Making change happen is easy. Making the change that happens the one you want is quite a bit more difficult.
But first a tangent … not much of a tangent, but a tangent nonetheless … meat. And not just any meat. Unicorn meat, as discussed by a fascinating piece in The Atlantic (“Open Your Mind to Unicorn Meat,” Annie Lowrey, 7/9/2023).
I say fascinating, not because it’s particularly surprising, but because it lays out all of the complexities those who want us to substitute non-meat meat for meat in our collective diets have to contend with.
The core message: Such a substitution would be better for both the planet’s and our personal health, but promoting it on the basis of its planetary and personal health advantages is a non-starter.
Want people to eat non-meat meat? Make non-meat meat whose taste and texture are indistinguishable from meat, or, even better, more enjoyable (unicorn meat).
This is why the Impossible Burger has been more successful than the black bean patties that preceded it.
Which gets us back to what intentional organizational change takes and why too many leaders fail at it. And so, here are a few tips, and anti-tips if there is such a thing, business leaders leading a change should keep in mind:
Insist that “It’s really very simple.” No, it isn’t. I don’t even know what you’re trying to accomplish, but if it’s an important change in how your organization does something, it isn’t simple, any more than creating a recipe for non-meat meat and then scaling that recipe up to factory-scale production is simple.
The closest to simplicity you can come is agility. Which is to say, there’s no such thing as a perfect spec. What there is instead is a well-managed backlog – an iterative and incremental list of change ingredients whose priorities are set based on the law of diminishing returns.
“What do you mean, ‘persuade’?” Like the dark side of the Force, there’s something seductive about authority and the power it confers. Far too many executives and managers figure that telling is better than persuading. And it is, if your definition of “better” is “requires less effort.”
So if you’re among those who prefers to rely on their authority to make things happen, keep in mind that power comes in five levels – change leaders can control, tell, persuade, influence, or be a victim.
Those whose habit is to control or tell turn those they control or tell into victims, defined as those who have no power. Wiser and more effective change leaders rely on their ability to persuade, and, should they lack sufficient authority for persuasion to work, to influence.
Bob’s last word: Which gets us to the meat of the issue: If you want to push a desirable change into your organization and don’t want your organization to push it back out, make sure you’ve defined the change so you can broadcast it, as the old joke goes, on the radio station every employee listens to on the way into work every day: WIIFM, which stands for “What’s In It For Me?”
Don’t, that is, design the change so it’s good for the organization and then try to figure out how to get employees to like it, or at least to not dislike it so much that they’re willing to sabotage it.
Design the change as something employees see as, first and foremost, something they’d want for themselves. Then and only then is the time to fiddle with it so it benefits the organization as a whole, too.
Make your change taste, that is, like unicorn meat.
Bob’s sales pitch: Want something book length on the subject? Check out Bare Bones Change Management and There’s No Such Thing as an IT Project.
They’re complementary takes on how to make intentional change happen.
Now on CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: The ‘IT Business Office’: Doing IT’s admin work right.”
What it’s about is that you shouldn’t run IT like a business. And it’s about what you should do instead – how to run it in a businesslike way, by establishing an administrative group within IT to shoulder much of IT’s bureaucratic burden.
When it some to change, here is my trick. I fill my project team with believers and non-believers. The non-believers are key, once I get them to accept change, they will help me bring along the other non-believers. Non-believers also are extremely valuable since the may find things that the optimistic ones do not.
Too many projects assume if they have a great idea everyone will follow. Those same projects fail. Respect your cynics.
I like both of these – thanks! There’s little more persuasive than a convert, and, as you say, skeptics are far more likely than proponents to spot flaws.
In my observation, the single biggest thing with change (not reshuffling, but real change) is layoffs. If people think their job is at risk, they will resist change. And if layoffs are inevitable, it is doubtful any effort will be made towards success.
The only thing worse than a mass layoff is incremental layoffs. That not only kills morale, it ensures the best people will leave (reverse Darwinism).
I find it disheartening how poorly most companies are in doing this.
On the other hand, companies that make the effort to retrain/retool their people in times of change often end up with dedicated employees who appreciate the opportunity.
This deserves a longer reply than I can provide in this space. A quick observation: Layoffs are sometimes necessary. So I’d say that sometimes, many employees’ jobs must be at risk. But … and this is something that’s often missed … employees must see a way to survive the change. It must, that is, be designed so the best employees will stay.
You kind of hit on one of the issues in change, but then kind of missed the point.
Lets look at the alternative meat thing. You brought up the bean “burgers”. The marketing and claims were that you could use these just like regular burgers. I am surprised that there was not a false advertising suit from this one. I would bet you could come up with some good recipes for them. But they would probably have to be for them and recipes that burger would not work in. I know I happened to try them as advertised and they were a disaster.
I actually enjoy cooking and do a lot of it. I have my own recipe book that I use a lot. Something most guys can’t claim. So I accepted the claims and tried them in a number of my recipes that called for burger. The results were never close to as good. It was not that the results were different. They were just plain bad. I would say that I probably tossed about half my results after tasting them, and my housemate had the same opinion not even knowing what was going on. I was involved in a activity were we had people who were vegetarians coming to a BBQ. Someone tried then on a grill and the results were tossed and someone went to the store to get food for these people. And yet the claim kept being that we just were biased and were not getting this. By the way the reason that the BBQ food was tossed was because one of the vegans tried them and declared them inedible.
I have tried the impossible burger. The first time by accident, Burger King gave me the wrong bag. And I did not notice the wrapper. OK this was edible. At a noticable discount Im might even have chosen it once in a whole or if it was the only option probably. But it definately is not as good.
I know that our local Kroger management is not at all happy with their corporation’s push on this. They are regularly sent these other options. Most they can’t even give away. And that is effecting the bottom line of the store. The women will buy it for its cool factor and take it home and uise it for the family and not tell them and they have a fit. Now a lot of times she has to cook a second meal because they will not eat it. OH and a lot of the times she won’t eat it either. 😉 Believe me she never buys it or any of the other ones again. I have tried some and certainly will never buy again for a recipe calling for the meat it is supposed to be again. I have tried a couple of them and tried to come up with edible recipes, and have come up with stuff that is not too bad. But it is not good enough but what if I have to pay retail, I would make that recipe. OH and in general when I look at the recipe, the other things I need to do and add makes it officially badder for the planet than the real meat.
And there in is the problem. Most of the time when I have seen serious efforts to make the kinds of changes you are talking about the people setting up and pushing them don’t come up with a real way to make them work. The try to substitute them into the e4xisting system and try to as it were use the meat recipe and then try to tell everyone that they don’t understand it and that they are just biased against it. The thing is that this might actually be a good idea, but only if they really look at it with and actual unbiased eye and really examine how if fits into the what things are.
The comment I see here about lay offs is kind of on target. But that also is missing one of the problems. Yes many corporate changes result in lay offs. But they also then even more result in employees being a bad fit for their job. Some times that is unavoidable. But a lot of the time this is because of bad biased “this is the sajme so the employees should be able to as productive wihen doing it” attitude. A simple example of this I have seen in the past was changes in word processors. The new choice in many cases was batter or arguably better. But it was inarguable massively different. The be executives who came up with the idea of the switch were unable/unwilling to see this. They expected to just install the new word processor and maybe have a couple quick classes and then expect people to instantly be as productive with the new word processor. They convinced their bosses that this was the cases and then made sure that anyone who was not as productive was labeled as uncooperative and other buzz words.
Many times the employees had macros and other files to assist them with the old system and these almost never transferred. But the biased version was that you should be able to everything with the new software that the old software did and so you just were not doing your job right if you could not do the same thing as fast. It can get even worse with spread sheets. Of course spread sheets gets into the world of accounting and accountants actually know how to do accounting. I have seen what amounts to wars over this where the accountants actually were able to keep coming up with real facts and figures in meetings where they were being marked as problem employees. And that can get into real nasty office politics.
But the new system/idea/produict is just treated as interchangeable.
And it can get very nasty in many ways. A couple decades agos I got dragged into one with our military. They had military personnel who were programmers and who had been specialized and highly trained in one programming language. The decision was made to go to a different language. Frankly it probably was the right choice. But at the time programmers and other software people were defined in military job codes without regards to what language they used. So a number of personnel were actually hauled into the military justice system because they were not producing at the officially acceptable level and so were engaged in various terms such as conduct unbecoming. They ended up with a law firm that I had contact with representing them and I got called into this mess as a witness. It was a very ugly mess.
Thast is somehting that seems to be missed in all of this.
Without going deep into this, I’m confident it proves one point: My taste buds are nowhere near as sophisticated as those you and your friends bring to a barbecue. I’m not saying I can’t taste the difference between an Impossible Burger and the real thing. Side by side I probably could, although I’ve never tried. But on the occasions when I’ve eaten them my reaction was that I was eating beef.
OK you have one point here. But you will notice the impossible burger and the bean burgers were different. I suspect that your taste maybe is not be as sensitive or maybe just sensitive differently. Actually it was certainly edible. I took it to the counter and was reporting it when the person who got my meal also showed up and what hand happened became obvious. I did not figure it out until that moment.; They had known on arrival, but I don’t know if that was from the packaging or eating it. I would suspect the first. The manager offered me a replacement but I was in a hurry so just went ahead and ate it. If someone handed me a free one I would thank them and eat it. I was originally worried there was an actual problem with it. So that would define the actual level of problem here. And it was different. I did not like the difference. But I would bet that if I took a large sample set I would find a few people who thought it was better. Now how many could tell the difference would be a much better question. But that was not the bean burgers.
They just plain did not work. For one thing BBQing requires that the item actually produce some level of grease to get the smoke. OK fish is different, but it is totally different. And the material actually has to do a lot of things to make it work out as a food. And these did not do that. With my recipes, I am not the most healthy cook and generally the grease is part of the recipe in a way. As an example, one thing I like to cook is burgers and onions. You thin cut the onions and then start the burger(s) cooking. Then once they are about half done you put the onions on and cook the burgers the rest of the way on top the onions in the burger’s grease. And as they cook the burgers keep providing grease that keeps everything frying and not burning. I have several recipes are like this and frankly they were the worst result and I quickly realized that.
As a different example, I found out that my chili requires the grease. I didn’t want to toss that so I actually fixed that one. It was horrible to start with. Then I added some burger grease left over from a different recipe and some left over bacon grease and it became not bad. Not as good, but not bad. And I bet that is one that I could plan ahead and modify and produce a really good product. But that is really kind of my point. It would have to be a different recipe. Frankly my chili recipe started as my gradma’s. And she added grease as an item in the recipe. I Left it out and liked it better. Most other people to also. So if I were to come up with a chili that was on a par with my burger based chili based on the bean burgers, I bet that it would be not so good then made with burger. The now excess grease would be a problem.
“It’s really very simple”, “5 easy steps” and all those variants are immediate red flags in my book!
Excellent insight as always!
My reply here is not totally specific to this week’s post, but it occurred to me how relevant so much of the content of “Keep the Joint Running” should be to so many Congressional representatives as they fail to do so. Those attempting to control and tell, without even a token effort to persuade, will leave us all as victims as the government shuts down.
Well, now … it’s hard to remain silent on this. So I’ll just say that what’s going on right now is something of a master class in acquiring power just for the sake of acquiring power.