A while back, I sat in on a birds-of-a-feather session on organizational change.  The main theme was bemoaning the difficulty changing even mid-sized organizations.

When people talk about how hard it is to bring change there’s a tendency to blame:  people who don’t turn on a dime are labeled resisters, NoNos,  dinosaurs, laggards.

There certainly are people who don’t change as quickly and with as much enthusiasm as the people behind the change would like.

(I heard one agile evangelist  complaining about people who weren’t embracing scrum after a two-day workshop.   “I want them to drink the Kool Aid,” she declared in frustration.  Yikes!  I want people to consider and wrestle with a new idea, not accepted it as someone who has given up free will. I hope she was ignorant of  Jonestown.)

There are many reasons people don’t change as quickly as we’d like.  A few I cited in Seven Lessons for a Top Down Change:

they don’t know how to do what they’re being asked to do.

they don’t feel they have time to learn the new way and still meet existing goals and targets.

they believe the existing way is better.

they don’t think the new way will work.

they believe the new way will cause harm—to customers, the company, the employees, etc.

they don’t like or don’t respect the person requesting the change.

the new suggestion is counter-intuitive given people’s existing models of how the world works.

the new way runs counter to existing reward structures or other organizational systems.

When there’s been a failed change or a change that went badly, people may figure that they can simply wait out the change. I’ve certainly seen re-orgs done and undone within a year.  And not matter how good a change looks, it’s bad for someone, somewhere in the organization.

People have a valid reason not to change–from their own point of view.  Labeling them will not help.

Most change efforts take a deterministic approach to change.  Set the vision, establish a sense of urgency (usually through pep talks)  and then pull and push people towards the desired state.  That may work with a simple change.  But most change isn’t simple.

Entirely apart from the (normal) human responses to change, there are structural and systemic factors  that make change difficult in organizations of any size.

So sitting there in the BOF, I thought about the times that I’ve seen top down and bottom up changes grind to a halt.

Hierarchy acts as a filter. Change from the top can stumble when the desired change doesn’t mesh with realities on the ground. Other top down changes falter when there isn’t sufficient understanding of the gravity of the need for change–what’s self-evident at the top isn’t communicated to the people being asked to change. Some popular writers on change talk about creating a sense of urgency. One SVP attempted to generate some urgency  by declaring he wanted seven scrum team up and running by a certain date because it was his birthday–which generated cynicism.  Urgency doesn’t come from a “vision” or from pep talks. It comes from a clear understanding of the current reality and it’s implications for the organization (and the people in the organization).

Bottom up changes peter out when they run into systems, structures, policies, and procedures that hold the current pattern firmly in place.  For example, grass roots efforts to form teams can fail when HR mandates forced ranking.

From both directions, it’s critical to understand the visible and invisible structures and how they hold current patterns in place.

If you want to change patterns of behavior, you need to know something about the pattern you want to create.  You have to understand how the work works, see the system and change the system.  Pulling and pushing people won’t change the pattern (but it will result in the predictable responses that people have when they feel they are being pulled or pushed).

One of the big problems I see in organizations is that managers who want to improve productivity pull the wrong levers.

For example, one company I know of decided to improve performance by ranking everyone in the company from 1…n, and firing the bottom 10%. Not surprisingly (to me at least), performance didn’t get better. But the managers were surprised (when they noticed at all).

Individual performance is important, but it’s often not the primary lever to improve organizational performance–it’s the work system that needs improvement.

In the company that tried ranking to improve performance, there was no clear product direction, priorities shifted weekly, and teams where broken and reformed every few months. Improving any of those factors would have had a much bigger over all improvement effect than forced ranking and culling.

We like to believe that people succeed or fail by their own efforts. I don’t discount individual effort….but focusing only on individual effort blinds us to system effects.

I’ve pointed out in a few posts that the environment (system, processes, structures, culture) and management are a huge factor in performance in organizaitons. And they are. But sometimes, it is an individual problem.

Like this woman who works in a health care providers office processing insurance claims.

They have a visibility system in the office; the inbox and the out box. When the inbox is full, there’s lots of claims to process. When it’s empty, it either means there haven’t been any patients or the claims processer is keeping up. As long as there are patients coming in, and claims are being processes, money should flow into the business.

Last month the office manager was in a panic. The inbox was empty, but the bank balance was dwindling instead of increasing. Of course an empty inbox could mean that there were no patients, but the office manager had seen a steady stream of people coming into the office for care.

The office manager suspected embezzlement or fraud and called the bank.

The bank told her there was nothing suspicious about the money going out, but that no money had been coming in.

It turned out that the claims processor wasn’t doing her job, and didn’t want any one to find out, so she stuffed the claims in her purse. It looked like she was keeping up. So much for the visibility system.

Clearly this is an individual problem.

But its also a management problem.

Maybe they need just a tad more in the way of accounting reports. Ya think? Not to check up on employees, to know the state of the business. I mean, you’d think a manager in a small office might notice that no money was coming in for several weeks.

When I heard this story, I asked if they’d fired the claims processor. They hadn’t….because no one else knew the claims processor’s job (another management problem).

I can’t make this stuff up.

And one of the biggest mistakes people make is attributing individual problems to the system and system problems to individuals.