Company culture matters
I borrowed the opening example of the article from the Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling. It illustrates two important factors that often play a role in human decision-making, both of which can greatly contribute to resistance to change if overlooked. There were two reasons why NHL hockey players didn’t want to play with helmets on. The first reason is tactical. According to hockey players, playing without a helmet on the ice provided a slight advantage. Without a helmet, one can see and hear a little better. If I’m to be the only one on the ice with a helmet, I’ll be at a disadvantage, so I’d rather do without a helmet.
The Swedish league dealt with that by making it mandatory for everyone. If the conditions are the same for all players, no one perceives wearing a helmet as a drawback. As for the tactical level, we’ll address that in the next article. Today let’s focus on the second reason, which is much more prosaic: Wearing a helmet just wasn’t ‘cool’. No one wanted to look like a ‘coward’. We might call that a question of culture.
Cultural obstacles are often harder to overcome than technical problems.
Let’s consider a situation where a specific process, such as change management, has not been working in the company for a long time (here we are talking about the ITIL® process for managing changes in IT infrastructure). Taking something from the request for change to its implementation may take several months. Employees have lost confidence in the process. They prefer to use informal routes. The company has developed conventions and ways to make infrastructure changes outside of approved processes. And no wonder. If you want to get something done, the due process is just a spanner in the works. What happens if at this point the IT department comes up with a workable solution? Will they be able to push it through? If we have a good solution to an existing problem, it will certainly not be a problem to convince others to accept it. We would expect good ideas to spread easily. No such luck.
Don’t beat around the bush
How might the meeting go, where you present the solution to key stakeholders? The room will feel stifling from the outset. Why, there’s the very fact that you have tabled the topic of change management, rubbing salt into the painful wounds of colleagues who’ve had the misfortune of trying to apply for a change in accordance with the existing process. It might be that they’ll see the benefits of a new plan and put aside their prejudices. But I wouldn’t bet too much on it. Distrust in the whole process has been instilled deep into the company’s culture. In one of the previous episodes, we said that change has no chance of surviving if people are not convinced of it. In this case, everyone understands that change is necessary. However, there is a lack of confidence in the competence of the IT team. What’s to be done?
Step number one, let’s call a spade a spade. You’re sitting in the meeting room, and the animosity is palpable. You have two options. Either you choose the safe path, opting for sterile corporate vocabulary and do stay well clear of the unspoken issues, or you start a real discussion. Patty Azzarello wrote in MOVE, her successful book on change management, that it is the avoidance of real conversation that brings risk to companies.
Don’t beat around the bush. Give colleagues the chance to express their frustration. You will learn valuable information.
Pick the low-hanging fruit
Back to our example: You’ve had tough discussions and understood that the frustration of colleagues is largely due to the delay in the implementation of change requests. You’ve identified a key metric: time to market. You have found that it takes 9.5 months to implement a change. What’s next? Step number 2, get some quick wins. Since this is an example from real life, I can share how the team proceeded in this case: They introduced the category ‘standard change’ and clearly defined what standard change means (for example, access to the system for new employees). This let them filter out a significant proportion of changes, which began to be processed automatically. Standard changes no longer hung around without an allocated priority level or a poorly determined one, but skipped the queue without burdening personnel, without an approvals process, going right through to the right solvers for standard processing. The power of quick wins is that they help you gain other people’s trust. You immediately give them a tangible demonstration that the project has benefits. But even quick-fix changes have to be taken with caution, as Václav Chaloupka from ComAp points out:
"We have to watch out we don’t do something that we’ll regret later. When it comes to pressing problems, there is a great temptation to quickly deliver ad-hoc solutions that will only lead to future problems. Quick change is also a double-edged sword because it undermines the arguments for deploying proper change processes. We also need to present these quick-fix changes from the outset as part of the broader framework."
Get ambassadors for your project
What is the third step? Let’s go back to the story about ice-hockey helmets. There have been a number of attempts in the NHL to enforce helmets. Way back in the 1930s the Red Wings coach Jack Adams brought in mandatory helmets. After a couple of matches, the players began to put them aside, one by one. The directive did not work. Hockey players began to take the whole topic seriously only after a series of serious injuries in the late sixties. One key impulse came from players like Red Kelly, who wore helmets despite taunts, and their active campaigns made helmets popular in youth and junior competitions. This paved the way for a decision on mandatory helmets for all new players in the NHL, from 1979. Every change needs active ambassadors. Hence the third step: Get ambassadors for your project.
This was confirmed by Tomáš Gregor from the University Hospital Ostrava in an interview for IT Systems:
"For project success, you need to create a lighthouse island of people positively disposed toward the change. When you manage to built that, these people stand up in front of the others and say: Don’t panic, we think it will all be good. Stick at it, just a little longer.’"
The social sciences confirm this experience. People’s behaviour is to some extent influenced by how many people are already behaving in a given way. Even in society, there is a certain critical mass where the majority allows itself to be swept along by a minority. We can notice this when people get off the tram and a few daredevils start crossing the road some way off the pedestrian crossing. As soon as there are five or more such people, they are usually followed by the whole crowd. Similar things apply to your project to some extent. If you get a critical mass of people in favor of a project, you will be able to convince the rest much more easily.