He believed that you could get better information with a group sitting together. I agree. Unless, of course, people are afraid to talk (e.g. their boss is present). Live exchanges allow you to see body language, hear tone of voice, see how others react when someone speaks. You can’t get any of that in a survey.

But, focus groups take time and money. Surveys (if you create your own) can be free (with a minimal investment in time interpreting results.

I prefer to create short surveys — five questions max. And I like to give people open-ended questions that demand a narrative response. “What’s your reaction to the change being planned?” Narrative comments give people a chance to tell stories and give you a chance hear how they are feeling. I find this subjective information invaluable.

I will use 1 to 5 scales (often referred to as Likert scales) if I am giving a survey to a very large group, but I don’t like numerical averages nearly as much. I learn a lot more from a couple of stories that illustrate people’s positive or negative reactions than learning that the Finance Department scored an item 3.4. That doesn’t tell what to address.
I am big fan of SurveyMonkey.com. The free service is fine for most purposes and it is really easy to create a survey in a few minutes. Just remember to keep it simple.

Our experience at Koshland was quite different. The exhibits not only engaged the individual, but also begged for conversation right then! For example, in the exhibit on infectious diseases, you could choose options for eradicating malaria and then see how effective that approach would be. We both were surprised by the dismal results of some approaches. So then, we started to mix and match – try things out — to see what the most effective approach might be. We got curious and talked about why one approach was so much better than another.

Contrast that experience to most presentations announcing the need for change in an organization. Most are long talking-head snoozefests with a seemingly endless number of PowerPoint slides. There is nothing to get excited about. . . sink your teeth into. . . debate. . .or explore. They are as lifeless as the bones in a paleontology exhibit.

We could learn a lot from good museums. Think of the Exploratorium in San Francisco. It is a veritable playground that entices people to try things out to see what happens. Imagine if we tried to engage people in ways that invited exploration. (I think some participatory change processes like large systems change events come close, but they too often miss the “Wow, that’s so cool!” magic of a great museum exhibit.)

If you have thoughts about this – and especially ideas that you’ve seen that meet the “wow” test, please add a comment to this post. Thanks.

I think columnist, Thomas Friedman, said it best: “When you have leverage talk. When you don’t have leverage, get some. Then talk.” (NYT 6/1/08)

I recorded an interview with Lori Silverman, author of Wake Me When the Data is Over (a title that I love). I ask her how to use stories to making a case for change – and to keep the message alive throughout the life of a big project.  (www.wakeupmycompany.com)

It’s about 40 minutes long and you can listen to it in the Change Management Library section of my website. Just scroll down the page and you’ll find it.

If you do listen and have questions, leave a response to this post. Lori has promised to visit the blog and respond to your questions. Thanks.

Sad, but true. People in organizations seem far more motivated by fear than by opportunity when it comes to embracing major change. 

You may have already seen this interview since it was widely syndicated. But just in case. .  . (My copy of the interview got lost in a stack of things to read.)

]]> http://changemanagementnews.com/change-management-at-sprint/feed/ http://changemanagementnews.com/fat-school-and-lessons-for-change-management/ http://changemanagementnews.com/fat-school-and-lessons-for-change-management/#comments Thu, 22 May 2008 13:07:43 +0000 rick maurer Uncategorized http://changemanagementnews.com/fat-school-and-lessons-for-change-management/ The article in The Washington Post (5/20/08) titled Fat School got me thinking. The story profiles a residential program for overweight children. The cost: $6250 a month with a four-month minimum stay.

Although the school presents high short-term success rates, and a few anecdotal reports of kids who kept the weight off for longer periods, there is no research to indicate that this approach does a better job than anything else in helping young people keep weight off. And at $6250 a month, it seems like that might be a good thing to do.

That got me thinking about change in organizations. It does strike me how easy it is to invest in something without any real indication that it works simply because the need is so great. Are parents willingness to invest so much in the lives and health of their children any different from leaders who spend millions on Business Process Reengineering when the success rate of such projects is so low? But, I’ll save that rant for another day.

I am most interested in the lack of support for these kids after the program ends. As Anjali Jain, a pediatrician at Children’s National Medical Center said in the article, “If their families don’t change, [students] are going to be back to their old ways of doing things” once they return home.

What many changes fail to take into account is what it will take to support these changes once the program goes live. Here are a few questions that I think are worth considering. What current programs and practices will vie for attention and resources of this new initiative? And what are we going to do about that? How will we support people as they take on the new tasks? (e.g. rewards, clear directions, training). And speaking of people, change brings shifts in power. How are we going to deal with potential turf wars? How will our customers and suppliers react to these changes? How will we make the transition easier for them? And the list goes on.

While organizations are willing to invest a lot in the front end of a change, they often don’t put money and time in supporting the roll-out. They’re willing to pay $6250 a month for tuition, but don’t want to actually change their own habits once the kids return to the land of Ho Hos.

I rarely see such a thoughtful article about how change should be managed. Too often, articles and blog posts focus on the technical aspects of change and miss the human elements. I appreciated the thought with which he approached the subject of Web 2.0 in large organizations.

And I got this e-mail from my friend, Bob Bryan., regarding the post. I like what he has to say, especially the distinction between training and learning.

“Training folks I know also tout butts-in-seats / CBT TRAINING as The Panacea. In addition to your point about leadership …… an add’l error occurs when TRAINING is conflated  w/  LEARNING. Training is not learning … they are not the same things. Learning is the process of continually id’ing what is working and what is not working in our constantly changing environments and effecting the necessary adaptations.  Training can support a learning organization but can subvert the nature of a learning organization if it becomes ‘the’ prominent response to change.   

The conflation of learning w/ training is an instance of the many ‘terrible simplifications’ that our culture perpetrates on itself.    

When we overly simplify, we formulate a problem that does not exist.  The resolution formulated for the false-problem not only does not attend to the problem but exacerbates the original problem and typically creates other problems that did not originally exist.  Additionally, when it becomes apparent that the false-problem’s resolution is not working, we do more of the same, which compounds and amplifies the situation further.   It is entirely normal for us (human beings) to go from a minor difficulty to a full fledged problem or cluster of problems … all the time without being aware of what is happening.

I view ‘training-as-a-significant-enabler-of-organizational-change and  ‘leaderless’ change initiatives as instances of  ‘terrible simplification’.  Everything should be as simple as it can be … not simpler.   

Or as H.L. Mencken may have put it … “For every complex problem there is a simple answer, and it is wrong.”

I feel much better now having gotten that off my chest.”

Thanks, Bob.