The Importance of Aligning Individual and Organizational Change Readiness

Read our new article entitled 'Aligning Individual and Organizational Change Readiness' at http://www.redequip.com.au/articles/aligning-individual-and-organizational-change-readiness/

Change Readiness and Sales

If you’re anything like me, you regularly receive calls from telemarketers trying to sell their goods.  I had a call from a salesperson just the other day, and it reminded me of the importance of change readiness in the sales process.

It may not be one of life’s momentous changes, but shifting from one phone carrier to another involves a change.  And although it’s only a relatively small change, the process I would have to go through is exactly the same as it is for life’s really big changes.  First, I would have to think about whether the change is needed, what the pros and cons would be, whether I could see benefit in the change.  I would then have to make a decision for change, and be committed to that decision (i.e. I wouldn’t change my mind about it).  Then I would need to make the necessary preparations and follow-through with the proper actions – sign a contract, or whatever.  Finally, for the salesperson to be completely successful, I would need to maintain my commitment to his company into the future.

The difficulty the salesperson had is that he didn’t know whether I was ready to make the change he was hoping for.   What could be my motivation for changing service providers?  Maybe I was dissatisfied with the service I was currently receiving.  He had no idea, but importantly, this salesperson didn’t even ask.  He didn’t bother to find out whether I had any motivation for change.  Instead, he tried to ‘sell’ me by telling me I could save money with his company because they were ‘wholesalers’.  This didn’t really make me feel comfortable.  Questions arose in my mind – What does it mean to deal with a wholesaler?  How did he get my number?  What sort of service would I receive from this company?  He never bothered to ask whether I had any questions at all.

It was also a problem that he was ringing me.  If I had rung him it would have been because I had a motivation to change carriers.  But I wasn’t making the call and he hardly put any time into discovering what my motivation for change could be.

He also had a problem of trust.  Why should I trust someone I don’t know calling me without my consent saying he can save me money?  This must be an issue all telemarketers face.  Perhaps he could save me money, but the levels of trust were very low, and low levels of trust work against change readiness.  Unless he spent the time to build up some trust between us, I was always going to be less likely to buy.  Ultimately, he made a fatal flaw with respect to trust.  At the end of our 10 minute conversation, I told him I would speak to my business partner about the issue, and if we wanted to proceed, I would call him.  The next day he called me, interrupting an important meeting.  That did nothing to increase my trust.
The point I am making is that a readiness to buy is also a readiness to change.  Unless salespeople understand the nature of change readiness they are going to be less successful at selling.

Steve Barlow

Change is the Journey, Not the Destination?

Have you ever heard that change is the journey, not the destination?  What people mean by this is that change is a means to an end, not the end itself.  In other words, don’t get too excited about change; get excited about where it will eventually take you.
In a way, this makes perfect sense.  If there is no compelling reason to change, why go to all the trouble?  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

But does the emphasis on end points really make all that much sense? Increasingly in this day and age, your end point is unlikely to be your final destination.  You may set a goal or pick a place you want to be in your personal or business life, but if you attempt to put down roots and stay there forever, you will surely run into problems.  Things change, and we must change with them.  In reality, ends are almost never destinations – they are goals; points along the way that may be good to reach, but will also eventually be good to leave behind.
If ends are not really destinations, what are they?  They are actually parts of the change process.  They may be “little ends”: points to aim for in one cycle of change.  But if you see them from the perspective of on-going change, they are really parts of a larger process.
The stories we tell of our lives mirror the fact that ends are not destinations. We set ourselves goals that require us to change and grow – educational goals, employment goals, sporting goals, relationship goals, or attainment goals.  We strive for them, and in the process, we change - perhaps a lot, or maybe a little.  But in the end, the way we use language shrinks these goals and all we had to do to attain them to a single point.  We say, “I went to university and got a degree”, “I met my partner and we got married”.  Goals and processes become points in the larger story of our lives.

If destinations are actually part of the change process, doesn’t it make sense for us to focus more on the process?  Change is not ‘just’ the process, less important that the final ‘destination’.  In a way, change is the destination – a destination with many points along the way.

If change is so important, change readiness is just as important.  People who are ready for change have greater ability to choose how and when they will change.  In other words, the more capacity you have for the change process, the more ‘destinations’ you are able to choose.  And the more able you are to move on when the time comes.

Steve Barlow

Three Metaphors of Change

When something is difficult to understand, people sometimes use a metaphor to help other people comprehend it.  The challenge is to get the metaphor right.

When it comes to change, I want to explore 3 metaphors.  The first comes from Kurt Lewin, a famous early researcher into organizational change.  Lewin came up with the metaphor of freezing and unfreezing – like you do with a block of ice.  Before the change, an organization is in a frozen state – rigid and practised in old behaviours that no longer work.  Rigid blocks of ice cannot move: they first need to thaw out and turn into a more flexible state – unfreezing.  Unfreezing is where the change takes place, when things move.  However, when change has occurred, you want to freeze again so the changes are preserved.  This is the final state of change – refreezing.

This metaphor is well known and still informs change management practice.  However, as a metaphor, I find it has two main limitations.  First is that ice and water have no say in what happens to them.  The model refers to a process that is ‘done to’ the organization, as though it were an experiment in physics.  Ice doesn’t complain or resist if you melt it, but organizations are made of people, and they do resist change.  You can’t ‘do to’ people like you can ‘do to’ ice.  The second limitation is that the metaphor assumes you can predict cause and effect.  Melt ice and you get water every time.  Freeze water and you always get ice.  But when you are dealing with people, things are not that predictable.  Who can predict what will happen when you destabilise something in an organization?

The second metaphor is that change is a journey.  You begin the journey, have challenges along the way and, if you persist, eventually you reach your destination.   The journey metaphor highlights the process and the vision of the future state.  In some ways, this is a satisfying metaphor, because change does feel like a journey at times.  It is also a much more human metaphor than the detached, scientific metaphor of Lewin.  But there is a problem with this metaphor.  When people go on a journey, they don’t usually return to where they began – unless they become lost, or they have a good reason to return.  Journeys are purposive ventures and the metaphor assumes onward progress; maybe struggling and slow progress, but ever onward and upward.  But in the real world, change isn’t like that.  With change, the ‘traveller’ is not always in control and he may (unwillingly) return to where he began – perhaps more than once.  There is unpredictability about change that doesn’t usually occur in journeys, and that unpredictability is a normal part of the process. 

The third metaphor is that change is a story – a book written.  This book has many authors: everyone who has a role to play in the change process is an author.  Change occurs as people write different parts of the story.  This metaphor assumes that change is constructed from the inside – that people within the organization (the multiple authors) change the organization from the inside. This is very different from the Lewin model, where change is ‘done to’ the organization from the outside. 

The story metaphor is powerful for two reasons.  First, because change does actually involve stories – stories leaders tell about the change, stories told in training sessions, informal stories told over a cup of coffee.  These stories do shape the change process – it is a dynamic process created and shaped by the kinds of stories told.  It is also powerful because the book is a work in progress and many authors (stakeholders) write the story: there is unpredictability about how the chapters will turn out.  This degree of uncertainty rings true about change.

Why does any of this matter?  Partly because how a consultant sees change influences how they approach it and work with it.  More specifically, it shapes how they work within an organization – do they come in as an expert who does things to make the organization change, or do they help the organization learn how to shape its own resources and stories from within?   The latter approach leads to empowerment, self-direction, and autonomy; the former can lead to dependence.  Be careful how you choose a change management consultant. 

Steve Barlow