Originally written December 11, 2022–
If there were 5 words that I could share which evoke the widest range of reaction when working with both clients and other consultants on change initiatives … it is these five words. A major role of any successful change practitioner, especially for the ones that work with the executive level of the organization, is to figure out how to be influential. I want to offer an explanation and an application of this phrase to the practitioner’s toolkit. The intent is not to add another catchy phrase that loses its potency over time, rather the purpose here is to introduce a framework to put behind the phrase. Further, there is the opportunity for the practitioner to leverage it for the awareness building, education, and mindset shift of sponsors at all levels involved in a change initiative. I find the greatest sense of accomplishment as a practitioner comes when a sponsor can see the patterns playing out on a change initiative and can apply this concept in an informed manner. Often this realization is a gateway for both the sponsor and the practitioner to gain a greater understanding into the reason why an initiative is not delivering the results expected.
Why is this phrase so effective with sponsors?
In short, this phrase, when applied appropriately and in the proper context, is effective because it gets at the most base level question – why aren’t people doing things differently? All the fancy models and PowerPoint presentations melt away when the practitioner sits across from their sponsor and the sponsor says “what’s going wrong here?” Now the sponsor MAY have opened a door with the practitioner for a different kind of conversation. A conversation that centers on the human factors that really drive the activities that lead to true “shift”.
Why aren’t people willing to do things differently?
No fancy heatmap, cloud-based platform, or word cloud can replace the very simple fact…. People who do not have a personal reason to do things differently won’t change .. Period. People do not change, for “change sake”. In fact, people are wired much the opposite. People will do almost anything they can NOT to change. I will explore avoidance tactics in a different post and some of the ways that practitioners address those situations.
When you can get to the root cause issue, it’s human willingness, or said differently, motivation. There has to be some reason that is meaningful to the person for doing things different. I offer one perspective below which is to look to the behavioral science literature for some possible answers.
One Possible Framework Based in Behavioral Science
Change practitioners come to the profession through many doors, one of which is from the behavioral science discipline. In behavioral science, you could look to motivation theories. The basic premise being that people do … or don’t …. do something, for a reason. People in general respond to two stimulus, pleasure and pain. Of those two, avoidance of pain is a far greater motivator to people than pleasure seeking. You could ask yourself, why would someone be more motivated to avoid pain than pursue pleasure. Think back to how people are wired, if you look back over time, people are wired to avoid those things which they find dangerous, threatening, or that they even fear. We are wired to avoid situations that we interpreted as threatening.
Change initiatives can run the gambit of intents. On the one extreme, an initiative may require very little of people to change, there are minor adjustments to what people do today. At the other extreme, delivering on a change may require significant shifts in the way people think and also what they do. They may have little or, in some cases, no experience working or acting in ways aligned with the change. In fact, one or whole groups of people may be struggling to even create a mental picture of what is expected of them in that “new reality” to be successful.
Change initiatives can run the gambit of intents. On the one extreme, an initiative may require very little of people to change, there are minor adjustments to what people do today. At the other extreme, delivering on a change may require significant shifts in the way people think and also what they do. They may have little or, in some cases, no experience working or acting in ways aligned with the change. In fact, one or whole groups of people may be struggling to even create a mental picture of what is expected of them in that “new reality” to be successful.
From a behavioral science perspective, the act of changing is a combination of stopping things they currently do or say and start thinking or acting in a different way. People need to perceive a sufficient reason to shift .. and that shift isn’t in the eyes of the people requesting, or even demanding the change; It is the very individual and deliberate choice made one person at a time to do things different.
From the practitioner lens, telling a leader or sponsor “the pain isn’t great enough” is a signal that there is an insufficient reason for shift. People simply do not have a motivation to stop doing things the current way and to start working in different ways.
Story Time…
I had a situation working on a business turnaround where a middle-level sponsor at a subsidiary company was angry at the fact that his boss, and his boss’s boss at the parent company, weren’t calling for significant cost cutting measures on staff support functions. The subsidiary had lost revenue and had high internal support function costs. The actual vs. forecasted were shared during regularly-scheduled monthly business unit report out meetings. The story went like this:
| Mid-Level Sponsor (MLS): “This doesn’t make any sense, my boss isn’t scheduling meetings to find cost cutting measures and I don’t see any signals coming from his boss either to cut costs.” |
| Change Practitioner (CP): “the pain isn’t great enough. What’s their motivation to change? |
| MLS: “You tell me.” |
| CP: “Well here’s the data. Your boss suffers no consequences for the spending continues at the prior pace. Have you seen him get reprimanded? Have you seen tighter cost controls placed on the subsidiary?” |
| MLS: “No.” |
| CP: “doing “something” by your boss is more work than doing nothing, and doing nothing has no consequence for him, so why would he do anything different than he is doing today?” |
| MLS: “But we are wasting money! Can’t people see that?” |
| CP: “Yes, they see it every month at the financial review meeting. It’s right there on the financials chart.” |
| MLS: “Then why isn’t anybody doing anything!” |
| CP: “Why would they? What force is pushing on leader to do different.” |
| MLS: paused and sat silent for a good minute and then in a very matter of fact tone said, “….nothing, nothing is .. but it’s wrong!” |
The takeaways from this story are following
- Rarely, do people change for change sake. In fact, I would pose the question that if someone appears to have changed “spontaneously” that decision to change boils down to one of two reasons:
(1) something about what they were doing was no longer acceptable to them – whether minor or major, or….
(2) that there was either something that they were striving to get that they currently didn’t have, more likely, there was some type of pain or negative outcome they were trying to avoid
- Being a student of the organizational context will reveal the datapoints – either data points as to why a change has started to take root .. or why it isn’t. I think each practitioner over time forms their own set of criteria as to why shift does, or doesn’t happen. What are your criteria?
- Take a chance … ground yourself in some basic behavioral science motivation theory. These behavioral science theories can serve for the practitioner as a sturdy foundation from which to understand the very individual journey every person who is expected to change goes through.
Future Posts
Future posts in this area will get into understanding the different aspects of motivation:
| From the perspective of the person who is expected to change | What are the motivators for people who actually have to do things differently? |
| From the perspective of the leader asking for the change – | Whether that be the person asking for the change and has the legitimacy to make such a request all the way to the leaders who will act as sponsors to their teams to shift the way people work day-to-day |
| From the perspective of the change practitioner | How do you help the leader apply this framework to their everyday actions on the change initiative. |
The two phrases that I’ll offer for consideration and later posts will be written on are the following:
—> The pain isn’t great enough … yet
—> The pain will never be great enough
What do you think?
For the professional community, one area of interest to me is how change practitioners that come from other disciplines would offer their own theories related to why people don’t change.