| A person having a nightmare can do many things in his dream — run, hide, fight, scream, jump off a cliff, etc. — but no change from any one of these behaviors to another would ever terminate that nightmare … Paul Watzlawick, Change. |
We’re asking people to change the way they serve customers, the way they work with information and the way they get their jobs done.
Change is the new normal. The pace of change in how customers buy, connect with brands and share their experiences is accelerating. New technologies and new platforms are driving fundamental changes in business models.
And yet as a whole, organizations are still pretty bad at change. Despite all the focus on change in recent years, an astonishing 70 percent of change initiatives continue to fail. We have to get better at change for, as Jack Welch once said “When the rate of change outside exceeds the rate of change inside, the end is in sight.”
What’s behind the high failure rates of change efforts related to technology deployments? According to a Deloitte CIO survey, seven of the top ten barriers to successful systems implementations are human factors. The number one factor CIOs cite? Resistance to change.
When it comes to deploying enterprise software many IT shops remain trapped in a nightmare. A nightmare populated by pesky users who resist change. When we notice this resistance, we draw from a handy toolkit of techniques for managing resistance to change. Executive mandate. Policies. Gamification. Training. Communications. The list goes on.
And yet the nightmare continues.
How can we wake from this nightmare?
“The one way out of a dream involves a change from dreaming to waking. Waking, obviously, is no longer a part of the dream, but a change to a different state altogether.” Paul Watzlawick, Change.
People resist change. Resistance is bad. Therefore we must manage resistance.
We see resistance as the enemy. Something we need to manage and overcome. This captures the essence of the nightmare we’re trapped in. And reveals clues for how we can wake from the nightmare.
Let’s explore the assumptions trapping us in the nightmare using the question assumption technique I shared in my previous article. What are the assumptions underlying each of the italicized words in these two sentences?
People resist change. Resistance is bad. Therefore we must manage resistance.
People: Who specifically? Who are they and what do they care about? What are some different ways we can understand people by their behaviors, attitudes or wants? What about managers, what role do they play?
Resist: What does resist mean? What specific behaviors and attitudes are we seeing? What are they thinking, feeling or doing that we label using the word resist?
Change: What specific changes are we talking about? Using a new piece of software? Being asked to learn new habits? Being told to do their jobs in a different way? What are all the things we’re including under the umbrella word of change?
Bad: Why bad? What if we saw resistance as a good thing? What if we saw resistance as feedback?
We: Who’s we? Project team? IT? Managers? Stakeholders? Executive sponsors? What about the people we’re asking to change?
Manage: What do we mean by manage? Push harder? Why not harness? Leverage? Learn from? Co-create? Inquiry?
These are just a few ideas starters. Try this exercise with your team to see what assumptions you’re making around resistance. What does it reveal about how your team perceives resistance?
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Source : cmswire[dot]com
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