One of the attendees from a recent presentation that I gave is looking for opinions on change management tools for her organization. (A technical tool for supporting their technical change management process).
If you would like to weigh in on products pros/cons, please use the "share your thoughts" button below.
(Please no promotional postings)
I am often brought in to organizations to help with a change initiative. Change can mean many things depending on where you sit in an organization. At senior levels, change often means organizational change, while at technical levels this often is interpreted as controlling or preventing change.
Change management should be looked at as a way to enable changes that have been deemed necessary when looked at strategically.
My complaint with how many managers view change is that it is a one time tactical implementation of something, be it realigning staff with new positions or installing some new piece of technology.
Change in my opinion should be viewed holistically rather than each component in isolation. Strategically the business wants to move in a certain direction, and tactically many things have to align to make that happen. Change management at a business level may include modifying behaviors, and at a technical level modifying the technology to support that.
I have written and spoke extensively about demolishing silos. You can see one such example in one of my blog posts from January 2010.
A silo of a different type is about to be demolished on Canada’s east coast. The scenic Peggy’s Cove lighthouse is on the chopping block through a combination of:
A) Natural selection –modern steel towers with long life bulbs are cheaper to erect and maintain than houses with lights on them, and
B) Silo mentality on behalf of Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO).
DFO owns the lighthouse and maintains it as one of their tools in keeping ships safe on the seas, in this case off the shores of Nova Scotia. The lighthouse needs significant maintenance and there is a stronger business case to be made for demolishing it and replacing it with a steel tower. From that standpoint it makes sense.
Lighthouses are relics from the past and time marches on. In the same way that we no longer need elevator operators, or welders on an automotive assembly line, we no longer need lighthouse keepers or even lighthouse. The work just isn’t there anymore.
The welder, machinists, and many other technical people including corporate information technology (I.T.) workers are no longer in demand for their skills and have or are about to be challenged to develop new skills.
The lighthouse keepers were obsolete many years ago, and now, so are the lighthouses. So, if their old value is now gone, how would you suggest the lighthouse keeper or the lighthouse itself move to work of higher value?
(Please post your response, and then I will share my own.)
Hint: I have provided some clues in the above text. Put your best ideas forward
Five Communication Barriers That You Can Actively Be Aware of
1. One upmanship
2. Hidden assumptions
3. Making up new meanings
4. Defensiveness
5. Going off course
I have only listed five. I could probably fill an entire book of these.
Stepping back, I am sure that you can discover even more on your own. The point is that as we communicate with others we need to be aware that we each have our own filters, preconceived notions and varying degrees of skill in getting our point across or seeing the point of view of others.
There is a process for this and by being aware you can improve the outcomes of your conversations the same way you improve anything. Find out where you are, plan what the conversation will accomplish, converse, and measure that you are progressing in the intended direction. Take corrective action to get back on course.
I frequently give presentations. When I do I am practicing the same steps that I would in a one-on-one conversation. The specific techniques may differ based on audience size and the degree that I need to listen and understand versus being understood, but you get the picture.
From time to time I have experienced what can be considered "an out of body experience." I've spoken to other presenters who have described this sensation where, mid speech, you find yourself observing yourself as if you had stepped aside and were watching the show. It is fascinating because during these moments, you can be in two places at once. In one place you are presenting and even answering questions, and in another place you are observing and analyzing what is going on and how to improve while even developing new ideas. When I tell my wife about this she looks at me as if I am from Mars, but I assure you that it happens, and not just to me. I suppose that it could be described as thinking on a higher plane.
A precursor to this phenomenon is the feeling of "being in the zone." Things just click, and you don't have to think about what you are doing because your mind is three steps ahead of your conscious thought, and able to change direction in an instant.
With practice thinking about what is going on in a conversation with another person, I have experienced the same thing although less frequently. I think the substantial difference is the degree of emotion in a one-on-one conversation, where you can be "sucked in" to a conversation that is going off course, rather than resisting the temptation and instead consciously bringing things back on track.
In conversation, some people use clever phrases that they rely on such as "so what you are saying is..." or "tell me why you feel that way." While those phrases allow them to bring things back on course, even these techniques require that you to think before speaking, or analyze while listening. It is important to be aware of where you are in the conversation and there is a big difference between simply conversing recreationally where you can be much more casual compared to a serious conversation where results need to be achieved and some sort of conscious process should be followed.
What are you doing to move to work of higher value?
Improving service delivery is about more than serving the customer. It is about making sure that the customer CAN be served. Too many times I see organizations sabotaging their customer service workers by providing them with a service that is impossible to deliver. While you can measure customer dissatisfaction at the door that is not where it begins.
In some places bad service is a novelty, but even in those places the product exceeds expectations.
(At Bullocks I couldn't pass up either product so I had both).
...in fact sometimes the product is so appealing that you can opt for no service at all.
Well, today I learned even more about Growlers. I had the spelling all wrong, but pronounced correcty. It seems that it is an evolutionary thing (in both species and language).
Growlers - Grolars - Grolar Bears -
Q- What do you get when you cross a Grizzly bear with a Polar bear?
A- a growler! (...which apparently sounds more menacing than a pizzly).
The result of Grizzlies following the caribou further north (now that recent years have been warmer), and the polar bears (left without summer ice to hang out on the way they used to).
BUT WAIT - before anyone gets their global warming nickers in a twist lets consider this:
The grizzly bear is thought to have descended from brown bears that came from Russia to Alaska. According to wikpidia this happened 100,000 years ago, and they lived in the north for 87,000 years. Somewhere along the way they evolved into grizzly bears and moved south 13,000 years ago.
So here we are many years later and the grizzlies have come back to visit their relatives who stayed behind and evolved into polar bears. The two meet again and apparently hit it off quite well.
The real question is "where were the environmentalists 100,000 years ago when we needed someone to prevent the Russian bears from crossing over as a result of global cooling?"
Perhaps they should have also been around 13,000 years ago to capture and isolate these odd offspring before they migrated south?
With all this ice disappearing, the polar bear is adapting by selecting a mate that gives them brown paws like a grizzly and white coats like a polar bear. Presumably this will be an advantage when it comes to hunting the offspring created when ringed seals from the west meet harp seals from the east for the first time.
Things change. The real question is how do you adapt to change? In the corporate world as in nature, things do not need to continue to exist in their current form simply because they always have. Sometimes new entities are created that are better suited to the current environment than are the old form that they replaced.
I am writing this week from Yellowknife, in Canada's North West Territories. The picture below was taken on my last trip mid winter at 11:30 AM (Yes you read that correctly 11:30, as in 1/2 hour before lunch. The sun was just coming up, and would soon set again at 3pm, a little over three hours after it came up for the day).
Aside from the decorations and the snow, this same picture could have been taken this week after 10pm. The long days are beginning this month in the land of the midnight sun.
If you could make out the street sign you would see that it marks Franklin Avenue, named after the early explorer Captain Sir John Franklin, a British Royal Navy officer and experienced explorer. Franklin and his crew perished as they attempted to traverse the last unnavigated section of the Northwest Passage.
This next picture was taken from the top of Pilot Monument, an outcropping of rock overlooking the city. It is dedicated to the bush pilots who lost their lives servicing this area in the 1920s.
In the picture above, far off in the distance you can see lights on the hill to the right of the main street lights. At 9pm I just took the picture below on this trip from that location looking back at the monument. It is the highest point just left of the island in the picture below.
Yellowknife is a mining town with an interesting past.
As Tom Cochran sang:
Where the shore-fires burn out on a new frontier, where the past don't haunt you and there's nothing else to fear. Baby don't hold out too long...they might not let you be!
Movin on, feel the wind in your hair.
The sun shines at night, I can take you there
To the land of the midnight sun...ragged ass road
One of the key elements of any change initiative is to create a sense of urgency.
Without urgency, two things tend to happen:
1. People tend to focus on things that are higher priority in the short term
2. Workers who do not fully agree with the new direction, or who have self interest in seeing the status quo prevail will chose to “wait out” the change initiative, believing that this too will blow over and they will have saved themselves all kinds of work.
You could name five other things, but in my consulting work I frequently see these two. You may correctly recognize these two issues as leadership issues. Strong leaders with experience in change know how to overcome these and other obstacles; however, I don’t fault the leader if they themselves have been rewarded for years for maintaining the status quo. Where would they get the experience leading change, or how would they keep their skills sharp if those skills are never needed? As a consultant I am at a distinct advantage because in working with different clients, I am able to practice these skills everyday. In my experience a leader who is good at managing stability is not as well suited for managing change without some assistance.
It is also easy to blame the workers for not wanting to change, but again, how often have they had to change? They must have received some reward for functioning the way they do, or they wouldn’t be doing things this way. True, the rewards may not be the officially sanctioned rewards identified by the business, but rather emotional rewards of some sort, but no less rewarding to the worker. Finding these hidden rewards and assessing their impact is challenging but it is part of creating change.
The real question boils down to why do people do what they do, and how can you get them to do something differently when the old way felt successful, and the new way represents an unknown leap of faith?
I have created this process visual to demonstrate how new experiences can be used to flush out old experiences thereby creating a better outlook for the future.
If you don't seek new useful experiences, you will be stuck with the ones you have already had. If they were good experiences that you hold on to, that may not be that bad particularly when it comes to predicting the future, but if they were bad, that's really bad...
The current lens
Psychologists believe that one will tend to view that which is currently being experiencing as well as very recent experiences, through a lens determined by past experiences. If past experiences are all bad, then one is likely to predict that future experiences will be bad as well. In fact, even current and very recent experiences that may well have been positive can become tainted. The lens becomes murky and one may perceive otherwise good experiences as bad or negative.
Polishing your outlook and that of your employees
You’ve probably heard the expression that pessimist see a glass as half empty and that optimists see a glass as half full. In my first job I was told that realists know that if you stick around long enough someone is going to have to clean that glass.
What we need is a tool for keeping that glass clean. Psychologists have tools for helping people through past experiences, and the skills to employ them in ways that can help people deal with negative or traumatic experiences of their past. If you truly have something that is holding you back, traumatic or otherwise, these are good people to talk to, and my simple model does not attempt to replace them. It simply takes the work of good people such as Dr. Martin Seligman, and others, and depicts one of the key concepts into something that can be understood quickly and easily.
My view is that if our brains are computers, we need to flush out the memory buffers. I believe that on a daily basis we can maintain our own looking glass. While preparing for day-to-day interactions, a person can benefit from simply stacking the deck in their favor by lining up enough sure-fire successes and positive experiences intended to displace past experiences of negative outcomes.
Simplistically this means that in addition to our regular routines, planning in advance a few things that are easily achievable, and then reflecting on the positive aspects of each event soon after. From a management perspective this may mean moving away from compliance metrics (perfect or not) and towards progress metrics (are we moving in the right direction).
The goal is to pad the past with positive experiences thereby flushing out the bad. As more challenging things come along, the likelihood that one will predict their outcome as negative, will be reduced, and we can take on more challenging situations more readily.
As we continue, in addition to no longer spinning otherwise good experiences as bad, I maintain that even the negative events will be perceived as not so bad. You can’t do this easily if your past experiences are all negative. The dog that was rescued from an abusive owner may no longer remember why it flinches when a hand is raised, but eventually that negative subconscious memory in the distant past just might be flushed from the queue to make room for the positive experience of an outstretched hand containing a treat.
If you are a manager it might just be worth looking at how your outstretched hand is perceived. People don’t need treats to perform, but they do need positive experiences. Are people moving towards or away from the outstretched hands in your workplace?
Following up on my promise from the last issue, this month I am skimming a bit further below the surface of ways to work smarter.
1. Don’t just say that you are going to think and act strategically, actually schedule time for it, just as you would a commitment to someone else.
2. Replace habits that are no longer serving you well. Why not set an appointment to check your email at 10am, rather first thing in the morning when it can distracting you from your day before it even gets started?
3. Step back from the tasks at hand and identify the process that it is part of. These seemingly spontaneous tasks that arrive are probably highly predictable if you look over the walls to see what is triggering them.
4. Don’t wait for the perfect opportunity when everything will be just right. Instead, get started and improve it from there.
5. Remember my saying “Don’t fire Bob, or by a tool. Instead, begin by improving the process.” Anything else is just treating the symptoms.
6. Motivate others by making measurable progress achievable. Punishing anything less than perfection demotivates and causes people to shut down.
7. Focus strategically on value and outcomes, not tasks and inputs.
8. Don’t make investment decisions on behalf of the customer. Instead, provide them with options.
9. Recognize that your true value is not in the tasks that you perform, but in the results that you achieve.
…And another thing 
Anyone can cut your grass or clean your house, but only you can bring your unique value to the people that care about you. Make sure you target results that are sufficiently high value.
Sometimes potential clients meet me and tell me they want me to deliver a report. I ask them how thick? You can buy 500 pages from business depot for just a few bucks, and that is double sided. All you need to do is apply a staple.
They quickly realize that they don’t need a report. What they usually need is help making a decision or influencing others.
What are you doing to maximize your value?
© Wayne McKinnon 2012. All rights reserved.
