I just heard it again: “People naturally resist change.”
Can I just respond, one more time, “No, they don’t.”
There just aren’t that many things that people do or don’t do naturally. People naturally love their mothers. They naturally learn to speak, interpret language, and walk. Eating is natural, too, but not raw oysters, which are definitely an acquired taste, and one I’ve never bothered to acquire, because really, yuck.
People don’t naturally resist change. They naturally resist changes they expect to be bad for them, not to mention changes explained in ways that are insulting. Why would they do anything else? If you design change to offer opportunity to employees, and explain it in terms that don’t denigrate their accomplishments, you’ll go a long way toward avoiding change resistance.
The subject of transitions, while related, is distinct. It’s driven by the way humans respond to the perception of loss, as William Bridges pointed out in his excellent and aptly named Managing Transitions. Without taking anything away from the book, here’s a simple technique that can help reduce the difficulty of managing transitions. A lot. To explain it, I have to tell you about the best golf lesson I ever received, and the worst.
The worst golf lesson came from a pro who had an excellent swing which he tried to teach me. He showed me a different way to address the ball, start my backswing, and handle the follow-through. The only part of my swing he left alone was my grip.
It ruined my game for two years.
The best golf lesson started with the pro watching my swing as I hit a bunch of golf balls. “That’s great, Bob,” he told me. “I want you to do just one thing differently. Which eye do you look at the ball with?”
“Both eyes,” I answered. “It’s that binocular vision thing.”
“Try looking at the ball through your dominant eye instead. Don’t close the other one — just cock your head so you’re paying attention to the dominant one.”
I did that and hit a bunch more balls. “That’s great, Bob,” he said. “I want you to do just one thing differently — right now you’re keeping your left heel flat on the ground during your backswing. Let it up as you pull the club back.”
I did that too, and three more “just one thing differentlies” over the course of an hour. The lesson transformed my long game.
That’s the secret of managing transitions: Don’t implement them as major transitions. Doing so turns employees who are competent at the old way of doing business into incompetents in the desired way. It emphasizes the sense of loss while maximizing inability.
Compare this tactic to the golfing way:
“You’re doing this well. I’d like you to try just one thing differently — before you start a project, make sure you and the business sponsor line up everyone who will work on any project tasks and include them as project staff. Get a commitment of their time from their reporting manager, and make sure they know what their tasks are and when they’re supposed to start and end.”
“You’re doing fine. Can I suggest just one small change? Instead of estimating every task yourself, only take the work breakdown structure as far as the assignment level, and ask project team members to finish the job for their tasks.”
And so on.
You can’t implement every change this way. If you’re implementing a major ERP system, which usually means changing much of how the enterprise conducts its business, it’s pretty hard to institute it one small tweak at a time. On the other hand, when you implement ERP, you aren’t telling employees they were idiots for doing business the old way, either. Sometimes, you have few or no alternatives to instituting major change in a single step.
But whenever possible, remember this:
I’ve listened to business change management consultants, and I’ve had a lesson from a terrific golf pro. The consultants told me to “unfreeze, change, and refreeze” — arguably the worst advice ever delivered, given, as it usually is, to companies facing the need for perpetual change.
The golf pro, in contrast, cured my slice.