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Chapter 1
An Invitation to Change
In This Chapter
- Change attempts often fail because of the assumptions we make.
- We often find ourselves in situations that require us to adapt but choose to distort reality and deny what the world is telling us.
- To be excellent, we have to be at the edge, a place of uncertainty and learning.
- When we are committed to a higher purpose, we move forward through the fear of conflict, and as we do, we learn and we see in new ways.
I recently received a phone call from an information technology executive whose team had spent months designing a technical change that was about to be launched across the corporation. Other senior people had consistently advised him to talk to someone who āunderstands change in terms of people and cultureā before rolling out the change. So he asked me to come in and speak to his team about how to implement the change process. He also mentioned that his people were not very interested in hearing about the role of culture in their change effort and could see little value in such a visit.
This executive was a very educated and experienced man. Yet he was about to launch a companywide change without having considered the role of culture in the change process. Such ignorance is unimaginableāit's the equivalent of learning that your brain surgeon is ignorant of the organ known as the heart. Yet such ignorance is also very widespread; it often seems as though ignorance about the importance of organizational culture is an epidemic. I hold the radical belief that many people do not know how to lead change, including people who think they already have.
Think About It
- Why did this executive spend months planning a change without considering his company's culture? Where was he focusing his attention?
- Have you ever been involved in leading an organizational change effort? What was the primary focusāon the mechanical processes or the needs for human learning involved in the change? What was the result? Looking back, what do you think you should have done differently?
- How might you plan a change effort to take culture into account? What would you do to be credible when you asked others to change their behavior?
The Western Way
Jeff Liker is perhaps the world's leading outside expert on how work is done at Toyota. When I spoke with him not long ago, he explained that, despite the glitches that came to light in 2010, Toyota had been so successful that thousands of companies have attempted to implement the Toyota concept of lean manufacturing. Lean is a philosophy of excellence that puts a heavy emphasis on the customer and the value chain. Implementing this concept, managers work to eliminate waste through a process of continuous improvement.
But Jeff pointed out that only 2 percent of companies that have implemented lean have achieved the anticipated results, and many of those ultimately experienced disappointment. These failures represent billions of dollars in lost value.
Why have the results been so miserable? At Toyota they understand something about change that few Western companies understand. Western companies operate with a checklist mentality. An expert comes up with the ācorrectā way to do something, builds a plan, trains the people, and audits the change progress. The great thing about this approach is that it is fast and efficient. The bad thing is that it seldom works. Worse, we often fail to see that it does not work.
The Checklist Mentality
As Jeff was talking, I recalled a quality evaluation program called Q1 that Ford introduced in the 1980s to stimulate deep change. To obtain the Q1 award, a plant had to pass an examination given by a group of hard-nosed outside evaluators. Leaders from successful plants were often invited to share their strategies with other groups.
At the time, my colleagues and I at the University of Michigan were running a professional development program for three thousand middle managers at Ford. Sometimes, we invited Q1 award winners to give presentations.
These presenters would usually recount the plant's general history, describe their results from the Q1 effort, and explain what had been done to obtain the results. The discussion would then turn to the issue of greatest interest for the audience: How could another plant achieve similar results?
At this point, the presenter would usually talk about things like the need for āeveryoneā to learn. He or she might talk of equality, participation, risk-taking, continual experiments, authentic communication, mutual learning, the transformation of assumptions, and the joint implementation of new ideas. (The presenter was actually talking about the subject of this book: leading deep change.) These discussions made the managers uneasy. After a few minutes, someone would invariably say, āGive me specifics. What do I need to do and when?ā
I asked one presenter about this pattern. He explained, āThey just don't understand. They want a checklist, but this is not about checklists. This is about figuring out where you are and where you need to go and then launching an effort to get there. It's about learning together. The key to becoming a Q1 plant is finding the unique strategy for your plant. Once you find it, you have to start looking for the next one, the one that will be right for tomorrow. There are no recipes.ā Few people want to hear that last sentence. It suggests that we need to do a kind of work that no one wants to do: the work of deep change.
Thirty years later, we are having the same conversations. The reason why today's executives look at Toyota's success, invest heavily in change, and then fail miserably is because successful implementation of a successful model is not about copying some existing technology. Rather, it is about changing culture, which means changing the way people have thought and acted for years. It is about learning how to learn together and create excellence in real time.
Leading deep change is never easy. But why is it so hard to understand and lead deep change?
Think About It
- Have you ever been part of a change effort in which your organization tried to import processes that others had used successfully? What were the results? What were some of the reasons for those results? Why might something that worked in one organization not work in another?
- When you look to examples of success to guide your own actions, do you prefer examples that provide concrete steps, tell you what to do and when to do it? What if an example did not provide concrete how-to steps? Could you use it? How?
Challenge Your Normal Assumptions
The process of leading deep change violates the assumptions that normally guide our interactions with others. Thus, simply telling people about that process will not show them why it worksāthe explanation just bounces off of their strongly held normal assumptions. Deep change begins with a state of mind. When I teach deep change, I no longer try to explain. Instead, I put people through experiences that cause them to challenge their own assumptions.
For example, I sometimes use a simple role-play to show that resistance to the ideas of deep change is not limited to corporate managers. Two volunteers play spouses who have just returned from their honeymoon. After breakfast, the āwifeā leans back and lights up a cigarette. The āhusbandā is concerned about her smoking but has never raised the issue. He decides that he can no longer suppress his concern. I ask him to begin a conversation with his beloved. The objective is to get her to ...
