The kickoff to this years Management of Change conference here in Philadelphia was the Presentation of the Honorable John J. Franke Award and then a presentation after dinner by Dan Heath, who wrote Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard.
This years winner of the Franke Award was recently retired from Government service Jim Williams. Independent of his obsessive Red Sox fandom (is there any other kind of Red Sox fandom come to think of it?), Jim is one of the wonderful people. Jim has represented the best qualities of Government service at least to me. He has been consummate professional, dedicated to achieving the highest possible results, and at the same time a good partner to work with for the private community that supports Federal programs.
I was lucky to get to know him during my time at the US Department of Transportation and am proud to have him as a friend. Now, if we could only cure him of his Red Sox’ism.
Dan Heath’s talk was an interesting one, I am sure my memory and this short summary will not do it justice.
He basically said that there are two aspects to how people react to change. First, there is a rationale perspective which he likens to a rider sitting on an elephant. Second, there is an emotional component which he likens to the elephant the rider is sitting on. He notes when push comes to shove which one is the powerful, the answer being the elephant.
His opinion is that we focus too much on the rider, emphasizing the logic of change. Though we cannot ignore the rider, we need to make sure we pay attention to the elephant.
In simple terms it is important that we explain the reasons for the change in explicit terms so the rider understands. But it is critical that we illustrate for the elephant why it is advantageous to change. He pointed out that the elephant needs that information often in an illustrative fashion.
One example he used was a financial executive who showed using spreadsheets how a billion dollars could be saved over ten years by centralizing purchasing. Almost everyone at the company he worked at ignored him. To prove his point he had his staff go out and get an example of every type of work glove they bought in each of the many divisions in the company. Attached to each work glove he attached the price paid for the glove, which varied not just between different types but even the same type bought by different divisions. He then had all of these gloves dumped in a conference room and invited all of the corporate executives to come to the room. A few months later he was given the authority to centralize purchasing.
I think his points were cogent. The challenge, as usual, is to apply those generic principals to my (or your) specific situations. The value however is that they do provide a context for thinking through what steps to take to cause change.