A majority of organizational change efforts fail. Here’s 3 ways to increase your chances.
Despite thousands of change consulting firms and millions of books on organizational change, research continues to tell us that a majority of organizational change efforts fail, and largely for human factors: either resistance by employees or a lack of management support, or both.
To be fair, the combination of turbulence, uncertainty, novelty and ambiguity in the business environment (TUNA or, if you prefer, VUCA) and the impatience of the financial markets leaves leaders with less time to activate change initiatives successfully. The difficulty is that all organizational change efforts must compete with current behaviors, habits, and the dominant narratives in the culture - as well as the impacts of nasty surprises like the pandemic. While we do not have a crystal ball, what we have found in our work helping large global organizations adapt and respond more effectively to change is that there are three things that can help you increase your odds of success:
1 Having a more complete knowledge of initial conditions
Human behavior within an organization is a complex adaptive system, like the weather. To understand what’s influencing it requires accurate information about initial conditions - so you must know how people are experiencing their situation right now. Relying on survey data, blogs, or engagement analytics aren’t enough to fully establish initial conditions - aggregation of data removes the very context you will need to establish the ground truth. To complete the picture you will need qualitative research consisting of confidential unstructured depth interviews with a diverse and representative subset of the population.
2. Using what science knows about how people really make decisions
It’s only rational to think we’re all rational, but this simply isn’t so. In the typical scenario, we find that ‘change’ or transformation initiatives are marketed rationally, with lots of numerical support - financials, research data, analytics. It is assumed that this evidence will help people understand what is required of them and get them to “just do it” because it “makes sense”. What science knows about the evolved psychology and neurology of the brain reveals that there are two minds in our heads - what Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman refers to as System 1 and System 2 - and the mind that does most of the work isn’t rational, it’s emotional.
System 1 consists of thinking processes that are fast, intuitive, automatic, experience-based, and operate below the level of consciousness. System 2 is slow, reflective, controlled, deliberative, and analytical. The surprising finding is that our instinctive System 1 is responsible for 95% of our decisions (on average), which are then “rationalized” after-the-fact by System 2.*
This means that you can increase your odds of success by NOT leading with rational arguments. Instead, craft an interesting emotional story capable of captivating System 1, and then follow with a compelling rational narrative that your audience’s System 2 can use to justify their change in behavior.
3. Focus on reaching the tipping point
Human behavior is emergent, meaning an individual both influences and is influenced by the social ecosystem. This means that you don’t have to get everyone on board. Instead, focus your efforts on quickly reaching a tipping point - which requires getting above 10% of your people fully committed (keep in mind that when we are talking about behavior, compliance ≠ commitment).
Social Consensus through influence of committed minorities, Physical Review E, July 2011
Once you get over 10%, agent-based modeling shows that it will quickly spread through the rest of the population. This works because in a complex evolving system (emergent human behavior within an organization), the higher the degree of interdependence, the wider the ‘ripples’ of influence; small things have a large impact. It also indicates that “the organization as a whole, in its manifold interactions, creates its way of working and relating and the ‘new rules’ then emerge from those interactions and new ways of working.” 1
If successful transformation efforts were simple, word would have surely got around - but you can improve your odds of success by changing the way that your organization goes about it. The job to be done is not to get people to change, but rather to get people to internalize the value of these new behaviors for themselves, in their own lives.
* This is a vital survival efficiency worked out during our long evolution. System 1 processes use very little energy; System 2 processes use a great deal. To conserve energy for survival situations, we only use System 2 when we absolutely have to. This is critically important because our brain consumes nearly 25% of our total energy.
1 Eve Mitleton-Kelly, Ed., Complex Systems and Evolutionary Perspectives on Organizations, 2003.
