(I write of Haiti and U.S. politics together only to illustrate a point, and not to imply any comparison between these events. I hope that you will join me and millions of others who have already contributed to one of the many organizations leading Haiti’s earthquake relief efforts.)

In my experience, organizational preparedness for major, unexpected changes varies widely. Most organizations pay lip service, with little more than rueful acknowledgement of the possibility of disruption. Some develop ‘business continuity’ plans, which are targeted at sustaining key assets and processes, like computer systems and networks, in the event of catastrophe. Far fewer have a comprehensive, robust capability to weather the literal and figurative storms of unknown and unexpected events. The most effective organizations prepare not for specific disasters, but with a well-tested process for making effective strategic and tactical decisions in the face of sudden, significant, unexpected change.

Every organization’s strategy is the result of its mission, its internal capabilities, and its external environment. Over time, mission and capability are likely to evolve to reflect the changing realities of the external environment. The normal strategic planning process, when properly executed, entails continuous monitoring of environment and management of capability and strategy itself. Sudden change in the external environment requires rapid and confident recalibration of the strategy. The decision making process is the same, only the time scale is different.

The difficulty with which most organizations mange and execute strategy means that they are ill-equipped to handle the inevitable lurches. Fingers are pointed, emotions flare, poor decisions are made, and must be made again, efforts are wasted, and chaos reigns. By contrast, healthy organizations quickly pick themselves up, look around to understand the new realities, quickly make well-informed decisions, and get on with the urgent tasks at hand.

How will your organization handle the next lurch?

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read this book

Most popular ideas in the domain of organizational management have a limited shelf-life. Those that gain widespread attention usually do so on the strength of a published work. My bookshelves are filled with titles that in their time, were purported to be the next ‘big idea’ in management, but have since faded into relative obscurity. This pattern is as much a function of the audience for the ideas as the ideas themselves; executives and managers crave the easy answers and magical insights that are promised by these works. So when an idea remains relevant and applicable for more than a few years, it stands out. 

Of course, balanced scorecard has been an exceptionally durable concept. The idea of a scorecard (a collection of measures) as a tool for management has been around for decades, and is thought to have originated at General Electric during the 1950s. Kaplan and Norton elaborated the idea of a scorecard as a tool for strategic management beginning with their first Harvard Business Review articles on the topic in 1992 and 1993, and their book The Balanced Scorecard in 1996. The BSC articles and original book were extremely popular, and remain so today.But I never recommend Kaplan and Norton’s first BSC book to anyone embarking on a journey of strategic management.

skip this book

As elegant and appealing as the BSC idea was, the early literature focused far more on what the BSC is than how organizations should actually use it. Combined with the initial popularity of the BSC, this gap in the literature led to many failed BSC implementations among early adopters in the late 1990s. There simply wasn’t enough documented experience to understand how to successfully implement the BSC, and trial and error is an especially inefficient way to learn.

Reports of widespread failure of BSC implementations led Kaplan and Norton to write their second book on BSC in 2000, The Strategy-Focused Organization. This is a far better place to start than the first book.

The SFO concept (as it came to be known in the BSC practitioner community) was based on observations of the many organizations failing with the BSC implementations, and the far smaller number that were successful. It identifies five key behaviors in those organizations that were successful. Failing to model any of these is a powerful predictor of failure; adopting all five improves the likelihood but does not guarantee success. The SFO behaviors have influenced the work of every serious BSC practitioner I’ve ever met.

1. Mobilize and engage executive leaders with the necessity for organizational change and the strategic management process. It is not sufficient to get the senior executive to agree to implement BSC. He or she, along with all members of the organization’s leadership team must commit to no less than changing the way they manage the organization, and must understand that the implementation process happens of the course of years, not weeks or months. A senior executive looking to BSC as a quick fix is a certain predictor of a failed effort.
2. Translate the strategy into language that everyone can understand, a strategy map. Remarkably, many organizations implement their BSCs without developing a strategy map; this outcome is the result of a lack of centrality of the strategy map in Kaplan and Norton’s early writing. Bluntly, if you don’t have a strategy map as the basis for your measures, you don’t have a balanced scorecard.
3. Align the parts of the organization with the overall strategy. Except in the very smallest of organizations, it is necessary to interpret the enterprise strategy for each part of the organization; business units and support organizations, such as information technology and human capital. This usually means subordinate strategy maps and BSCs that are cascaded from the overall strategy map.
4. Ensure that each member of the organization understands his or her role in executing strategy. The natural inclination for executives to play their strategy close to the vest inhibits this vital behavior. Broadly communicating the content of the strategy and an unvarnished accounting of the organization’s actual performance are table stakes; embedding the language of the strategy in each employee’s performance management process is the first realization of this behavior.
5. Embed the process of strategic management in business processes. Because BSC-enabled strategic management is unfamiliar and can make leaders a bit uncomfortable, the reflexive tendency is to quarantine the BSC from everyday management process. Successful organizations recognize that strategic management is an ongoing process, not simply a once-a-year event.

Needless to say, there is much more to say on the five SFO behaviors. Remember that skipping any of these will almost certainly mean your change program will fail.

How is your organization doing at each of these?

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The New Yorker piece begins with a recollection of the news item from a few weeks ago, in which two Northwest Airlines pilots overshot their destination (Minneapolis) by over a hundred miles (the pilots claim they were engrossed in a complex work scheduling program on their laptop computers), then goes on to comment on the effect of multi-tasking on our performance. According to Paumgarten:

Studies have shown that multitasking, even of the law-abiding kind, doesn’t work. You just perform each task less efficiently. Marshall McLuhan predicted that technology would sharpen our senses, but, instead, as the writer Michael Bugeja said last week, it seems to split them. (A few years ago, Bugeja, with a colleague, started writing an article called “Media Saturation Kills,” but he got distracted by another deadline and never finished it.)

I first became familiar with the concept of multitasking many years ago when I started working with mainframe computers. Learning about the operating system, I came to understand that while it appeared that these giant computers were working on many things at once, in reality they could only work on one thing at a time. Much of the inner workings of the hardware and operating system was devoted to handling interruptions; quickly saving the status of the interrupted task so that work could shift to the next task in line. When there were too many tasks, the computer would spend more of its time switching between tasks than actually doing useful work, and progress would grind to a halt. Computer architecture has evolved, and some computers can actually do more than one thing in any given instant, but there is still a lot of suspending and switching going on. But enough about computers.

Human organizations, by their very nature, work on more than one thing at a time. Creating value is complicated business, and each individual’s contribution to value creation must somehow be coordinated by the organization itself. But like the pilot with his laptop, or the distracted driver texting on a smartphone, there are dangerous adverse consequences to trying to do too much. There seems to be a natural tendency for organizations to take on a larger change agenda than their capacity to accomplish them; and only deliberate intervention can reduce the agenda to manageable size.

Most of my clients easily admit to having too much going on at once, and no good way to prioritize what must be done. The sign of a healthy strategic management process is an understanding of the organization’s capacity for change, and careful management of the agenda within that constraint.

How many things are you working on right now? How many things is your organization trying to accomplish?

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One such word I find myself using often in my writings here is deliberate. Both its verb and adjective meanings (which are sometimes pronounced differently) powerfully apply to our interest in strategy, change, and organizational leadership. Let’s take a closer look.

Main Entry: ¹de·lib·er·ate

Pronunciation: \di-ˈli-bə-ˌrāt\

Function: verb

Inflected Form(s): de·lib·er·at·ed; de·lib·er·at·ing

Date: 14th century

intransitive verb : to think about or discuss issues and decisions carefully

transitive verb : to think about deliberately and often with formal discussion before reaching a decision

synonyms see think

In other words, to deliberate, we formally discuss issues carefully before making a decision.

Main Entry: ²de·lib·er·ate

Pronunciation: \di-ˈli-bə-rət, -ˈlib-rət\

Function: adjective

Etymology: Middle English, from Latin deliberatus, past participle of deliberare to consider carefully, perhaps alteration of *delibrare, from de- + libra scale, pound

Date: 15th century

1 : characterized by or resulting from careful and thorough consideration <a deliberate decision>
2 : characterized by awareness of the consequences <deliberate falsehood>
3 : slow, unhurried, and steady as though allowing time for decision on each individual action involved <a deliberate pace>

synonyms see voluntary

In other words, decisions are deliberate when they result from slow, unhurried, steady, careful, and thorough consideration.

When becoming familiar with a new client, I like to find out about recent decisions that have been most influential to the people in the organization, and to its direction as a whole. Capturing and deconstructing the history of key decisions reveals much about the culture and leadership style of the organization. Some leaders exercise power autonomously, and express their own beliefs and judgments through decisions made without apparent deliberation. These leaders may reveal these decisions in the context of discussions intended to give the appearance of deliberation, but participants may describe the decision as having been a “done deal” well before their input was sought. Autocratic leadership has the benefit of efficiency, but amplify the risk of wrong decisions.

By contrast, other organizations are painfully slow at making decisions. Without prompting, one of my clients described her organization as having “analysis paralysis.” After working with another client for several months, I began to describe its decision-making process as “deliberative” – which was a gentle euphemism for excess discussion, and not a compliment. And yet another client prompted me to observe that “at XYZ, ‘yes’ is never yes, ‘no’ is never no, there are only endless degrees of ‘maybe’.” These organizations suffer from their inability to quickly recognize and act upon threat and opportunity.

As we continue to puzzle over the inability of most organizations to reliably execute strategy, it is important to examine how each one makes decisions. There is no one ‘right’ decision style, but it seems to me that the elusive and desirable approach would be one in which decisions are made carefully, as a result of efficient consideration by leaders and expert stakeholders working together, yet quickly enough to enable timely action. Decisions made carefully yet quickly are acted upon tenaciously, yet subject to careful scrutiny and a healthy skepticism that objectively separates the decision from the decision makers. Poor decisions are recognized thoughtfully and early, with timely corrective actions taken. These ideals, to me, are core definition of the deliberate organization.

How has your organization made its important decisions? Were good decisions made quickly and efficiently? Did leaders stand by decisions, or drift in a tide of uncertainty? Were poor decisions recognized and dealt with properly? Were risks understood and accepted? How would you define the deliberate organization?

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However, not all surveys will improve the situation.  The following are four warning signs that conducting a survey may do more harm than good.

1.  The leaders don’t really want to know what people think.

The people who hold the top spots in an organization are usually out of the feedback loop.  As they move up the ladder, they are increasingly unaware of the pulse of the organization.  When the intent to conduct an employee survey is proposed, leaders who understand this phenomenon will jump at the chance to collect information that they have gradually been phased out of.  These leaders will want more details about what will be asked, and might even propose other questions that they would like to ask.

On the flip side of the coin are leaders who think they already know, or worse, don’t really care what the employees think or how they feel.  If you propose an employee survey and receive a resounding, “Sure, go ahead” without any curiosity or concerns, beware.  They probably don’t really want to know what people think.

2.  The leaders won’t believe the results.

Sometimes leaders will dismiss the results of the survey, even if it seems they wanted to know.  I once conducted an employee satisfaction survey that I created in-house due to lack of funds for the project.  Once I presented the results, the leaders wanted benchmarks to compare against to see if the results were “normal.”  Of course, having created the survey in-house, there was no other data to compare them against.

Before conducting a survey, watch for signs that the leaders commonly deflect accountability by picking apart the validity of numbers in other settings.  One way to combat this scenario ahead of time is to discuss the output that will be generated from the survey.  Discuss hypothetical results with the leadership team to determine up front what else they will want to know, so you can build it into your analysis.

3.  The leaders won’t do anything about it.

Even leaders who want to know and believe the results still may not do anything about it.  If employees give their opinion and then nothing is done, the integrity of the leaders and you as the surveyor drops, and future surveys will not be taken as seriously.

When discussing hypothetical results, gauge the interest of leaders in taking action.  For example, if the survey says that people don’t know the direction the company is going, are the leaders willing to share strategic information?  If the answer is no, then don’t bother asking.

To combat the first three reasons not to conduct an employee survey, make sure leaders know the questions you are asking and what you are actually measuring with the questions.  Discuss ahead of time what the implications and actions might be based on hypothetical responses you think they might have trouble absorbing.

4.  You don’t want to say what you already know.

The fourth reason not to conduct an employee survey, instead of being directed at the leadership team, is directed at the surveyor.  Are you conducting the survey because you don’t know the answers, or are you conducting the survey because you don’t want to say what you already know?  Is fear getting in the way of you speaking up and sharing the problems you see in the organization?  Is the survey actually a cop-out?

If any of that rings true, here’s an idea for you:  Include your point of view in the proposal for the survey.  State your hypothesis – what you believe to be true – and say you would like to conduct a survey to test it.  Share the implications and the action plan for improving the situation if you are right.  Then offer the option to skip the survey if they agree – they just might.  If they don’t agree with your hypothesis, then you will still conduct the survey.  Not only will you get more involvement from people who disagree with you, it will also be more scientific and objective than if you were just using the to communicate for you.

Yes, surveys can be very useful tools to help direct a change initiative.  That is, of course, if the leaders want to know what employees think, will believe the results, and will do something with the opportunities that are revealed.

(Editor’s note: This post first appeared in the Change Starts Here blog at Enclaria.com)

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Loggerhead turtle, about one meter long

I don’t remember exactly when, how, or even why I first became enamored with turtles and tortoises. It’s probably been at least 25 years since I bought my first carved wooden turtle, and my collection of small handmade keepsake turtles grows by one or two every time my wife and I travel together. I’ve probably got over 50 of them now. But it’s less than an obsession for me, and I don’t have any live turtles as pets.

A video on Facebook caught my eye a couple of weeks ago. Shot at night in infrared light on Big Pine Key near our second home in Key West, Florida, it shows a “boil” – the nearly all-at-once hatching of baby loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) and their immediate and frantic scramble to the sea. The first few minutes after hatching are especially perilous for the little guys (who would easily fit in the palm of your hand) – they rely on star- and moon-light glinting off the ocean’s edge to find their way to the water before seabirds and other predators pick off these tasty morsels. Human development has threatened the loggerhead in multiple ways, including the presence of artificial light at nesting areas causing the hatchlings to lose their way to the ocean, along with entanglement in fishing lines and nets.

Loggerhead Sea Turtles were once intensively hunted for their meat and eggs, along with their fat which was used in cosmetics and medication. As a result, both its subspecies are now internationally protected. Local turtle protection organizations have sprung up near nesting areas around the world to locate and protect nests, ensure darkness and otherwise guide hatchlings to the sea, rescue wayward hatchlings, and monitor the survival of the species.

rescue in progress

Although they spend nearly their entire lives in the water, adult (and they don’t reach sexual maturity until around 35 years of age) loggerheads return to the beach of their own birth to lay their eggs below the sandy surface and above the tide line. The mother abandons the eggs and likely never sees or recognizes any of her offspring. But despite natural and human-caused threats, loggerheads have (at least until now) been very successful as a species; individuals loggerheads often live well past 100 years, and fossil evidence suggests that they’ve been around for about 200 million years. Not too bad for the little guys.

Human organizations behave like living things in some specific ways, and their drive for self-preservation is certainly among them. Individual organizations may outlive their human founders, but the long-lived human organization is the exception, not the rule. And I believe that the number one cause of organizational demise is a failure to understand and adapt to changing environmental conditions. The ecology of human organizations is as tough and unforgiving as the loggerhead’s post-natal scramble to the sea.

I continue to need to explain to friends and colleagues why I named my firm ‘Tenacious Tortoise.’ ‘Why would you want to chose an icon of slowness to represent your firm?’ they ask. But impatience and lack of determination seem to me to be the hallmark of organizations destined for an early demise. I chose Tenacious Tortoise easily and quickly when the time for naming came. I like the alliteration, and hope that it is easy to remember. But it is the tenacity of tortoises and turtles that is at the core of the idea of our firm – it is their single-minded determination to survive and prosper that we aim to capture, enable, and enhance in every client organization with whom we work.

Or maybe I just wanted an excuse to share the pictures and video.

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Not only do organizational leaders have the power to make or break your project on their own, but it is impossible to bypass them to change the organization below. Individuals experiencing change will look to those in power for confirmation that they are committed to the new way of doing things. It is under intense scrutiny that leaders are watched to see if their actions match their intentions. If not, the change initiative will be dismissed as “flavor of the month” and not taken seriously.

Amid all this doom and gloom, there is a bright side. You don’t have to settle for the level of leadership support you currently have. As fellow human beings, leaders are capable of being informed and influenced.

Take the following steps to determine how to best garner the support of the most influential people in your organization.

1) Identify “Leadership”
When we use the term “leadership,” it typically means the group of people whose titles reside at the top of the org chart. However, the list may be different for the transformation you are trying to achieve. Start by identifying all individuals who might have a strong impact on the success of your initiative, including decision makers and influential employees who do not have leadership titles.

The key is to decouple the nebulous term “Leadership” from the names of individuals who can impact your project. Since each leader has her own opinions, knowledge and motivations, it is important to treat leaders as individuals, and not as a faceless leadership group.

2) Assign Levels of Support
Before you can garner support for your initiative from your leadership list, consider that there are different levels of support. Buy-in is the minimum amount of support required to be called support at all. There are two other levels that rise beyond buy-in on the support continuum.

• Ownership: An initiative owner takes personal responsibility for the success or failure of the initiative. He plans, communicates and holds people accountable for task completion.
• Commitment: Leaders who are committed to your initiative demonstrate it by taking action in favor of it. They do not own the project per se, but they do their part to make it happen.
• Buy-in: In the game of poker, “buy-in” is the amount you pay just to join the game. When you have someone’s buy-in, it means she may agree with you, but may not act on it.
• Neutral: These are the people who don’t really care about your initiative either way. They either are not affected or are just along for the ride.
• Opposition: Unfortunately, there will be people who don’t agree with your initiative. There are different levels of opposition, from relatively benign disagreement to downright belligerent and argumentative.

Identify where on this support spectrum each leader is currently and where he needs to be in order for your initiative to succeed. Then prioritize which leaders have the most support to raise, and thus which leaders need the most attention from you.

3) Specify Requirements
Different levels of support require different roles from leaders. Determine what is required of individual leaders and in what ways each must change in order to demonstrate the support you need.

Each leader is in a unique position in the organization. They make decisions, talk to others, and influence followers. Your initiative would be more successful if they performed specific activities, exhibited certain behaviors, and conveyed and ideally held key attitudes. These facets reflect the desired level of support for each individual.

To further define support for each leader, identify what you need her to start doing differently. Also list what you want her to keep doing, and what you need her to stop doing. In this fashion, you will specify a gap between her current activities, behaviors and attitudes and the desired ones.

4) Diagnose The Gap
Based on the requirements you determine, identify what factors are standing in the way of the full support you need.
The reasons leaders do not show support generally fall into six categories.

• Information: The leader may lack knowledge of the details of the project, such as benefits. Also, he may not know what is expected of him.
• Skills: Some change initiatives require leaders to learn new skills and abilities.
• Motivation: The project or the necessary behaviors may not be aligned with what the leader considers to be her best interests, or to the interests of what is important to her.
• Power: When a leader is not allowed (real or perceived) to show the desired support there is a power gap. Culture and feared repercussions are examples of power factors to explore.
• Fear: Change involves an inherent risk. Leaders may experience a number of different fears related to your initiative, which they may or may not express directly to you.
• Resources: A frequent excuse or complaint is that leaders don’t have enough time or resources to take on or become involved in another project. While this may be true, lack of resources is an easy excuse that may also hide any of the above reasons.

5) Design Action Steps
The last step is to make an action plan by closing the gaps you identified in the fourth step.

Provide information and training where necessary. Develop incentives and work with leaders to understand how to reframe the project to fit with their personal motivation. Map power gaps to the source and develop interventions to close them. To reduce fear, reduce the real or perceived risk. By clarifying your requirements and expectations you will pinpoint the appropriate steps to raise leadership support for your change initiative.

If you like this approach, you might also be interested in:

• Four Ways to Boost Your Organizational Power
• Tips for Leading a Successful Transformation
• The Beyond Buy-in Workbook

(Editor’s note: This post first appeared in the Change Starts Here blog at Enclaria.com)

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Newborn gazelle hunkering down for safety, Serengeti, Tanzania (© Erika Bloom)

Reading blogs, scanning headlines, and staying in touch with old friends, it seems to me that right now there is a lot of hunkering down going on. Hunkering down, like dodging bullets and any port in the storm are vivid metaphors for the actions of people when there is danger about. During a global recession, individuals naturally think about protecting themselves and their families from the risk of unemployment, investment failure, and other threatening stuff.

Organizational behavior is a ‘soft’ science that begins with the premise that organizations exhibit collective behaviors. This too is natural. Fish and birds move in unison. Bees, ants, and other insects live in highly-ordered societies that act in concert. Wolves hunt in packs. Evolutionary biologists explain these behaviors as adaptations not just for the survival of the group, but the survival of the species.

Human organizations behave this way as well, but there is no apparent species being protected by organizational behavior, just the organization itself. Some organizations are risk-takers, while others are more prudent about risk. Right now, risk-taking seems at an all-time low.

As we slowly emerge from the depths of economic decline, we’ll likely see tipping points inside organizations as those advocating seizing new opportunities hold sway over those who want to continue hunkering down. National and global economies will reach tipping points as well, when optimism outweighs fear.

Economic downturns perform a function akin to forest fires – clearing the dense underbrush to enable vigorous new growth. Some companies, and perhaps even some industries may not survive the flames. But those that will survive have the best opportunity to thrive by acting before the tipping points. This isn’t just speculation, it is a pattern that has been repeated following previous downturns.

Many of my clients over the past several years have sought to foster more risk-taking as part of larger cultural changes, and have even gone so far as to codify this objective in their strategy maps. But is has been far easier for leaders to express a desire for more risk-taking than to actually take more risk for the organization.

I expect that in a few years, we’ll be reading and writing the case studies of those firms who even now are focusing on seizing new opportunity. They’ll have to act early, and act quickly. Is your organization going to be one of them? Does your organization have the capacity and the will to change?

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The consequences of our leaders’ mistakes are usually greater than the mistakes of those led; through their decisions and actions, leaders cause many others to do things. This is the definition of leadership. In meritocracies, individuals rise to leadership roles because they are viewed as capable and skillful, and are therefore expected to make good decisions for the organizations they lead. But we also say that ‘mistakes will happen.’

About a week ago, U.S. President Barack Obama made a comment at a press conference (about the racially-charged arrest of a noted college professor) that exploded into a firestorm of popular and media criticism. In an unscheduled press appearance a few days later, he somewhat clumsily acknowledged his error, and has since arranged to sit down for a beer with the professor and police officer involved. His admission was kind of a refreshing moment. In his remarks, Obama said that he hoped the episode would become a ‘teachable moment,’ presumably on the topic of race at the center of the incident. Perhaps it can be a teachable moment here, as well.

We properly hold our leaders to a higher standard when it comes to their errors; we want errors to happen infrequently, we want leaders to be motivated to avoid errors, we want errors to be quickly rectified. We want confidence that our leaders’ directions will lead to good outcomes for ourselves. Leaders with too many errors don’t always get to keep their jobs, especially when financial performance and stock price reflect the consequences of those errors.

Leaders face a dilemma when they err – to avoid the appearance of fallibility so as to sustain a perception of error-free performance, or to acknowledge their error and risk losing the support and trust of those they lead. All too often, leaders find it more attractive to try to be seen as error-free.

Many of the organizations I’ve worked with have become dysfunctional over time because of this approach to error. Their leaders are willing (sometimes even relieved) to unburden themselves of their misdeeds behind closed doors, but are simply unable to do so in a public setting. The members of these organizations are aware of the mistakes, but fear retribution from raising any public discussion of the errors. Thus, leaders and the led enable each other to sustain a fictional parallel universe in which everything is (and will continue to be) hunky-dory. It is unsurprising when these leaders finally do go away, and only a short time before a new parallel universe is constructed around the next regime.

But other organizations have a healthier culture in which errors are expected and handled as part of normal routine. Leaders freely admit their mistakes and are open to criticism. Willingness to quickly identify problems and to focus on corrective action rather than blame means that the impact of errors is lessened. Contrary to intuition, employees trust and are loyal to their fallible leaders more than those who attempt to appear infallible.

Strategy is about setting a direction for an uncertain future. Errors will be made. Hypotheses will be more quickly proven or disproven when leaders expect to be wrong, and course corrections can easily be made. But how often have you heard your leader say, “I made a mistake, and I was wrong. Let’s move on.” ? Have there been teachable moments in your organization? Please share your comments below.

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Condition IV: Capability Building

The skills of the workforce and the capabilities of the organization must change to support the change agenda.

Lesson 8: Don’t overlook employees’ beliefs when driving behavior change

McKinsey idea: Requiring behavior changes without understanding what employees believe may not have the desired effect. Behavior stems from personal beliefs, and without understanding those beliefs, mandated behaviors may run counter to employees’ self-perception.

Tenacious Tortoise comment: McKinsey’s example of bankers becoming uncomfortable with becoming salespeople is not convincingly applied in the general case. But it is easy to see that simply telling employees to do something they otherwise wouldn’t do will have less effect than patiently creating an understanding of why the new behavior is desired and understanding and addressing any discomfort that the new behavior creates.

Lesson 9: Skill-building programs aren’t enough

McK: Enterprises engaging in formal training programs in skills required for the change agenda see little effect if the training is treated as a stand-alone event. It is important to provide the opportunity to practice new skills, receive feedback, and share experiences with colleagues reinforces the training and ensures that new skills do not stagnate. Interspersing training and field experience with new skills enables new skills to ripen and mature.

TT: Sounds right, but there needs to be a bit of a reality check here. With increased specialization of knowledge workers, broad-brush training programs for large groups of workers have become far more rare than in the past. Leaders who pay lip service to the idea of training employees in new skills under-invest in training programs and the integration of training with the work itself. Outsourcing of functions to firms with lower labor costs or concentrated skills has decimated enterprise training programs. A surplus in the skilled labor market resulting from higher unemployment raises the incentive for organizations to simply hire proven skills rather than take the risk of training existing workers for new tasks. It seems unlikely that organizations will invest in the carefully-designed training and field integration called for by McKinsey’s authors.

Been There, Done That

In their article, the McKinsey folks have captured and consolidated some important lessons for anyone driving change in organizations. But reading through the article, I was struck with the extent to which these ideas are well-understood in the community of strategy and change professionals that I’ve worked with over the years. When consulting, we’re often in situations where we have to guide the decisions of our clients; big decisions about the strategy itself, but countless smaller decisions about the design of a communication program, how a leader should act in a meeting, how to tell a story, or what to do with incentives. It is easy for me to imagine much agreement and little interest in the lessons here among experienced consultants, simply because they’re already part of the practice of driving change.

What was missing in Kotter’s and later McKinsey’s assessment of the low success rate of change in organizations (see part 1) was the degree of experience in change management in each organization. The common sense lessons offered by McKinsey aren’t common sense to those leaders and managers with little actual experience in driving change. That the majority of change programs are led by persons with little experience is perplexing, that the majority of these change programs fails is not at all surprising. To drive change in the enterprise without the guidance of an experienced facilitator, is simply, ahem, irrational.

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