't really taken on board. It can be wanting to act quickly and jumping into risks, or coming up with loads and loads of ideas, which can be really great sometimes in transformational change, but are they filtered through? These are the moving-against behaviours because they can cause conflict.

"Behaviours that either move us away from others or cause others to move away from us: These include cascading from huge enthusiasm for a project to disinterest and wanting to move on, coming into things really cynically, holding on to grudges, not trusting the process of moving forward and missing opportunities as a result. People move away from this behaviour because they fear negativity and criticism. It can be being overcautious, analysis paralysis, always feeling you need just a bit more information, or it can be being reserved, shutting your office door, not engaging.

"Toward behaviours, where people are constantly checking in with people around them: Perfectionism that makes it impossible to let a piece of work go, at odds with the intuitive, quick responses often called for by the process of transformational change.” See link 2 in the appendix for resources around Derailers.

Narrative is a wonderful and dangerous thing. In our lives and in business, stories can be powerful, even inspirational. But they can also be inaccurate. Even a slightly false narrative left unchecked, repeatedly told, takes on the illusion of fact. This includes the narratives we create for ourselves. I was unlucky. Mistreated. Misunderstood. I’m no good at that. I can’t face that. I don’t like change.

When our own narrative seems to be controlled by others, we need to be able to talk through the discrepancy between how we presumed our story would unfold and reality. Douglas talked about the anger that this discrepancy can engender.

“What matters are two lessons. First, that one can be angry at quite general things; at fate, at selfish politics, or how the virus has ruined your wedding or taken away your job. Second, that anger can travel some distance underground and erupt about things which are not its true cause. Resolving all of these kinds of anger involves taking care to find the right people to listen to your story.”

In controlling one’s own personal narrative during change, a degree of separation supports us in making sure that our professional identity within an organisation does not share the exact same air space as our personal identity. Given that transformational change can be imposed on you or your workplace or your entire industry sector without notice, and without taking your ambitions, feelings or expert opinion into account, no one can afford for their professional path and their personal wellbeing to be welded.

We can start to control the narrative of transformational change by not personalising it.

If 70% of transformational change in business is unsuccessful, and if not all leadership is bespoke for us, we need to write our own story and ask our own questions: What is at the heart of me and my work? What and who do I care about? How do I wish to live? Change at work might threaten the way in which I live, but it can’t control my values and behaviour and ethos. I will retain those things separately and they might well be what leads me safely through a period of change. The important decision is choosing who to tell our story to. After that, it’s a matter of where to start.

Abel identified two types of change; one that's a desired change, the other forced on you, compelling you to react. He approaches change by identifying which of these two it is then asking what are the barriers? Why do I need to make this change? The what and the how is often the examined aspect of change but the why is essential to communicating about change and dealing with it.

We might also ask ourselves, or be asked by friends and colleagues we turn to, why does this change seem so painful and important? Is another narrative possible which offers new insights?

Can we gain a different, better perspective on change?

Sonya’s work model challenges us to stop and consider:

“What are you not seeing? What assumptions are you making? What other explanations could there be? What physical, social and psychological resources do you need? Who is in your support team?”

Remembering the human element is important. Everyone involved in change is a human being, those driving it, those on the receiving end. Each person is possibly full of self-doubt, capable of feeling both great and terrible about a day’s work. In an article for the Forbes Human Resources Council, Andrew Cole writes,

It’s impossible to operate in a culture of fear. As a leader, you must give permission to your team to ask the tough questions and push back without the threat of retaliation. As an employee, you need to take advantage of opportunities to speak up. If you don’t, leaders will never know what’s keeping you up at night, and you might miss out on a chance to be a catalyst for change. Be clear. Be direct. Show you care. Trust goes both ways. If you’re being led through a transition, be open to the change. Be flexible. Don’t assume negative intent.” (Cole, 2020).

When you are struggling to see beyond the negatives of change at work there are few things worse than being told by a well-meaning colleague or friend to think positively. It’s as helpful as telling someone with the flu to stop feeling unwell. But not assuming negative intent can open up a better space for our own thinking. Often, during change that challenges us, we spend our time looking from the outside-in. What is happening to me? Why are they doing this to me? Don’t they understand the effect this is happening on me? When we do this, we engage with the things that we have no control over. Taking a look from inside-out might not alter the clear and present danger of change but can be the key to exerting control over it. What do I care about? What is fundamentally important to me? What one thing would I choose to keep and start anew with? What do I refuse to lose?

These are questions that invite us to strip back to fundamentals. The physicist, Richard P. Feynman, when writing about atoms, describes what’s exciting and important about them by asking a similar question:

“If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact) that all things are made of atoms – little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied. If water – which is nothing more than these little blobs – can form waves and foam, and make rushing noises and strange patterns, if all of this, all the life of a stream of water, can be nothing but a pile of atoms, how much more is possible? Is it possible that the “thing” walking back and forth in front of you is a great glob of these atoms in a very complex arrangement, such that the sheer complexity of it staggers the imagination as to what it can do? When we say we are a pile of atoms, we do not mean we are merely a pile of atoms, because a pile of atoms which is not repeated from one to the other might well have the possibilities which you see before you in the mirror.” (Feynman. 4, 20-21. 1963.)

Dr Neil Patel, Consultant Neonatologist at Glasgow’s Princess Royal Maternity Hospital, recently led a transformational change of his neonatal unit by acting on the possibilities you see before you. The background to this story was a neonatal care system in the UK that had been a hothouse of traumatic experiences for many years. Traditionally, neonatal units have been about high tech and specialist expertise. “The approach has been to get patients well quickly and then bring the families in,” says Dr Patel. “Caring for sick babies tends to be highly technical, with a lot of procedure and equipment. Families get excluded unintentionally.” But in some developing countries, a lack of staff and incubators mean neonatal units need greater parental involvement. In his work training neonatal doctors and nurses in Vietnam, Dr Patel saw first-hand the value of so-called Kangaroo Care rooms, where mothers, fathers and grandparents look after acutely premature babies around the clock, supervised by staff. This was not a matter of mere passing interest. The work at Da Nang was generating data suggesting clear benefits for the babies cared for by their families; better weight gain, earlier discharge, increased success rates in breast milk feeding.

Powerfully affected by what he had seen, Dr Patel introduced Family Integrated Care (FIC), a new neonatal approach that helps parents to be primary caregivers, to the Glasgow unit. Changing to FIC was a fundamental threat to the established command-and-control approach to neonatal care and consultants and senior nurses feared losing any measure of control with babies’ lives at stake. Dr Patel invited the clinical and nursing staff at his unit to a meeting, and then asked parents to join them. His colleagues were horrified by the idea, and then shocked when the resulting discussion revealed a series of assumptions and false beliefs they worked to and which the parents of sick babies wanted to change. Dr Patel expected the unit to begin again with not just a blank sheet but a totally open mind. The parents needed staff to put aside assumptions and place their views front and centre. It was a total culture change, but Dr Patel witnessed his colleagues asking new questions in group meetings; how can we change how we work? What could I see differently? What’s stopping me use the permission being offered here to come at this from a totally new perspective? What are my concerns and are they founded? This mindset shift saw the normalisation of radical new ideas, with positive clinical outcomes and other immeasurable gains the result. What made the new way of doing things at Glasgow move from experimental to systematic was Dr Patel and his colleagues listening to the families. It deepened the foundations of transformational change so that the unambiguous belief became that this level of family-centric innovation was the way things are done around here.

Changing ‘how things are done around here’ is a tough sell for organisations. The Foundation is a London-based consultancy that works with businesses to facilitate the often seismic transition to becoming customer-led. Why seismic? Because it’s a change from being self-interested, starting with what matters to you and your business ­– which is natural – to the alternative of starting by seeing the world from your customers’ perspective. The kinds of ideas that are customer-led, like spending more on people working on checkouts to make queues smaller, are clearly good for customers but sound bad, or expensive, for the business. So most organisations stay as they are. To change they need something stronger than data or desire. They need ‘burningness.’  The Foundation’s ethos of finding a system of shared beliefs from the outset for all involved in change gives it a dual perspective on the leadership and employee experience of transformational change. Founding Partner, Charlie Dawson believes that

“What matters most are people’s shared beliefs about what success is and how it is achieved. Organisations can only start this transformational journey when the people involved feel burningness – the current situation is on fire, conventional action untenable if they are to succeed. Burningness has three possible causes – pain, fear or ambition. Pain is most commonly good at creating these conditions because things are going wrong, visibly, viscerally, now. No one can argue that action must be taken that is bold. Fear is a step less convincing because things are fine now, it’s just that they are clearly going to get worse at some point in the future. Ambition is the least compelling cause of burningness, not because it is weak – far from it ­– but because it has to come entirely from within. There is no crisis visible and instead the leader or the leading team has a burning desire to reach somewhere further on, somewhere seriously stretching. I think the need for burningness is the clearest part of transformation for me – without that it seems that it is too hard for people to let go of a version of things that has worked for them in the past.”

A time of crisis offers the permission to make extreme changes – inspirational ones, in an ideal scenario. Post-full lockdown, we are heading into a period of a changed world where necessary and long-awaited change could be precipitated. The global crisis will, in some cases, be used as a veil for insidious change, and, elsewhere, will provide a far-sighted opportunity for positive change. In extreme cases, crisis creates reactive change, and when a crisis unfolds with a start-to-finish timescale of hours or days and apocalyptic potential, permission is granted to tackle change in instinctive ways which do not have to be accounted for in the traditional manner. Such moments of intense transformation can ignite new ways of thinking.

It’s time to look at leadership and to begin, at Douglas’ suggestion, at Fukushima.

LEADERSHIP

‘How the Other Fukushima Plant Survived’ is a 2014 Harvard Business Review article by Ranjay Gulati, Charles Casto and Charlotte Krontiris. In it, they tell the story of Fukushima Daini, the sister plant to Fukushima Daiichi, the nuclear power station destroyed by three core meltdowns and three reactor explosions in the 2011 Japanese tsunami. Only ten kilometres apart, Fukushima Daini escaped a similar catastrophe.

“At a magnitude of 9.0, the earthquake was the largest in Japan’s recorded history, and the waves it generated were three times as high as what Daini had been built to withstand. It was left with just one diesel generator and one power line intact. But three of the four reactors lacked sufficient power to run a critical component of their cooling systems. To prevent the kind of devastation that was unfolding at Daiichi, site superintendent Naohiro Masuda and his team had to connect those reactors to Daini’s surviving power sources. But the team was still reeling from a natural disaster of almost supernatural dimensions.

"Masuda didn’t simply make decisions and issue orders. He knew he had to persuade people to act—against their survival instincts. Masuda acknowledged the evolving reality in which they were operating. He shared the burden of uncertainty and doubt, engaging in what the organizational theorist Karl Weick and others have described as the “sensemaking” process: he arrived at a common understanding with his team members by revising and communicating what they “knew” so that they could together adapt to each twist and turn. As a result, workers at Daini didn’t lose focus or hope. They acted their way into a better understanding of the challenges they faced.

"The Daini plant experienced one disruption after another: the earthquake, the tsunami, the flooding, the power loss, threats to the containment vessels’ integrity, changes in priorities for restoring power. Masuda and his crew assembled fresh explanations and plans each time, projecting their revised understanding of the crisis back onto the past and forward onto the future, making what had already happened knowable and what hadn’t yet happened a little more predictable.

"Masuda was not thinking about sensemaking in those sleepless March days. But in his handling of confusion and fear at Daini, he set a valuable standard. Though he felt tremendous pressure to manufacture a sense of physical and psychological security for his team, he did not make sweeping pronouncements and commitments in the critical early hours. He presented data and made and revised plans openly, investing in a shared understanding of the risks the workers faced and the actions they needed to take. (Gulati et al., 2014). See link 3 in the appendix for the full article.

Most business leaders don’t have the option of adopting a position of “I’ve no idea the best way to handle this but here goes” because they do not have the same permission (to fail, to work reactively, wing it) granted by impending disaster. But they do have the option to share what they don’t know, to be vulnerable, to be honest about what they are in control of and what they are having to navigate by instinct. The resulting communications might create a very different experience of change for both those on the receiving end and those having to lead.

The ‘sensemaking’ approach (look it up, there’s plenty on Karl Weick and Sensemaking out there) seen at Fukushima poses radical questions to instigators and receivers of change; is a degree of abandonment helpful? Can it sometimes be beneficial to recognise the absence of control and embrace it? Masuda had the licence of extremity to allow his own story of change to unfold in front of his colleagues. Vulnerability was displayed, not hidden. His team felt more involved and, perversely, less fearful when leadership didn’t claim to know exactly how things were going to pan out and exposed the real-time calculations and ideas being used to navigate the situation.

One hugely experienced CEO I spoke to urges leaders to include their own story as they lead through change. He spoke of

“the absolute central importance of my own experience of change when communicating with colleagues through transformation. We all should crisis plan and mostly do, have processes and procedures ready, but crisis is never quite like that, and when it happens there’s a need for great, nuanced communications.”

In our roundtable, one attendee told us,

“I've had two major restructures in the past year. The first was unpleasant and not very nice, but it did have a defined end goal, and a defined timeline. So painful, but I knew for how long and why. The second one, basically now, I’ve no idea when it'll end, vague communication and not really sure why it's being done.”

In his book, The Monday Revolution, David Mansfield warns organisations of the stakes when it comes to poor communication:

“What matters is the championing of your people. The consequences of not engaging with the front line are high sickness rates, staff turnover and low morale. Sharing that mission, explaining everyone’s role and getting their commitment provides the unity and common purpose a team needs to win.” (Mansfield. 11, 53. 2020.)

Trust and confidence come from leadership that knows how to communicate. And it needs powers of perception, too. The ability to see things from the other point of view.

 “The Kingdom of Didd was ruled by King Derwin. His palace stood high on top of the mountain. From his balcony, he looked down over the houses of all his subjects – first, over the spires of the noblemen’s castles, across the broad roofs of the rich men’s mansions, then over the little houses of the townsfolk, to the huts of the farmers far off in the fields. It was a mighty view and it made King Derwin feel mighty important. Far off in the fields, on the edge of a cranberry bog, stood the hut of the Cubbins family. From the small door Bartholomew looked across the huts of the farmers to the houses of the townsfolk, then to the rich men’s mansions and the noblemen’s castles, up to the great towering palace of the King. It was exactly the same view that King Derwin saw from his balcony, but Bartholomew saw it backward. It was a mighty view, but it made Bartholomew Cubbins feel mighty small.” (Dr. Seuss, 1958)

Alan talked about the value of seeing change as constant:

“I think labelling a change programme as change or transformation is probably the kiss of death. Change within an organisation should be a constant feature of what it does and how it evolves. The trust and the confidence go out of the window as management starts to talk about things which are jargon-heavy and mean very little to the man or woman on the shop floor. Having a consensus of trust, a consensus of confidence and a clear understanding of what's the point of any of this, is essential. Where's the value? What does it mean to me as a punter on the shop floor and what does it mean to you as the chief executive? Do you understand what I do?”

Michael took up the theme:

“Change is happening all the time, so it's about adaptability and how you adapt to each of those different changes. It comes down to your own personal resilience. If you try to focus on a solution it can help you find the solution and be positive.”

If change is happening all the time, perhaps we are better equipped to deal with it than we think. There might well be reserves of fortitude to draw on that we do not credit ourselves with, reserves we are reminded of in those valuable conversations with the people we entrust our story to.

OUR PRE-EXISTING CHANGE SKILLS

What can we take from the idea of perpetual change? Can it help us when the scale or speed of change is ramped up and threatens us – transformational change? When that happens, we are not necessarily at the standing start we think. We are possibly more match-fit than we realise when it comes to navigating change. This trajectory of thought and self-awareness might help us distil what it is about a particular heightened moment of transformational change that is destabilising us.

Might it be useful to take a moment to credit ourselves with the change we have handled or initiated in our lives, and to be expansive in our thinking?

 I went from adolescence to adulthood (if you survived that transformation without crisis then you have nothing to fear).

I went from being a son or daughter to losing a parent, maybe both parents.

I moved abroad.

I started working for myself.

I changed career.

I committed to a relationship.

I learned to swim.

I addressed my fear of flying / spiders / goats (a story for another time).

I voiced an opinion that wasn’t welcome in the room.

I dropped a friend who was not good to me.

I experienced profound loss.

I became a parent.

I gained status. I lost it. Gained money. Lost it.

How did we handle these huge changes in our lives? We are, after all, still standing so we must have skills, experience and resilience aplenty.

Does it really serve us to think that change is happening to us, instead of seeing change as a constant with a specific challenge right now that needs addressing? Is it really accurate to think that I’m not accustomed to change and don’t have the strength or tools to deal with it?

What can we exert control over? With greater self-awareness, what narrative can we author for ourselves? We do have skills and experience when it comes to transformational change, unwelcome change, crisis. We can write our own story, even if unwelcome or scarring change is a chapter in it.

Here’s what an employee of a major retailer (who was not present at our roundtable) said to me:

 “In the 13 or so years I have worked for the company I have experienced a good number of structural reviews and changes of leadership and this has increasingly become the norm as pressure on the retail sector has intensified. The first time I faced a structural review there was a good deal of nervousness as I wasn't familiar with many of the terms being bandied around. Not having been through the process before made it seem more complex than it really is. This wasn't helped by the fact that there was a drip-feed of information, so you just sit there, trying to calculate your fate one announcement at a time, worrying until you finally come out the other side. But – and sorry for being all Darwinian about this – the more adaptable you are, the more likely you are to come out the other side in one piece.

"I've now gotten used to the idea that nothing is really forever and that you've got to make the most of the opportunities afforded to you. I think the more you go through it, the more familiar you become with the various stages of change and how that manifests itself in business. The resources I drew on were, basically, anything and everyone I could get my hands on. I think talking to people and sharing your views is a really healthy way to support each other through change. It's easy to get sucked into rumours and gossip when going through change so I was always cautious to try and stick to known facts and not let myself start to panic about what wasn't actually known yet. To be honest, I don't think there is a perfect way to handle these sorts of situations. You just have to try your best to ensure decisions are made quickly and clearly and they are communicated to employees in as timely a way as possible. That way, those affected can consider how any change will affect them without ambiguity and decide what they are going to do.”

In the context of the landscape of change-experiences that the roundtable threw up, Niall’s opening statement about the Human Givens approach to mental health (developed by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell – see link 4 in appendix) offers a useful summation of people’s needs and resources.

“The needs that people have are safety and security – a safe environment which allows us to develop fully. A sense of control and autonomy. Feeling connected to a wider community. Privacy and the opportunity to reflect and consolidate your experiences. Intimacy; somebody who accepts us, warts and all. Having a sense of status or a place within social groupings. A sense of competence and our abilities. Receiving and giving attention. Meaning and purpose; feeling that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.

 "And we have innate resources to allow us to meet our needs. Those are the ability to develop long-term memory patterns. Imagination, which can allow us to focus our attention away from emotions in order to problem-solve more objectively. The ability to understand the world and other people through metaphor; an observing self – that part of us that can step back and recognise itself as a unique centre of awareness. The ability to empathise and connect with others. Emotions and instincts, our rational minds that can check out emotions and a dreaming brain.”

These are such fundamental, well-observed, human needs and qualities that surely, when it comes to transformational change, we’re all in the same boat – right?

THE SAME BOAT

“We are not all in the same boat. We are all in the same storm. Some are on super-yachts. Some have just the one oar.” Damian Barr, writer.

Barr’s tweet, a response to the ethnic and social iniquities of the pandemic, resonates – like so much of his writing – way beyond its apparent context.

In the roundtable, Stuart made this observation:

“Alan mentioned how change is perceived through an organisation and at different levels in an organisation. If you get to somebody who's actually doing the more practical grounded work, change programs do often mean making redundancies. For people that are at a higher up level, that's not what a change program is about. It's perceived differently as you go up and down the structure of an organisation.”

Some change is bad news or, at least, very challenging news for some people. When we see ourselves being adversely affected, when the change feels like an attack, and we do not feel good about it, we don’t want to be told what to think, or that change is affecting us all the same way. As Douglas observed, communication itself can add to the sense of hierarchy.

One of the things that can be traumatising about transformation is what is revealed. A lot of matter is stirred up when fundamental change occurs and some of it might not have been visible to us before. So, whilst we think we are dealing with a changing culture or role or location, or leaving a place of work, we are also handling the fact that we are seeing things differently, possibly for what they always were. Not only can this be upsetting, it can shake our belief system. Was the leadership of this organisation ever really on board with my ideas? Did I matter at all? Was the relationship that I thought I had forged over a substantial period of time just my imagination? How am I perceived if I am not valued the way I thought I was? This can lead to us doubting fundamental pillars of our life; our sense of self, of people and how things are, what things mean.

This observation on the furlough was offered by Lynette:

“In the retail sector, where some people have been furloughed, subcultures are occurring in these businesses because those people who've been dealing with the crisis are seeing themselves as the team who have taken the business through this crisis, whilst those people who've been furloughed, albeit that they've been kept informed of what's going on in the business, feel left out. From an integration point of view, having to restructure businesses, I think that they're finding that really difficult because it's quite personal. Businesses, some of them, are really stuck at the moment because there's a lot of stress, fear, doubt, uncertainty.”

Let’s go back to that much quoted 70% figure. Lane 4 is a UK management consultancy (founded by Adrian Moorhouse, who was in Lane 4 when he swam to Olympic gold in the 100 meters breaststroke at Seoul) which revisits the statistic in their white paper ‘All Change is not Equal’, in which they argue that not only leadership but nuance is needed for successful and pain-free change.

“The statistic that ‘70% of all change initiatives fail’ has dominated the literature and directed change research for decades. For academics, this statistic reads like a call to arms; a call to find out why so many change initiatives fail, a call to solve the problem of change. Over the last 30 years, numerous studies have consequently been carried out to explain why the change failure rate is so high. There’s a fundamental flaw in the logic. The statistic bucketed all change within one big umbrella, which prompted researchers to find the one root cause of the change problem. One challenge, one cause, one solution. Change cannot, however, be considered in one big all-inclusive bucket. There are a vast variety of change situations and to cope with each effectively, a more nuanced approach is called for; an approach that considers the specific change occurring within its specific context. An approach that appreciates that all change is not equal.” (Walters, A. Maitland, A. 2020).

The same paper also makes this observation: “All change is, to some degree or other, a culture change. It’s impossible to significantly impact any aspect of an organisation and not shift the culture.” (Walters, A. Maitland, A., 2020).

If you have been successful as a CEO or as an organisation in building a group of people who love coming to work and have a strong sense of why they do it, it is likely that the organisation has a strong cultural identity and that it is this culture as much as the service, brand or product, that gives your people a sense of professional wellbeing. If that cultural identity is being altered, diluted or threatened, then that is going to affect your people. There’s an umbilical cord between the best people and the organisations with the strongest cultural identities.

The specifics of an organisation’s change history form a part of its culture, and if there have been instances of badly handled transformation in the past, there is a historical wince factor during times of escalated change. People are aware of how well or badly change has been handled in the past, either from direct experience or anecdotally. Change management is a part of an organisation’s identity, like it or not. It can mean a change programme starts already with people coiled up, resistant, fearing the worst.

But so much of this comes down to communication. Even if the news is bad, good communication – with honesty, sensitivity, timing – is deliverable. Bad news doesn’t become good news (watch George Clooney and Anna Kendrick in the 2009 movie Up in the Air if in doubt) but people do not have the added turbulence of doubt, fear, anger and catastrophising if an organisation has a culture of good communication. It means that we can all be in the same boat when it comes to understanding what’s going on and why, even if we are not going to be equally affected. And, in some cases, knowing does alleviate the concern because either things aren’t as bad as feared or they are, but honest communication means people are fast-tracked to a point where they can start to deal with reality. At Fukushima, they stared down the barrel of a worst-case scenario and responded accordingly. In the same way that negative and positive electrical charges attract, so too the question “What’s the worst thing that can happen to me?” sparks an essential reappraisal of the self; remember what I am fundamentally, a miracle of atoms, a good human being, a hard worker, a parent, a sibling, competent, gifted, experienced.

Just how much can good communication achieve when it comes to change? The potential is huge, especially when communication includes the art of listening. To illustrate that art, and for a final case study, let’s look at something inspirational. Julia talked about transformation meaning “setting a vision early on” and about how meeting the needs of the individual, in terms Niall talked about, led to change on the collective level being achieved by her organisation.

She founded Orchid Project in 2011 to help bring about an end to female genital cutting (FGC). To date, 24,000 communities worldwide have abandoned FGC and it is telling the language the organisation uses, with their message dominated by words such as partnering, sharing knowledge, non-judgemental, choice, community, discussions.

“FGC is a deep-rooted social norm which is held in place by an entire community. Parents have their daughters cut because they believe it is the right thing to do to ensure their future, and because it is an expectation of the community. It is difficult for individual families to break with this tradition on their own, as they may risk their daughters becoming ostracised. Change is being achieved when communities come together to share their experiences of FGC, breaking the silence that often surrounds the practice. Locally owned processes are helping communities worldwide to recognise that the practice is harmful. Community and religious leaders often play a critical part in bringing an end to FGC in their communities, because of misconceptions that the practice is a religious requirement. As respected community members, religious leaders have the access, power and influence to change social norms. Effective programmes often see these leaders facilitating community dialogue and learning sessions, providing guidance, and playing a key role in public declarations of abandonment.” (Orchid Project website.)

I don’t want to offer up a conclusion here, because our roundtable was intended to be a provocation, the start of a conversation. That said, there is a clear return to a key idea, that we depend on good communication to survive transformational change. We want that from leadership, but we can’t be sure of getting it. What we can try to take control of is the quality of our own internal storytelling, our self-awareness.

What we haven’t shared yet are specific encounters, moments, words, that were lightbulb moments on our journey through change; something said, or the manner in which something was done, that created a whole new personal or organisational perspective on surviving transformational change. Or, simply, examples of an organisation leading change in an enlightened or disarmingly honest way.

Over to you.

 © Tom Connolly, July 2020.

tomconnolly.co.uk

 _________________________________________________________________________  

APPENDIX

Resources

1 The original roundtable conversation – video www.tinyurl.com/STCvideo2020

2 Derailers

https://www.hoganassessments.com/assessment/hogan-development-survey/

https://www.hogandarkside.com/

 3 Fukushima

https://hbr.org/2014/07/how-the-other-fukushima-plant-survived

4 Human Givens

http://www.griffintyrrell.co.uk/human-givens.php

Reference List

Abulof, U. (2017). ‘Introduction: why we need Maslow in the twenty-first century.’ Soc 54, 508–509. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-017-0198-6

Cole, A. (2020). ‘How To Survive Your Business Transformation.’ Forbes Human Resources Council.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeshumanresourcescouncil/2020/02/19/how-to-survive-your-business-transformation/#5198de3f66aa

Gulati, R., Casto, C., Krontiris, C. (2014). ‘How the other Fukushima plant survived.’ Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2014/07/how-the-other-fukushima-plant-survived

Feynman, R. (1963). ‘Atoms in Motion.’ The Feynman Lectures on Physics. 4, 20-21.

Mansfield, D. (2020). The Monday Revolution. 11, 53.

Dr. Seuss. (1958). The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.

Walters, A., Maitland, A. (2020.) ‘Organisational change: all change is not equal.

https://www.lane4performance.com/insight/whitepaper/organisational-change-all-change-is-not-equal/

 

 

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