Promoting change is a major strategic and management challenge. Most will accept that change is a necessary ingredient in survival, but most will also hope it is the other bloke who changes, and they can continue in in their comfortable cocoon.
There are three ways to initiate and lead change, all based on behavioural psychology.
Incrementally.
When you ask people to make minor changes, and provide the background information so the changes seem reasonable, people will usually be prepared to make them. Minor change, on minor change, compounds to significant change is what seems like a short time when you look backwards.
You are not taking people too far out of their comfort zones by making these minor changes.
Anchored.
‘Anchoring’ is a core technique in negotiation that is fed by ‘fixing’ on the first number mentioned. In a negotiation over wages for instance, you often see what amounts to an ambit claim, a huge increase over what you are actually prepared to accept. The process then becomes one of compromising, meeting somewhere in the middle. The higher the starting point, the higher the ‘middle’.
Catalytic event.
When something happens that is an attention grabber, it can be used to demonstrate that the status quo is simply not viable, and change is a necessity of survival. This can be used at an individual and corporate level. Management jargon often uses the term ‘Pivot’.
Steve jobs did it on returning to Apple, by radically reducing the product range, and focussing resources on the ‘Mac’ and development of what became the iPod. Bill Gates executed the biggest ‘Pivot’ in corporate history in 1995 when he realised that the internet really was something big to come, and that Microsoft had almost missed the boat. Gates wrote a memo to all staff that instigated the pivot that in an instant, turned Microsoft 180 degrees.
On several occasions over the years as a contract manager and ‘change-agent,’ I have deliberately generated a catalytic event. On each occasion, corporate survival was at stake, and significant change was essential. Under normal circumstances, the scale of the changes necessary would have been untenable in the absence of the catalytic event.
The management challenge to successfully making change, whichever strategy is used to make those changes, is to ensure they will ‘stick’ after the initial pressure is removed. The tendency to revert to the previous status quo is always very strong.
