Leading Continuous Change
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Leading Continuous Change

Navigating Churn in the Real World

Bill Pasmore

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eBook - ePub

Leading Continuous Change

Navigating Churn in the Real World

Bill Pasmore

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About This Book

Most change efforts fail because most change methods are built to deal with single challenges in a nice, neat, linear way. But leaders know that today, pressures for change don't come at you one at a time; they come all at once. It's like riding a roller coaster: sudden drops, jarring turns, anxious climbs into the unknown. Drawing on his years of experience at the Center for Creative Leadership and Columbia University, Bill Pasmore offers a four-part model and four mindsets that allow leaders to deal with multiple changes simultaneously without drowning in the churn. The first step, Pasmore says, is to Discover which external pressures for change are the most necessary to address. The key here is to think fewer—step away from the buffet of possibilities and pinpoint the highest-impact options. Then you need to Decide how many change efforts your organization can handle. Here the mindset is to think scarcer—you have only so many people and so many resources, so how do you best use them? Once you've figured that out, it's time to Do —and here you want to think faster. Streamline processes and engage in rapid prototyping so you can learn quickly and cost-effectively. The last step is to Discern what worked and what didn't, so think smarter—develop metrics, identify trends, and make sure learnings are disseminated throughout the organization.For each stage of the process, Pasmore offers detailed advice, practical tools, and real-world examples. This book is a comprehensive guide to navigating change the way it happens now.

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Year
2015
ISBN
9781626564435

1 Riding the Coaster

THINK BACK to your first roller-coaster ride. For some of you, it might have been on the comet, one of the great wooden roller coasters of all time, nearly 100 years old and still in operation at the Great Escape in Queensbury, New York, after having been moved from its original location in Fort Erie, Ontario.
As you approached, the screams from those riding the coaster grew louder. What were you thinking? Was it going to be fun or terrifying? As you waited were you anxious to get to the front of the line, or were you looking around to find a way out? By the time you actually sat in the car and fastened your seat belt, were you excited or shaking?
Clank, clank, clank. As the cars climbed the first big hill, were you taking in the view with amazement or wondering how you got yourself into this mess? Did you have a premonition of doom (after all, you observed the first-aid office near the exit of the ride), or were you ready for whatever came? As you crested the first hill, did you relax going over the top or envision yourself falling offthe moon and crash-landing into the park below, scattered into tiny pieces?
You were jolted from side to side. You may have wondered as you went up and down smaller hills and around curves if your seat belt was strong enough to hold you in. You had absolutely no clue where you were going or when the ride would end. Each corner brought a new surprise.
Obviously, you survived. Other than a few small bruises, you were fine physically, albeit perhaps a little nauseated (or very nauseated). Your legs wobbled for a little while once you got off, but it felt wonderful to be alive. You had done it.
Riding the coaster is an appropriate metaphor for living in a world of complex, continuous change. Sometimes we put ourselves in a position that leaves us exposed to unknown dangers, feeling vulnerable and out of control. We feel we don’t have a choice. Standing pat is a recipe for failure. We are not sure how to get through what will happen next—and what a ride it is. We are surrounded by “churn”—everything is coming at us at once from every direction. We try to slow things down, sort it all out, and make good decisions, but we know that we’re not on top of everything. More is happening than we could possibly have seen in advance. We want to believe we have things under control, but in a very real sense we are just along for the ride.
Neither avoiding change nor minimizing its importance is an optimal way to deal with complex, continuous change (triple-C). Neither cowards nor daredevils make great leaders of this kind of challenge. Others can tell you about their experiences in managing triple-C, but until you are the one in charge, you won’t understand what it really feels like. You have to jump on board and live it. Like riding the Comet, only in hindsight will you be able to compare your imagination with reality.
If you have ridden the triple-C Comet and survived, you may believe that managing complex, continuous change is no big deal. You would be wrong, as the examples here of very intelligent leaders failing at complex, continuous change will show. You have developed an illusion of control that is simply not real. You believe that somehow, despite not knowing what will happen next, you will make the right decisions and manage your way through whatever comes your way. You believe that your choices will be the best available in the moment and that everything will work out eventually. This is a powerful delusion that is difficult to resist.
You recognize the upside of complex, continuous change. You know you can’t learn much if you don’t get on the coaster. You can’t learn if you don’t take some risks. Your organization stalls if you don’t spend some time at the edge of your experience, trying something that is scary and new. You accept that you have to place some bets, aware that you may lose but not believing you really will. Instead of facing reality, you gamble that somewhere in the confusing morass of uninterpretable signals there is one that will eventually lead you forward and toward success in a big way. You tell yourself that leadership is not for the weak and that you are strong. Despite being rocked violently from side to side, you are in command. You can handle it. You will survive. But in actuality, not everyone does survive in the real world of triple-C. The truth: business is not just a ride after all.
If a crash actually occurs, it is a shock and you meet it with either disbelief or resignation. A business plan that has worked for decades suddenly breaks down, or your best-selling product is eclipsed by someone else’s innovation. Or someone you trust does something you never imagined him capable of doing. The real world is not an amusement park. It can be a surprisingly harsh and unforgiving place. You may walk away, but not without a tarnished reputation and not without others suffering harm.
If, on the other hand, your early experiences with complex, continuous change were negative, you may have developed an aversion to change. You may now put all of your energy into protecting your organization from the world. While you tell yourself that you are being prudent, you are actually putting yourself and others at risk. Experts tell us that more organizational failures occur from avoiding change than from attempts to change successfully.1
Blockbuster Video stores and Borders bookstores stayed committed to their bricks-and-mortar strategies when the world was shifting to digital entertainment. Kodak and Polaroid remained in silver-halide photography, in part due to the investments they had made in their chemical film–producing operations. American Motors and Chrysler were unable to withstand the onslaught of lower-priced and then higher-quality foreign competition. Lucent Technologies was too slow to move from mechanical network telephone switching to cheaper digital switches; and both Wang and Digital Equipment gave up leadership positions in their industries to competitors that included Apple, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Dell, and IBM. Speaking of IBM, everyone knows that the reason the brand survives today is that its then-CEO, Lou Gerstner, drove a change in the company’s focus from hardware to services. HP’s attempt to follow suit was slower and not as successful. There are many more examples, but the point is that none of these companies wanted to die; in fact, they wanted to live and they thought that the best way to do so was to stay focused on what had worked for them in the past rather than taking a bold step into the unknown. So long as they still had some customers, it must have seemed like a return to profitability was just around the corner. Perhaps a new advertising campaign or a redesigned product would save them. They hoped for the best, but the truth could not be denied. They played it safe, which turned out not to be a safe thing to do at all.
Somewhere between the extremes of using all of your power and influence to protect the status quo by trying to stop change from happening and completely abandoning reason to simply “let whatever happens happen” lies the right way to lead an organization through complex, continuous change. There are many phrases to describe those who try to avoid or stifle needed change: sticking your head in the sand, being risk-averse, putting your finger in the dike, hanging on to the past, being out of touch with reality, wishing for the good old days, being too committed to your course of action, ignoring the cues, locked-in, looking in the rearview mirror, sliding into a death spiral. There are also names for those who are too quick to jump at each opportunity change presents: foolhardy, fast and loose, overly aggressive, prone to snap judgments, thrill seeking, undisciplined. What do we call those who have discovered how to manage effectively the inherent tradeoffs in complex, continuous change? Pioneers, change leaders, visionaries, balanced, intuitive, successful. This is the group in which you want to be.
If you are one of these leaders, you seek ways to reduce the risks that accompany complex, continuous change. You have gained awareness of your capacity to manage this kind of change and the capacity of others around you. You build in more safeguards by following sound change practices and increasing the processing ability of your organization to make good decisions in the moment and learn from them. You ride with your eyes open, steering the coaster instead of just going along for the ride.
If you work hard and long at learning how to lead complex, continuous change, you improve. You ascend to a position of dominance in your industry that forces others to follow your lead, eventually causing their downfall if they choose not to learn from your example. You get to control your fate.
Whether you are leading complex, continuous change or advising those who do, you must understand what is required of you to succeed. You need to be willing to revise your way of thinking about change. You also need to understand how to tell when you have exceeded your capacity to change and recognize that continuing at your current course and speed will not lead to the outcomes you desire. You will need to learn greater discipline and focus, how to think in terms of scarcity rather than abundance, and how to slow down to get faster at change. Only leaders can make the critical decisions that determine how the ride will end.

We’re Playing a New Game

The field of organizational development was conceived by behavioral scientists as a way of helping organizations introduce planned change. Changes to work practices, strategy, organizational design, mergers and acquisitions, and so forth were too often resisted by those whose help was required for them to succeed. Kurt Lewin, the most widely recognized progenitor of the field, in the 1940s and ’50s laid out the basics of what became the backbone for change work in organizations. His model was simple and intuitive. It called for leaders to (1) “unfreeze” the organization by clarifying the need for change; (2) introduce change using highly participative methods that allowed others to see for themselves the logic and necessity of change and even to contribute to the design of the change itself; and (3) “refreeze” the organization by institutionalizing new ways of working through the adoption of new methods, policies, and procedures that would not allow it to relapse into comfortable but ineffective ways of operating.
Later others added to Lewin’s three steps. It was recognized, for example, that before the leader could help others change, the leader himself had to be committed to the change. If a leader refused to acknowledge the clear need for change, engaging him in learning about the threats or sharing with him the results of careful diagnoses could increase his readiness to act.
If a leader had difficulty getting her staff on board with the change, techniques were developed to understand people’s concerns and address them. Using surveys to gather opinions and then summarizing the data so that it could be discussed by leaders and employees in a search for solutions became an extremely popular approach. In other cases, when the implementation of good ideas failed to happen, reward systems were realigned to provide incentives for desired new behaviors. Over the years literally hundreds of techniques and approaches for managing change were invented, ranging from individual coaching to large-scale interventions involving thousands of people simultaneously. Despite the proliferation of approaches to managing change, the planned change success rate has remained stuck at around 30 to 40 percent.
John Kotter’s eight-step model, introduced in 1996, became the most widely cited roadmap for changing organizations:2
1. Increase urgency.
2. Build the guiding coalition.
3. Get the vision right.
4. Communicate for buy-in.
5. Empower action.
6. Create short-term wins.
7. Don’t let up.
8. Make change stick.
Kotter’s approach followed Lewin’s basic framework, which is premised on a linear notion of how single changes occur.3
But at about the same time that Kotter’s model was published, others were questioning whether Lewin’s linear, single-focused thinking could still be applied successfully to the world we live in today. Peter Vaill was among the first and most vocal to articulate this alternative point of view. His 1989 book, Managing as a Performing Art: New Ideas for a World of Chaotic Change, struck a chord with beleaguered managers who could not keep up with the changes occurring around them.4 Just as one change was introduced, another was needed, and often that change required undoing something the previous change had accomplished. Under these circumstances orderly steps and one-at-a-time sequential changes went out the window. One explanation for why all the tools and techniques that were devised to help with change were not actually helping is that there was simply too much change going on. Tools designed to manage one change at a time could not keep up with the constant interruptions that came from the need to change course continuously.
What Vaill called “permanent whitewater” we refer to here as complex, continuous change, that is, a series of overlapping, never-ending, planned and unplanned changes that are interdependent, difficult to execute, and either cannot or should not be ignored. Organizations facing triple-C can reach the point of change saturation in which the many important changes that must be undertaken can no longer be addressed through parallel, linear, sequential change efforts. Changes start falling off the plate because there are not enough resources to address them, and organizational performance suffers as more effort is put into transformation and less is left over to support ongoing operations. What is a leader living in a world of complex, continuous change to do?
Recently, at a conference that addressed the topic of change, Kotter made the statement that a new approach to change was needed to keep up with the pace and complexity of change that we are experiencing. He said that while his model still makes sense when we focus on a single-change effort, as the pace and complexity of change exceeds our capacity to respond effectively, a new approach to change must be invented. We are playing a new game.
One idea that has been suggested is to take Lewin’s ideas around involvement a step further and get everyone involved in making change happen rather than leading change from the top. The theory is that by getting more people involved, there would be greater shared understanding of what should happen, fewer up and down the hierarchy meetings needed to clarify things, and more hands on deck who are committed to assist. Further, there would be greater buy-in and fewer conflicts due to one part of the organization’s fighting with another about the direction of change. Marvin Weisbord, in his 1987 book Productive Workplaces, laid out the tenets for an approach to change that “got the whole system in the room.”5 Building on the earlier work of Fred Emery and Eric Trist on “search conferences,” the idea was to eliminate the “strategizing at the top and execution at the bottom” that often leads to change failures.6 While these ways of managing complex, continuous change were a step forward, they were not entirely successful. It turns out that it’s easier to get the whole system into a room than to get the whole system to do something after people leave the room.
These whole-system or “large-group” interventions, including popular variations like the appreciative inquiry summits and the world cafĂ©, are sometimes run as onetime, single-focus events.7 They can also be repeated over time and in different parts of an organization or system. Using these methods, change leaders have discovered that they can indeed get more people in the room to increase understanding of the whole system before they target specific changes to be made. They also discovered, however, that follow-through from whole-system events is a challenge and that only rarely do these discrete events build upon one another to produce continuous adaptation. Even with many people involved, our single, linear interventions are simply not agile enough to deal with the many complex changes we are facing. Nor can we do them frequently enough to keep up with the pace of change around us.
Another suggestion that has been offered is to devote attention to one key change effort at a time. There are success stories of narrowly focused sustained linear change programs, and we should not overlook them because they inform us of conditions that are required to achieve footholds as we climb toward higher levels of organizational performance. The Work-Out program developed by General Electric (GE) that br...

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