We resist change at various levels.  And we must address each level, or change won’t happen.  We might get short term improvement, - but it won’t stick.  We have to climb the Resistance to Change Pyramid.

 “The way we do things around here”, for most of us, is “the right way”.   So change can easily be interpreted as making us wrong.  Self-talk is the enemy here.  We will rationalize why we don’t need to, or should not, change.  I had people feel insulted that we would even consider they needed to change.  Or at the other end of the spectrum, they felt overwhelmed by the change, thinking they would surely fail.  Almost every executive has stories of their team resisting change for apparently incomprehensible reasons.

Our comfort zone comprises those actions we can reliably perform to get acceptable results – and avoid failure.  Stepping outside the comfort zone, may hold the promise of better results.  But it increases the risk of failure.  So we won’t stretch our comfort zone too far, too fast. This is especially true in the work place.  Change may be needed, but current results must be maintained while we change.

Culture is like a puzzle. Team members adjust how they work to fit the pattern.  After that, any one member trying to change will face resistance. To avoid all of us having to step out of our comfort zone, we want no one to step out of theirs. The group literally becomes the inertia, making it that much harder to effect change.   Even if a pilot team of “early adopters” were to adopt the new practices, the rest of the group would pressure them back towards the old ways.

We must address the self-talk surrounding “how we do things around here”, or the change process won’t even start.  We must respect people’s comfort zone, or they will pick only those actions closely related to what they are already doing, and ignore the rest.  And, we must commit to change in a big way.  We need critical mass to beat cultural inertia.  A few “stars” won’t carry the team.

Too often, senior management focuses only on what needs to change – the new “best practices”.  But that’s only half the battle.  We must apply similar level of planning and professionalism to deal with the resistance to change pyramid.  Otherwise the team won’t adopt the new best practices.  People resist change.  Even when they know they need to change, even when they believe it will be good for them, they still resist change.

I am training a group of engineers and managers on planning R&D work. And I’m getting nowhere. A manager and his best lead engineer keep attacking every thing I say.  For every example, they have a counter example.  For every method, they are already doing it, only better and different.  They’re telling me that they never really overrun projects.   Not if you take into account the fact that clients changed scope mid-project or management undersold it in the first place.

I’m at my wits end.  But then I see it.  I am up against “the” roadblock to change:

“That’s how we do things we do things around here!”

During a break, I asked the functional manager:  Why are you in this training?  “Management think we don’t know how to do our work”, he said.  “The CEO blames us for overrunning. But in fact, if it was not for us, they’d be doing worse they are.  We’ve been doing this work for 30 years, I think we know how by now”.

People identify with their work.  How we do becomes who we are.  When we have been doing things a certain way for a while, it is the right way.  And doing things the right way makes us right.

Then there is pride.  In a group of 30 engineers, some of them have contributed to how “we do things around here”.  At the time, it solved real problems and produce real results, for which they are rightfully proud. 

But improvement means doing things differently.  “The way things are done around here” will change.  But for those who feel right, or proud, it is felt as a personal attack.  Change says: “do it this way instead”.  But they hear:  “your method is no good.  You’re not right anymore.”  And they react against the change, before it even starts.

It’s the self-talk. This running commentary in our head makes comments and passes judgment on what’s happening to us.   Where a “that’s how we do things around here” mentality exists, the typical self-talk is what I faced in that training.  “We don’t need this.” “We’re not being recognized for what we’ve done.”  A less common, but equally disruptive self-talk is “I can’t do this.”  “I am not good enough.”  They’re asking too much.”

We can’t argue with the self-talk.  But we must realize it exists.  Then we can steer it towards something constructive.  Otherwise, change doesn’t even have a chance to start.

After I spoke with that manager, I asked everybody why they thought they were there.  It turns out others felt like him. So I asked the group to look around.  Who had been selected to participate?

Each department had sent its best people.  Why would they do so? Could it be that they wanted those who would best lead the change?  I proposed a new self-talk:  What can you get out of this?  What can you make your own?  Can you become a champion for some of this?  You’re here because you’re the best at how we do things around here now.  Maybe you can also lead how we’re going to do things around here.

Then I went back to the training. We practiced the new methods.  They were tough on me. They drilled me on how, what why, and can I be sure it will work?  They weren’t about to do this blindly.  After all, they were the best.  But they were now ready to consider change.

We are creatures of habit. We operate within our comfort zone and resist change that makes us act outside of it. The resistance level is proportional to how far outside of the comfort zone we are asked to go. Thus a change program must move our comfort zone by increment towards new practices. But that is not enough.Teams exist because we are creatures of habit. We need the consistency of others. It allows us to operate within our comfort zone within the team. In fact the team culture mandates it.

Culture is not something we define or prescribe. It emerges. It is a tacit agreement between all participants. I like to think of culture as an unconscious jigsaw puzzle, where each individual comfort zone is made to fit together. Team members fit in the team by adjusting their actions slightly. If we are in a team long enough, these adjustments become part of our comfort zone. And that’s the problem.

I was assigned to lead a large multi-million dollar bid. We were proposing a system that had consistently lost in the last few years. A bureaucratic system of interdepartmental paper trail ensured that no department would share ideas with the next to reduce overall costs. Corporate silos reinforced with Kevlar.

Opting for speed and cooperation between departments, I ignored the system. Within days, I had managers pulling me aside to explain that I ought to use the paper trail system. Otherwise, after we lost, I would d have no way of protecting myself. I’d surely get fired. Worst, I would drag unsuspecting low-level engineers ignorant of office politics with me.

None of the managers consulted each other before they talked to me. They just did. None of them instructed their engineers to not give me information if I did not document the requests according to the bureaucratic system. They just did.

A few engineers on the team who had been against the system, and followed suit got the same treatment. It was us against the culture. And the culture was winning.

Culture reinforces actions that are aligned with it and resists actions that are not. It does not reason with you. It’s automatic, and comes from everybody, at the same time. The culture validates the comfort zone of all members. Individually, they each defend their comfort zone, and in doing so protect all others. Your changing would force some if not all of them to adjust to your change. Having pushed yourself outside of your comfort zone, you’re forcing them out too. Reaction is swift, and strong.

“Listen sonny, I don’t know how they did things at that place you came from, but that’s not the way we do things around here.”

In physics, inertia is a property of an object that resists change to its motion. The more massive the object, the more inertia it has. It’s the same with teams. Just replace mass with the size of the team. Culture is the inertia of the team.

To beat the inertia we need to apply enough force to enough mass. Within teams, we speak of reaching “critical mass”. Mass for our purpose is a combination of the influence people have, as well as the number of people. The greater number of people that change, the less there will be those who remain to push back. Of course, if everybody changes except for the management, it will be hard to reach critical mass. But we already know that management must support change, so I won’t focus on it.

It’s all about the comfort zone. We must plan Change in increments, designed to minimize individual resistance at each step. And we need critical mass. Enough team members must step through the change process at the same time.

There’s more to change than this, obviously. For example, how to choose the increments to make change happen fast. But without managing the comfort zone and achieving critical mass, change is but impossible.

I have argued that improvement only occurs if we change our current actions. From books to seminars to training programs, finding best practices that will give better results is straightforward. Getting the whole team to adopt these is the problem. To implement change it helps to understand what we’re up against.

We individually resist change because we act within our comfort zone. And we can’t change that.

Though we would like to think otherwise, we are predictable in how we work. We favor actions and methods we have already mastered. We are creature of habit, because we trust our habits to produce repeatable and acceptable results. In this comfort zone, we are relaxed, confident, focused. We know how. We have experience. We may not always succeed, or produce great results, but we rarely fail.

It’s not that we don’t like change. In fact we crave it. We want to improve, to get better. But to produce better results we must act differently. This means doing things outside of our comfort zone. Unconsciously or outright we ask ourselves: Will I succeed? Will I do it right? Will it work, for me? Isn’t it most likely I will fail at first?

People will resist change at a personal level if it forces them out of their comfort zone.  Neither management’s wishful thinking about motivation, buy-in and commitment nor threats will change that. And then, there is the reality of the workplace, which compounds the effect.

At work, we can’t jeopardize current results, even for future gains. At the end of the day, we still need to develop products on time, fill orders, and generate profits. An inspiring leader may motivate the team to step out of the comfort zone.  But the team must continue to produce.

We were introducing concurrent engineering methods, trying to involve manufacturing earlier in the design process.  “Management has to understand the impact on my project ” said the lead engineer.  “I am sure this will be good in the long run, but right now it’s adding hours and delaying milestones.  This extra work was not part of the plan.  It should be okay to overrun in this case.”  

But it is not OK!  It is wishful thinking.  Reality doesn’t care.  The market doesn’t care. 

What would the stock market do with the following press release.

ABC Inc. announced today its “Improved Work – Improved Results” program. Changes in work processes will triple sales and double profitability within a year. Management asks for shareholder and customer patience with the inevitable disruption to order processing and  product quality during the workforce retraining process.  ABC expects to regain any lost customers within six month after completion of the program…

On a personal level, people resist change outside of their comfort zone.  And the workplace increases that resistance by requiring results without interruption.  So where does that leave us?

You cannot cook a live frog by throwing it in a pot of boiling water. It will jump out, and only have sore feet. But put it in cold water, and heat it up gradually. It gets acclimated. It never jumps out, until it’s too late.

In changing how we work, we are the frog. We need to have our comfort zone expanded slowly. We need time and process  to assimilate  new methods.

It’s worth repeating: To be successful a change program must find a process to expand the comfort zone incrementaly in order to minimize  the resistance everyone faces to acting outside their comfort zone.

That lead engineer was caught between a rock and a hard place. The fault was with the change method being used.  We were asking for too big a change, too fast.  But, there are ways to implement change so it “sticks”.  An effective “Change Action Plan”  is realistic about resistance and plans for it from the start.  In fact, done right, change can be almost painless.   It involves breaking down the new practice into a succession of achievable small modifications each designed to shift the comfort zone with minimum resistance.  More on that process in a future post.

Actions are the source of improvement, not people.

I remember a director in charge of the automotive engineers at a contract R&D firm. He complained out loud and often about his staff. He had come from a big car manufacturer where apparently they could measure load curves for engines in a quarter of the time it took his current team to get them. Somehow this poor man had now ended up with a bunch of nitwits who could not do it right. In time, I learned he was right, partially.

He looked at measurable results – that was the good part.  Comparing the time it takes to get load curves told him that his current team needed to improve, and by how much.

The part he got wrong was that he only kept looking at the people, judging them. But he never focused on what they actually did. To his mind there was little else to fix but his staff. And the results never improved.

People are not the source of improvement, their actions are.

A trivial distinction? Not when it impacts how managers relate to their team. If we believe people are the source of improvement, we can easily assume that there is something wrong with them when improvement fails to materialize. That R&D director told me his staff lacked motivation and/or pride in their work. You name it, they lacked it.

But if we believe that actions are the source of improvement, we do not look for “people flaws” as the cause of failures. Instead we analyze how the work is performed. We objectively see what’s missing. Then we address it.

Taking “people” out of the improvement equation offers a different perspective. Webster’s defines improvement as “a change for the better”. What exactly becomes better? And what changes?

“Better” implies a comparison with what was before. This can only be about results, since only they can be measured. But results cannot be changed directly. It is our actions that produce results. Hence my definition:

Improvement: Changing how we act to produce better results.

Here is an interesting corollary I never truly realized until I understood the source of improvement:

We get the results that our actions create, nothing more and nothing less.
If we want different results, our actions must change.

Look to the collective actions of the team as the source of improvement:

• What actions must change?
• What are we not doing that we should be doing?
• What are we doing that we should stop doing?

The source of improvement is working differently. Thankfully, figuring out what actions are needed to reach new goals is becoming simpler in this information age. Best practices, empirical research, training seminars, continuous improvement point the way.

How we’ll make everybody work the new way – That’s the real challenge.