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January 25, 2006

Selling the Change

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

The consulting industry that has built up around this challenge offers years of multidisciplinary research in its solution recommendations.

But in the center of the vast collective scope of the recommendation, a repeatedly confirmed synopsis appears, looking more or less like this:

- People have an innate sense of risk and reward, and they are willing to change their personal balance of them for a good reason.

- Giving people a reason to change requires more than just promising them additional tangible compensation. People want opportunity. The best opportunity you can give someone is support for them to be who they want to be.

- Part of that comes from clarity about what will be expected of them in a successful change. People need to see requirements that they feel are relevant and achievable. They need to see the difference between what they have already been responsible for and what they will next be responsible for.

- But the strategy for fostering change is to excite people about becoming a certain way or contributing themselves to something they believe in.

The excitement comes from communication. But the communication effort is not just information delivery.

Change envisions a future state and ascribes some "reality" to it by presuming that, on certain already manageable terms, individuals will make it happen. Communications to promote change must therefore answer some basic questions in a way that fosters the alignment of personal and organizational agendas.

That alignment revolves around two major concerns:
- What accountability is associated with the particular change?
- Do we believe the change is intrinsically do-able and worthwhile?

Those considerations are not in rank order here. Because they are each so basic, both concerns pertain to any given change. (But it's true that organizations more often change the way they tackle an unchanged objective, and less often change the objective itself. For that reason are the two concerns mentioned in this order here.)

As illustrated in the following picture, the connection of business vision to personal opportunity results from a "discussion" of the two concerns, in each of which the connection is logically fortified by the way key questions are answered. Negotiation to the answers may be more the rule than the exception.

Click here for enlarged image.

The above provides an overview of the key factors. Covering all of them is important, But getting right to the heart of the matter: for people to power the change, communications (as outlined above) must establish trust, visibility, roles and boundaries -- so that people feel empowered to take ownership of their decision to commit.

Violating those terms is a sure-fire way to undermine the motivation to change. As seen below, normal instruments of daily management need to be adequately focused on satisfying those terms.

In some ways these views are incomplete and have big spaces in them -- but if this much of the scenario isn't true as shown, then there's no reason to expect to be able to get people to change...

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at January 25, 2006 6:45 AM

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