Author: Robert Bogue

The question about whether we’re talking about management, leadership, or both is one of those perennial questions that keeps popping up in the conversation of business books and sites.  While the broader question may remain unanswered, is there an answer to whether we should be talking about change management or change leadership?

Business Management and Business Leadership

For most people, “the leadership” are those people in the upper echelons of the organization, with titles that start with “Chief” and are followed by two or three words.  However, this relegates leadership to something that only a scarce few do.  Clearly coaches, teachers, parents, and others lead as well.  This is the problem that James MacGregor Burns attempted to address in his book, titled simply Leadership.  Joseph Rost later built on Burns’ work in Leadership for the Twenty-First Century.  Rost spent two-thirds of his book trying to define leadership, and he never really did get to a crisp definition.  Instead, he focused on a fundamental shift from authority to relationship.

The assertion is that leadership is a relationship-based approach to accomplish meaningful change.  In that way, we see that change is a part of leadership.  And while we may see change without leadership, leadership can’t exist without change.

This leaves management to the tactical execution of the existing processes and policies of the organization.  It relegates management to the mechanics and leadership to the art of being human in relationships.  The problem with this approach is that it elevates leadership above management, and that’s no truer than saying flour is more important than yeast in making bread; both are required for a successful result.

What’s in a Word?

At some level, the idea of speaking about change leadership is new.  Over the past few decades, it’s become more popular for academics and “thought leaders” to speak in terms of change leadership to justify their own higher status.  However, change management still is the parlance in use most of the time.  The people who needed to accomplish change initiatives mostly ignored the attempts to change the word management to leadership.  Instead, they focused on how to do leadership within their change initiatives.

Mostly, the industry has worked on how to create space for the relationships that are at the heart of leadership.  Instead of trying to force changes, the change for change managers has been in working with everyone to adapt, change, and accelerate the change.

Engaged Adults

Leadership, in Rost’s conception, is about relationships.  There’s a need to create a degree of engagement that people want to be in the relationship – or to change their relationship.  In Work Redesign, Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham explain that sometimes workers resign themselves to their role in the organization – and they may not want to change.

Facilitating Organizational Change describes organizations as complex adaptive systems.  Therefore, our goal is to create the conditions that allow for the right kind of growth to occur – without trying to specify or dictate the timeline or degree of growth.  Part of the conditions that allow for a person to engage with the organization and with change is the psychological safety that Amy Edmondson describes in The Fearless Organization.

David Richo’s How to Be an Adult in Relationships speaks about the kind of changes that everyone needs to make to create the space for this kind of relational growth to occur.  It’s the set of conditions under which change leadership can thrive.

Creating change leadership in the organization may neither be easy nor occur on the mechanical timeframe that management requires, but it is possible if you’re willing to create the right conditions.

I was up on stage.  It wasn’t any different than the 50 other times that year I had been on a stage – except it was different.  Instead of a professional crowd, I was at the front of a comedy club.  The room was dark, and I couldn’t see anyone.  I walked on stage, and within a moment, the cord fell out of the microphone.  Normally, I would have made light of it.  I could have stared at the cord with a face that would make everyone laugh – but not that day.

My vision literally became tunnel vision, and I could only make out one friend in the front of the stage.  I kept thinking that I was bombing.  His face was amused but I couldn’t hear anyone else’s laughter.  Luckily, he was recording it and there was laughter from the rest of the room.  However, it was the first time I had been frightened on stage in over two decades, and I didn’t like it.  It was also the only time I’ve ever experienced tunnel vision that I could recognize.

No Options

Of course, I had options on the stage.  I could walk off and the emcee would appreciate the extra time.  However, I didn’t want to do that.  I wanted to continue no matter what was happening – or not.  I needed to get through my set so badly that I didn’t even care what was going on with the audience.  I needed the completion for me.

Sometimes in change initiatives, we get so focused on getting done that we can’t hear or see the feedback around us that should be pushing us forward or creating caution for us.  Alexander Pope said, “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” and I’ve certainly been that at times.  I’ve been unable to see where I should have stopped but instead, I continued.

In our change initiatives, we need to recognize that pausing, stopping, and even cancelling are options no matter how disastrous they may appear on the surface.  Too frequently, we continue down a bad path for way too long, and we do damage to ourselves, our reputation, and the organization along the way.  Our tunnel vision prevents us from seeing the broader and more important picture.

The Reality

My friend’s reassurance that I did well wasn’t good enough for me.  He was biased after all.  He’d tell me I did good if people started throwing their meals at me.  While I needed his support, I also needed an objective way to establish how I really did.  I was lucky that he was able to record the session for me.  It left me with an unbiased record to which I could refer.

Too often, we fail to identify our goals and objectives to the level that we can establish the unbiased measurement of our effectiveness.  We can’t hope to accomplish a goal if we don’t know what the goal is – and how we’ll measure it.  Too frequently, we know the end objective we want, but rarely are we able to articulate the behaviors that we’ll need to do to reach the goal – and without that, we’ll have a hard time knowing whether we’re bombing, doing okay, or rocking the house.

The Savers

Comedians know that you need to keep some one-line zingers in your pocket for when things go wrong.  You need these little things to give you the space to generate options – to expand your thinking in ways that allow you to be successful.

I knew I could generate a laugh without a word if I either stared at the cord incredulously – or if I mouthed some words and pantomimed a belly laugh before ultimately reconnecting the cable.  When the audience isn’t interacting, I know I can say, “You know this is live and I can see you right?”  I never fail to get a laugh – though sometimes it’s a nervous laugh.

Because I was afraid, my thinking was constricted, and I couldn’t even pull out these savers to get the routine truly back on track.  What is going on in your change that’s preventing you from using the tools you know you have – and need to use?

In our post, What’s Different Between Adoption and Change Management, we focused on the fact that change management is more focused on the broader context and the value delivered by adopting a new technology.  Adoption is fine when we just want to check off the task – but if we really want to drive value, we need to look for the results we’re getting.  One way to get better results is to stop talking about technology adoption and focus on engagement.

Adoption is Easy

It was a 70s-era meeting room, complete with dark paneling and yellowed ceiling tiles from the smoking that once clouded the air.  The demand was to get to 100% adoption of the new intranet.  Failing to convince the leadership that this wasn’t the right metric, they insisted, and I guaranteed 100% adoption.  They were satisfied.

Like the genie or cursed monkey’s paw that grants wishes that are literally what was asked for, I worked with the information systems team to set the global policy in their network that all browsers would always have their home page set to the intranet.  We did indeed get to 100% compliance with the adoption of the intranet – after having to manually help a few Apple Macintosh machines.  And the results weren’t what they wanted.  No one was actually using the site, and they were complaining that they couldn’t set their home page to Yahoo any longer.  (This was a while ago.)

You see, you can force adoption, because it’s not a state of mind.  It’s a mechanical act rather than a belief system, emotion, or feeling.  (See Going Through the Motions for more.)  If we want to get real results, we’ve got to get people wanting to adopt our change.

Engagement is Powerful

In an ideal world, we’d want everyone to be excited about our change initiatives, but that’s not realistic.  They’re not truly interested in the latest and greatest technology for something that is a small part of their job.  They don’t care if it looks pretty on the back end.  If it helps them out slightly, they’ll be slightly happier – but “excited” would be a high bar.  That’s why the goal shouldn’t be excited.  The goal should be engaged.

An engaged person believes in the change that’s happening – or the people leading the change – and is a willing participant in learning what the new world will be like.  They want to try to make their own lives – and those of their coworkers – better.  Instead of forcing people to make the change and watching the predictable subversion, we engage them to create unexpected opportunities.

No one at 3M started out with the idea of the Post-It note.  The technology at the heart of the innovation was supposed to be a super adhesive to hold things together permanently; but when the stickiness was discovered to be enough to allow pages to be attached and detached, the value was recognized, and a product line was launched.

This is innovation, but it comes from an engaged individual trying to solve problems and create new opportunities.  In this case, it was used to keep bookmarks in a Bible.  That’s not a market that 3M was – or could even consider – pursuing.  By being engaged in the creation and discovery process, we got a totally different – and unexpected – result.

Exchanging Adoption for Engagement

In your next change initiative meeting, try swapping out the word “adoption” for the word “engagement” and watch how the perspectives and options change – and then wait for the innovative ways of using your solutions generate new lines of business for your organization.

It’s early, and you’re not caffeinated yet.  You’re doing your morning routine with barely a thought.  Not bad for a morning routine – but it is bad if you end up in the same thoughtless process of filling out templates and creating artifacts.  Here’s why.

Templates

Templates for artifacts, checklists, and forms aren’t bad.  They provide structure and repeatability, and they can be powerful tools to prompt you to thinking and understanding.  Designed right, they force the thinking and evaluation process in a way that leads to better outcomes and deeper understanding.  However, too often, these templates become a crutch that people blindly use to say that they’ve completed the work for doing a change effort.

It’s about checking the box.  The project charter is required, so you grab the template and paste in the text from the email that the project’s sponsor sent.  The document is copied into the project workspace, and it’s off to the next project or the next document.  After all, the work is done.  There’s a project charter, and that’s what’s required.  There’s no requirement that the questions in the template are answered or that it’s signed off on.  All that matters is that the file exists.

Requirements

As requirements go, having the artifact that the template becomes is a good start.  However, what’s harder to manage and require is the thinking that the template is designed to trigger.  Because every project is different, it’s not practical to require an answer to every question – and it’s even harder to enforce a requirement like this.

Requirements in the form of checkpoints and gates are necessary but not sufficient to ensure that your change projects are getting the attention they deserve.  They can form the first layer of support for good change management, but they don’t go all the way – that’s what approvals are for.

Approvals

There are some approvals that are clearly a formality.  The person you send the document to for approval never – or rarely – reads it.  The approval is perfunctory.  It’s a signal that we’re doing due diligence when that isn’t the case.  On the other end of the spectrum are those approvals which you dread, because you expect hard and even unfair questions and discussion that borders on personal attack.

Approvals, done well, need to be neither of these.  If we want to prevent people from going through the motions, we must pay enough attention to the approval process to ask thoughtful, insightful, and probing questions without making it feel as if the approver and the requestor are archenemies.  The goal of the process is to ensure that everyone understands and agrees with the change and that it’s got the proper support to be successful.

Approvers should thoughtfully consider whether the questions in the template have been answered appropriately – or whether the requestor should consider them more deeply or address other angles that weren’t fully explored.

The Goal

Too often the goal becomes the artifacts, but the artifacts will be long forgotten by the time the change is implemented.  What remains are the feelings that are left with a good – or bad – change effort.  Artifacts are, in truth, not the point.  They’re the tools that are used to generate the shared understanding and thinking that are essential to change success.

Each time you start talking to someone else in the organization about the latest change initiative, you’re met with an audible groan.  You made the same sound inside your head when you were asked to take the initiative on.  The voice inside your head was screaming, “No!” while you silently nodded yes and asked the probing questions about scope and impact that you know you’re supposed to ask.

The problem isn’t this change.  The problem is any change.  There’s only so much capacity that any person – or organization has – and it feels like you’re constantly beyond the limit and because of that continuously ineffective – but it doesn’t have to be that way.  You can find ways to minimize change fatigue and get to a sustainable pace.

Maximum Sustainable Rate

Runners can sprint, covering a lot of ground in a short time.  However, the sprint isn’t sustainable.  You can’t stay at that speed forever as you burn up the resources you have.  While there are times that it is desirable and even necessary to sprint, it is when it becomes expected as the normal pace that there are problems.

In organizations, we fail to see the difference between the maximum rate that we can safely maintain and a rate at which it’s only a matter of time before something breaks or the system collapses.  Like a pressure vessel that fails, it’s impossible to predict when or where the failure will occur – and the results are often catastrophic.  (See our previous Sustainable Pace post for more.)

Change Capacity

Change capacity isn’t a fixed quantity that can be measured like money in the bank.  Instead, it’s a set of capabilities that make it easier – or harder – to accomplish change.  Without fundamental communications skills, your change initiatives are doomed.  Communication strategy as well as tactical communications skills are essential for increasing change capacity – but they’re not the only part of the story.  Learning how to motivate others through stories and making them the organizational hero plays a role in the capacity for change as well.  We believe the following six keys are essential to developing your capacity for change and fighting change fatigue:

• Ability to Clearly Define the Change
• Project and Program Management
• Tools for Motivating Adoption
• Communication Strategy and Techniques
• Stakeholder Management
• Higher Order Organizational Change Capacities

Few organizations are effective at all these keys.  Instead, they may have change capacity in one or two or three of the skills but struggle in other areas.  Too often, the skills behind the keys are given a head nod or the occasional acknowledgement with too few people able to clearly articulate how your organization creates communications plans, or the framework for managing stakeholders.

Quick Cheat

There is a “quick” cheat, however, if you don’t believe that you’ve got the capacity to improve on any of these dimensions.  You can instead work on increasing trust.  By increasing trust, you reduce fear and friction to change initiatives.  Trust is the magic lubricant that can dramatically improve change capacity and reduce change fatigue.  The only problem is that trust is rarely built quickly.  More frequently, it’s something that’s added to bit by bit over a long period of time, and it’s destroyed in an instant if a behavior doesn’t match what people expect from you.

Building trust is one of those advanced skills of organization change that looks on the surface to be a quick and easy fix but turns out to be quite difficult.

No matter what your current level of change fatigue is, you can improve it if you’re willing to work on change capacity – and trust.

Driving your car faster on the highway burns more gas.  Parasitic drag increases as velocity increases, and therefore it takes more energy to travel the same distance at a higher speed.  If you had no speed limits and no safety concerns, how fast should you drive?  The answer comes at the intersection of how much you’re willing to spend and how much time you have.  A sustainable pace for organizations and individually is the intersection of a set of factors.

Mandatory Overtime

Consider the case where you’re looking to hire skilled workers but haven’t been able to find them.  To meet customer demand and organizational commitments, you might decide to start offering overtime, including overtime incentives.  Pay rates are typically 150%-200% of base pay, and in many cases, there are bonuses on top of these premium rates.

However, the pay incentives for overtime will only work for so long.  In some cases, organizations resort to mandatory overtime.  Despite the increased pay, resentment builds until eventually people will quit – making it even harder to find the right people because of the reputation that will be built and because there are more positions to fill.

In short, you know that you’re not at a sustainable pace when you’re working overtime for more than a short time, because it’s not what was collectively agreed to.

Efficiency

Most organizations have an optimal pace.  It’s a place where there’s good productivity with relative efficiency.  Positions are filled, people work their hours, and the organization makes money.  When we slide into overtime, we realize that we rapidly erase any profit, because our labor costs have increased dramatically.  I know many organizations that operate in a perpetual state of overtime availability, because they can’t hire folks – and they can’t hire folks, because they’re requiring mandatory overtime.

They’re stuck, because they pushed the production beyond sustainable capacity, and they didn’t increase the sustainable capacity to keep up.

Failure

It’s well known that when people are tired, they make more mistakes – not just mistakes in the products they’re creating but safety mistakes as well.  The result can be much more than a broken widget, it can be serious injury or even death.  Despite this, we put systems into places where we’re trying to extract more productivity than we can sustain.  In the short term, it may increase profits despite the extra labor costs.  However, in the long term, we find that we’re teetering along the edge of total collapse.

Continuous Improvement

The solution to these challenges is to always be working on improving the capacity of the organization – and yourself personally.  The more you can increase the sustainable pace, the more room you have as the system becomes strained.  These capacity gains come from adding additional production resources and, critically, also come with better learning.  The more that you and your organization can learn, the more capacity there is for eliminating unnecessary steps and improving the execution of the remaining steps.

Pace of Change

The pace of change in your organization is like any other sustainable pace.  If you find a rate of change the organization can sustain, then you should do that, with only occasional bursts of change that exceed the sustainable pace.  However, simultaneously, you should be consciously improving your change acumen so that the organization develops a greater capacity to accomplish change.  The capacity of the organization to accept and embrace change should be as important as the ability to maintain a short-term, sustainable production pace – that is, if the organization is going to survive in a world of change and transition.

It was a correlation that was mistaken for a causation that caused the recession of 2008.  It stacked up kindling high and wide, just waiting for the spark to set off an inferno that would burn down banks and billions in valuation and put the economy in a tailspin.  When we make changes, we seek to find those things that are causal so we can get the results we want – but that depends on getting causation right.

Home Ownership and Economic Stability

We knew that home ownership and economic stability were correlated.  Plenty of studies over decades had indicated that, as home ownership rose, so did economic growth and stability.  The problem wasn’t that these two variables were correlated.  That was a fact.  However, what wasn’t established was whether economic stability caused more home ownership – or the reverse.

Enter the government as they encouraged mortgage lenders to be more aggressive at lending for homes – particularly in economically disadvantaged minority groups.  Using some older but rarely enforced legislation, they upped efforts and started the boom of sub-prime mortgages.  Income verification became a joke.  You could get whatever house you wanted with practically no questions asked.

To be fair, other factors were at play, including financial managers packaging up these loans, and other financial managers who didn’t understand what they were buying or what the risk was.  In the end, housing prices dipped, people just stopped paying their mortgage, and the whole thing burned down.

The simple belief that home ownership caused economic stability was tested – and it failed.  We discovered that it’s when people feel safe that they go to the effort of buying a home – and not the other way around.

Establishing Causation

The mistake was one that is made all the time.  We believe because two things are correlated that by manipulating one, we’ll cause the other to change.  That works when the variable we’re changing is truly causal – and generally fails spectacularly when it isn’t.  While establishing correlation is statistically possible and not particularly difficult, establishing causation is much, much trickier.

The key is the establishment of time-sequencing.  If one thing occurs and the second quickly follows, then we know with a reasonable degree of certainty that the leading factor is causal.  Unfortunately, teasing out timing like this is difficult, as the changes over time tend to be gradual and the correlation is filled with a great deal of noise.  Collectively, this makes teasing out causality difficult, and as a result, many people don’t take the time necessary to accomplish that.

Instead, they take the shortcut and assume causation where there is none.

Changing Causes

In your change effort, rather than assuming that you’re working with the causal factor, take specific, time-sequenced steps to test your assumption that if you change one variable, you’ll get the results you want.  It takes time, and it’s frustrating and even exasperating as people believe they know how things will turn out.  However, without those small-scale tests, you may find that you’re changing something that doesn’t matter – or worse, you’ll find that what you’re doing threatens whether your organization can exist in the future.

The next time someone says that if you change X, you’ll get Y, ask them how they know.  If they insist, ask them what happens if you change Y.  If they answer that X will change, they know the variables are correlated – but not which is causal.

In the technology world, the word “adoption” is often used to describe those who are using a piece of software.  It’s a global term that is designed to encompass the metrics used to measure success of the initiative.  As organizations spend millions of dollars purchasing and installing software, those dollars are lost if no one uses the software.

Change and change management is a much broader way of describing the same activity.  Adoption is a subset of change that focuses on the use of an implemented system.  Change can refer to software use or how to change the direction of an organization, how processes are being incrementally improved, or how individuals change personally.  (See What is Change Management, and Why is Everyone Else’s Definition Different than Mine? for more.)  Between the broad term, change, and the narrow term, adoption, there’s a difference in focus that can sometimes get in the way.

It’s All About the Technology

Perhaps the greatest challenge to technology adoption projects is that it’s perceived to be a technology project, and the adoption and change aspects are considered secondary or even optional.  The project manager or leadership believes in “build it and they will come” instead of carefully considering how to help people make the behavior change.

It’s common to hear that the training – which is only a part of the change effort – gets cut from the project at the last minute because of budget overruns in the deployment.  To control cost, the overall project success is put at risk.  When you’re measured as a project manager by on-time and on-budget, it’s easy to leave on-value to chance.  (See Why the 70% Failure Rate of Change Management Projects Is Probably Right for more.)  Too often, the people implementing the project aren’t measured on the outcomes expected from the project – they’re only measured on their ability to deliver the project.

Focus

When you’re focused on getting across the goal line of delivering the project and not on the end results, it’s easy to cut the things that are difficult – or impossible – to see.  Training becomes a checkbox.  Did you do training?  If you did anything for training, it gets a checkbox, and the system can count as being completely deployed.  The question is rarely whether people were effectively trained on the new system.  It’s too hard to know when the system is first deployed, and everyone wants to close the project down.  (For more on evaluating training efficacy, see Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation.)

Communication, another traditional component of change management, is similarly a checkbox.  There’s often the question about whether the communications were done without asking how effective they were, because measuring communication efficacy seems daunting.  Because it’s not a critical component that is deeply measured, the minimal amount is done, and the focus remains on the technical aspects of project – even if they’re not the ultimate drivers of success or failure.

Broader Change

Adoption is shifting the focus and awareness from the technology to the use of the technology to drive the desired outcomes.  No need to deploy something that no one can or will use because it can’t drive the right outcomes.  Adoption starts with communication and training.  Change extends this to tools and techniques for shifting behavior to the new desired behaviors.

In the end, adoption is just a stop on the path towards change management and taking a wholistic look at how to change the behaviors to lead towards different – better – outcomes.

I was wearing a Hawaiian-style US Coast Guard shirt.  He was a Rear Admiral in charge of Cyber.  What he noticed had escaped me.  The shirt showed the proud history of the Coast Guard, including many of the current and historical ships used to support their maritime protection and enforcement duties.  There was not a single aspect on the shirt that portrayed the role that the Coast Guard plays in protecting the country digitally.

The Admiral had just revealed one of the hidden barriers to changing perceptions and identity.  The long history of the Coast Guard created a lore about their historical mission that didn’t include the Cyber mission.  He hadn’t pointed it out to be cruel; in fact, quite the opposite: it was an effective attempt at being inclusive.

What We See

In our organizations, we’ve developed our posters, mission statements, and ethos about the way that things were.  If we fail to change these to reflect the new identity, we’ll consistently reinforce old ideas and old ways of working.  It seems like a little thing to not include aspects of the new identity, but it matters.

I’ve always felt like logo redesign efforts were a waste of time and money.  When the US Postal Service updated its logo, I was astounded at the cost of the effort and wondered how it could possibly improve the delivery of mail.  But I was wrong.  I was looking at activity instead of the intent and the results.  Changing a logo – even a subtle change – conveys a sense that things are different now.  The lore has changed – and people have little choice but to see the change as they confront the new logo everywhere.

What We Believe

What we see is easy to change in comparison to what we believe about our identity.  It’s one thing to say that your organization protects shipping vessels and quite another to create a belief system that defines the mission in terms of protecting ports of commerce both physical and virtual.  As you adapt your identity to be inclusive of the new beliefs, it’s common to make the core beliefs so broad that no one can really connect with them.  It’s easy to think about ships and ports – harder to consider what it means when Cyber is included.

As we’re changing the identities of our organizations, we must find the solution that is not too abstract and therefore meaningless but also is inclusive of the way that we need to see the organization to be relevant in the future – and that isn’t easy.

What to Do

There are, however, techniques that lead towards a better understanding of beliefs and can help you understand both what the current belief systems are as well as the ways that they need to change to be more inclusive.  For instance, SWOT and PESTLE are evaluation approaches that allow you to understand both current and future states of the organization in its environment.  Done thoroughly, you’ll discover the belief systems of the organization of today – and the way that those beliefs must change in the future.

At a macro level, you can look to the tools shared in Immunity to Change, but these tools don’t help you to see what’s missing in your images and lore that may be hampering the transition to your new future.

While many like to speak of change resistance, I prefer to refer to those who are uninformed about a change and thus need to know more before going forward and those who rightfully disagree with the course of action and therefore do not believe the change should go forward.  In The Limits of Certainty, we addressed the challenges of communication.  In this post, we’ll tackle the problem with those that disagree.

All Conflict

All conflict comes from just two sources.  We disagree either because of perspective or because of values.  If we disagree because of perspective, we can use tools to better understand each other’s perspective and decide if they are both valid ways to see the situation or if our perspective needs to be adapted to incorporate new information (see Think Again for more).  Sometimes, we’ll recognize that both perspectives are potentially valid, and we don’t know which one is right.  We’ll come back to this, because it’s common, and it creates the opportunity to disagree and commit.

The second cause is a difference of values.  These values can range from foundational, morality-based values (see The Righteous Mind) or those which are simply things we prefer.  (See Who Am I?)  Of course, those changes that violate your ethical guidelines should not move forward – at least not move forward with you (see Moral Disengagement, The Lucifer Effect, and How Good People Make Tough Choices).

We’re left with two conditions where the change may not be what you believe but it’s not fundamentally in conflict with who you are.  The first is when there are two possible perspectives and the second is when the change doesn’t move forward in a way that motivates you but isn’t an ethical or moral violation.

Understanding

For those conditions, the key is to first ensure that you reach a solid understanding.  Everyone should acknowledge the other’s perspective and their personal values and beliefs that are in play.  Too often, we believe that we need to agree with the other person to acknowledge their perspective – this is not truth.   If we can get to clear understanding, we’ve got a foundation to move forward – even though we disagree.

With a clear agreement about the disagreement (agreeing that we disagree), we can choose to commit.  Because of positional authority, a deep-seated trust, or other factors, we can yield our beliefs and defer to the other person’s course of action.  In other words, it’s possible to disagree and commit.  We’re not committing to a course of action because we agree with it but rather because we respect the other party and are willing to move forward.

Enabling Conditions

If you want to enable the conditions for people to disagree and commit, it starts with developing clear understanding – on both sides.  Understanding is the easy part.  The harder part is building the authority, trust, or respect that is required for the other person to become willing to commit to the course of action.

Of course, the strategy of disagree and commit relies upon the integrity of the person that you’re asking to disagree and commit with the course of action.  If they don’t have personal integrity, then you have a larger problem than the change and may need to help to encourage them to succeed outside the organization.