Change Management: Does Compromise = Failure?

Compromising Dreams

I hate it when I hear people say that 70% of change efforts fail.  First I think the number is urban legend espoused by people who don’t realize the damage this statement does to our profession.  How many financial advisors would you hire with a 70% failure rate.

Sure, I understand the marketing gravitas.  We’re trying to create pain within potential clients.  We’re trying to say: “you're entering dangerous seas.  Most change efforts fail so you need an experienced guide – like me.”  Well, since we’ve been saying this for about 20 years don’t you think clients will inevitably conclude that our “profession” is really a shell game?

Do we really fail 70% of the time?  I know that I’ve worked on dozens of change initiatives and I would say my success rate is close to 100%.  Similarly I have polled many consultants & corporate change practitioners about how often they fail – their experience is close to mine.

So what’s going on here?  Do I only have access to successful change agents?  I think not.  In fact, I have access to experienced practitioners who claim that: “given the circumstances we were as successful as we could be.”  Is this a rationalization or a confession?

Fundamentally I think that practitioners are saying: “… we advise our clients on what to do; then we compromise within their real world realities.”  Is it compromise that is causing failure that we choose not to see?  I think so and here are three common compromises.

Scope:  

Often the change aspiration is inspiring but when it’s broken down into near term tasks we’re asked not to disturb sacred organizational silos or protected customer classes – the very hot spots where the change should have the biggest impact.

Timing:  

Everyone knows that change is a journey within an exponentially changing world.  We want near term results, quick wins.  When the low hanging fruit is harvested the exasperated sigh is: “is that all there is?  We knew that!”

Resources:  

How often does the organization devote the best and brightest to the change effort?  Rarely; these people are needed in the business to get real results.  Similarly, how often does change get it’s own, needed funding?  Again, rarely; usually change is expected to be self-funding through re-purposing of resources.

I believe that every time we make a small compromise decision we foreshadow our failure.  Each of these decisions makes us less accountable for the result.  In the end we can claim that we colored within the lines.  That seems to be our definition of success.

Innovation – The Link in the Virtuous Value Chain

Innovation Links Employees & Customers

I get tired of hearing that “70% of change initiatives fail.”  Firstly, I’m not sure of the context and accuracy of this urban myth.  Secondly, to the extent that it is true I don’t hear of many solutions other than the tautological: “we need better management of change.”

Since this 70% mantra has been around for more than a decade maybe its time to question why we haven’t solved the problem.  Let’s step back and look for other correlations and trends.  I see two:

• Employee Disengagement:  It’s astounding.  We’ve worked for decades to disconnect employees from their employers.  Now that we’ve hit all time lows in employee engagement we seem surprised.
• Customer Dissatisfaction:  No matter how hard we work at the customer experience we find that levels of customer loyalty keep dropping in this world of mobile “show-rooming” and social media.  Customers are now in charge of brands; not company’s.

We have produced a vicious cycle: 

Employee Disengagement->Customer Defection

My question is: “How can change, or any initiative, be successful within such organizational malaise?”  Shouldn’t we solve the organizational question before we work on the change question?

We haven’t failed at change; 

we’ve failed our employees!

So if we start with employees, how do we re-engage them?  This topic has received myriad attention in the past few years, but a lot less by way of results.  We know the answers, we just can’t figure out the implementation paradigm.  

For example, if we look to Daniel Pink we can find one slice of answers.  His research shows that engaged employees need three things: Purpose, Mastery, and Autonomy.  Ok, that’s a good list, but how do we take action?  Well, I have a few thoughts.  Firstly, let’s look at Purpose.  My observation is that:

Employees don’t work for their employers; 

they work for their customers!

No matter how hard organizations try they just can’t remove the desire of most people to do a good job.  Very few people wake up and say “I want to do a bad job today.”  Yet, the drive for undisciplined profits and imposition of bureaucratic controls thwart the energy of people at work – except when they are directly involved in solving a problem for a customer.  How often have you heard a customer disdain an amorphous company but love the person who solved their problem.

So, customers give employees Purpose.  But what do we do about Mastery and Autonomy.  My answer is that we involve them in Innovation through:

• Skills.  Humans are creative by nature.  They need to regenerate and they love to bounce their ideas against other ideas.  However, often they just don’t know how to structure idea generation and synthesis.
• Means.  Employees need “Nike autonomy” – when it’s right for the customer “just do it.”  When the issue is higher than low hanging fruit we need mechanisms to register employee ideas, and get short term funding for experiments.  These tools are not a mystery in this time of technological open innovation.  

Change initiatives will succeed if we connect our employees to their customers.  Innovation is the link in this virtuous value chain:

Employee Engagement->Innovation->Customer Loyalty