Month: June 2021

Lakshmi is the Hindu Goddess of wealth.  The problem is that if you chase her, she’ll avoid you.  Sarawati is the Hindu Goddess of knowledge.  If you pursue Sarawati, Lakshmi will get jealous and chase after you.  So, if you want wealth, the best strategy isn’t to pursue it directly.  The best strategy is to pursue knowledge and let wealth come to you, or so the story goes.

When we’re trying to change our organizations, lives, or anything, sometimes the direct path isn’t possible.  Sometimes the best – or even the only – approach is the indirect approach.

Gravity Assist

One of the amazing things that humanity has done is to have launched a probe beyond our Solar System – or rather to have launched two of them, neither of which had enough power alone to escape the pull of our Sun.  Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 both used a technique called gravity assist to accelerate beyond the solar system.  They used the pull of planets to accelerate them on their journey.  Through the mechanics of gravity, they took a relatively little amount of momentum and turned it into much more and escaped the pull of the Sun.

Sometimes our change efforts seem to be weighed down by the past successes of our organization.  These bright spots – successes – invite the question, “If it’s working, why change it?”  We know, of course, that what has worked won’t always work and cringe at the thought of doing nothing until we become organizationally extinct.

Challenging Beliefs

Sometimes belief in the truth – or the truth of the current approach – can be so powerful that it can’t be escaped directly.  It may need an initial disruption and then a redirection.  One way to do that may be to take us back to our childhood.

Santa Claus

It’s a fantastic story.  One man with an army of elves and flying reindeer travels to every house across the globe and deposits presents for all the good boys and girls in a single day.  The mathematics are staggering.  Even accounting for the rotation of the Earth, the rate of present placement simply can’t be done.  However, you can’t tell that to a starry eyed three-year-old whose parents and grandparents have assured them of this fantastical story.

By about ten, most of us have heard the news.  Our parents and grandparents deceived us.  There is no Santa Claus.  Parents across the globe give their children presents and pretend they’re from Santa Claus.  It’s deception to be sure.  It could be called the largest conspiracy that the world has ever known – except it’s done to keep the magic and hope of life alive, so we all accept it.

Heliocentrism

Sometimes, the belief isn’t based on a deception.  It’s just a misunderstanding.  It was believed in ancient times that the Sun and all the planets circled the Earth.  Geocentrism was defended by the Church, and the heretical ideas of Copernicus and Galileo that the planets – including Earth – circled the Sun resulted in Galileo’s conviction and his house arrest.

It wasn’t that there was any intentional deception, but ideas which we held dear were eventually invalidated.

Other Changes

Once there’s an initial burst of energy as people recognize that not everything that we know is certain, we can begin to gently evaluate some of the tenets that we hold dear inside our organization.  Instead of clinging to an outdated notion that we’re in the movie rental business, perhaps we can recognize that we’re in the business of enabling entertainment, whether or not there’s a VHS cassette or DVD involved.

Perhaps, we can challenge seemingly immutable beliefs that we have to be in the office to be efficient or that teams can’t be remote.  There are dozens of hidden beliefs that can prevent us from accomplishing our change directly.  To be successful, we’ll have to find and dislodge these beliefs first – we’ll have to accomplish our change a bit indirectly.

“I just don’t understand it.  They won’t do anything to move forward with the change.”  It’s a familiar lament by change managers who are trying to help organizations reach their potential.  We’ve all encountered people that seem stuck or frozen, and too often we overlook the obvious problem, because it’s not obvious to us.

Fear

Fear is a powerful motivator.  It can drive people to amazing efforts and accomplishing the seemingly impossible.  However, as a motivator, fear is dangerous.  Like a pressure vessel, you never know how it will explode in unanticipated ways.  Instead of a pressure to move forward, the person explodes – or freezes.

The unfortunate reality about fear as a motivator is that it is unpredictable.  Sometimes it will drive to the right conclusions, but too often it leads somewhere else – including nowhere.  We’ve all seen possums on the road that are no longer playing dead.  We’ve seen deer that have frozen as the car headlights sweep across the road and on to them.  Because fear is so unpredictable, few people use it to motivate people any longer.  However, there’s more to fear than the fear that’s an attempt to motivate.

Deepest Fears

Our deepest fears are not of heights, spiders, bats, or any of the first thoughts that we may have.  Our deepest fears are unspoken.  They’re our fear of rejection, ostracism, and feeling unimportant, unworthy, or impotent.  When we’re making changes in our organizations, we necessarily are creating disruption and risk to everyone’s security.  They may not feel competent and safe in their current situation, but they’ll feel less safe when there is change and the unknown.

From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense.  Rejection and ejection from the community was often a death sentence.  If we’re unimportant, if we don’t contribute to our community, and our family we can be replaced, removed, and forgotten.  We’ve learned that these fears aren’t the kinds of insecurities that you share with others.

Self-Sealing

The first problem with anything that we keep secret is that no one else can help us with it.  No one can reassure you that you’re valuable – just because you’re a member of the human race, if for no other reason.  No one can remind you of the resources and support you have if something does happen in your job.  There’s no way that anyone can reassure you that your insecurities, though natural, aren’t grounded in reality.

The result is that often people become more secretive about their insecurities, and they’re more focused on the threats that exist that may mean their insecurities will become truth.  More and more energy becomes consumed, feeding the fear monster so much energy that there’s nothing left for anything else.

Frozen

From the outside, the lack of change looks like being frozen.  On the inside, it’s a battle royale, as the ego defends itself from the slings and arrows of insecurity.  Even if you’re unable to accept that the battle is going on and this is the core dynamic that causes people to freeze, you should acknowledge that people freeze when they encounter fear, whether internally or externally generated.

If you want to get people to change and they seem stuck or frozen, a good way to figure out what is keeping them stuck is to ask what fears they’re hiding.  Often these internal fears are undiscussable, and because they’re undiscussable, they’re difficult to address.

It’s no secret.  It’s not complicated.  And still, it’s not done consistently.  The data shows that even in acute care settings, professionals don’t wash their hands like they should.  Depending on where you live, the professionals that you trust with your health may only wash their hands one in five times that they should.  They’ve been told.  They’ve been lectured.  They’ve been threatened.  Despite this, they’re still not washing their hands when they should.

They’re not stupid.  They’re not uneducated.  But they’re not motivated.  They don’t see how it matters, and it shows.

The Command

One of the most annoying things about many infection control professionals is that they believe they can just command others to do something, and it will happen – even if they won’t do it themselves.  Tell others to wash their hands, but don’t always do it yourself.  The command should be enough – particularly when backed up with a threat of being fired – but it isn’t.

The CDC, National Institutes of Health, and World Health Organization have launched countless research projects, trials, and programs designed to improve handwashing.  Largely, these programs have been a moderate success in the short term and a colossal failure in the long term.  Many of the interventions create a short-term change in the handwashing rate but ultimately fail to make a permanent change in the amount of handwashing in the organization.

One may argue that they don’t believe in the consequences or that the consequences aren’t swift enough.  But what happens when you consider the case of seat belts?

Seat Belts

It’s 1964, and the prevailing thinking of the auto industry is that accidents are caused by idiots behind the wheel.  Ralph Nader writes Unsafe at Any Speed and works to shift the perception.  The result is more robust safety features in cars and the introduction of the seatbelt.  Fifty years later, we are still struggling to get people to wear them.

It’s an impressive number when taken out of context.  90.7% adoption.  That’s the percentage of miles driven where a seatbelt is used.  The problem is that this number is plateauing.  It doesn’t appear we’ll get much higher than this, because everyone knows about seatbelts, and they’ve formed their own opinions about whether they’ll be using them or not – regardless of the consequences.

The Consequences

Beyond the threat of death that the crash test dummies drilled into our collective consciousness, in the 1980s as a part of the public safety campaign, there’s the threat of getting a civil infraction – a ticket – if you’re not wearing your seatbelt.  In 49 of the 50 states in the United States, you can be written a ticket if you’re failing to wear your seatbelt.  The 50^th state has the ominous state motto of “Live Free or Die.”

The consequences can’t be higher than your death or the death of someone you love.  They can’t be more tangible, real, and vivid than the consequences of driving without a seatbelt.  Despite this, there’s not 100% compliance.  If it’s really just as simple as telling people what to do, why can’t we get people to do what we want them to do?

The Solution

The solution to accomplish change is to help people understand why they want to do the behavior and then build supporting systems around them to encourage the right behavior.  Built in seatbelt warnings in cars were effective for those who didn’t remember to fasten their seatbelt and simultaneously emboldened others to resist people telling them what to do.

If we want to get people to change, we have to help them come to the idea that they want to comply –rather than they feel like they must comply.

I was never very good at carnival games.  I’d throw a dart to pop a balloon and end up skewering a goldfish in the next booth over.  However, I was always intrigued by the bowling ball game.  It required just enough energy to get over the hill, but not so much that the ball would come back to you.  It was a delicate balance between too much and too little.  It’s like navigating the change productivity dip.

The Productivity Dip

Every change manager knows that when you make a change from something old to something new, there is always a productivity dip.  The old way was automatic, natural, and routine.  The new method is different, awkward, and forced.  It takes time for the brain to adapt to the new way of doing things.  During that time, you can expect that everyone will be a little less productive.

Both the degree of productivity dip and the length of the dip vary with the change and the preparation that is done to minimize the impact, but it’s always there – and there are two ways to get stuck there.

The Wheels Fly Off the Cart

When I was young, I’d play with slot cars.  The cars would follow a groove on the track, and as the driver, you’d control the speed with a trigger in your hand.  You couldn’t just hold the trigger at full throttle, because the car would fly off the track during tight turns – and crash into the wall.  This is the first place that I learned that, if you went too fast, things would fly apart.  I learned the lesson again a few times – including once or twice in a real car, never knowing there was a problem until it was a bit too late.

Some changes can be managed this way.  Too much pressure.  Too much change.  Too few constraints.  The result has never been good, and in more than a few cases, it’s led to what I have often described as “explosive growth leads to explosion.”  Going too fast without enough control (or influence) has the tendency to end badly.  However, there’s an opposite problem: not going fast enough.

Failure to Thrive

In babies, there’s a problem called “failure to thrive.”  It’s when the baby just doesn’t gain weight like they should.  They’re not getting enough calories to grow at the normal rate.  It’s often a signal that the baby isn’t getting enough nutrition either because of insufficient feedings or because there’s a problem preventing digestion and absorption of their food.  If the situation is left unaddressed, the baby won’t grow into a normal adult.  They’ll face several developmental problems, the least problematic of which is a smaller size.

Our change initiatives can face the same fate if they don’t get enough energy to get them kicked off and over the proverbial hump that the productivity dip represents.  We know that people don’t evaluate events on their totality.  They evaluate them on their peak and on their ends.  (See Change Anything.)  If you never have enough energy to get past the productivity dip, the last experience of change is a failure – and you begin to expect it.

Just Enough

The trick to the carnival game and to the process of mastering the change curve is to go fast enough to get past the productivity dip without crashing into the wall on the other side and sending the bowling ball careening back at you.  The good news about change efforts is that you can adjust the amount of energy after you start, to increase it if necessary or apply the brakes if it feels like you’re getting out of control.

It’s 1968, and Fredrick Herzberg has the snarkiest of titles in the prestigious Harvard Business Review (HBR).  His article, “One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?” would go on to become one of the most requested reprints from HBR.  Behind the snarky title is research into what motivates people.  What causes them to stay with the organization, and what prevents them from leaving – and why are they different?

Hygiene

The first category of motivation that Herzberg covered were hygiene items.  Without enough of these, people will leave.  If you don’t pay people a livable wage, they’ll find someone who can.  Each of the factors that Herzberg considered had some hygiene aspects to them.  However, the interesting discovery is that adding beyond the amount necessary to be “okay” didn’t motivate people more.  As Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow, people are marginally less motivated by the second dollar than the first until there’s no appreciable change in motivation.

It’s not just money.  There are other factors, like the company’s policy and administration, that must be good enough, but it’s not like these factors will compel people to be more likely to stay.

Motivators

The motivators are in an entirely different class.  While there may not be much in the way of these factors required to help people stay on the job, their continued satisfaction – and performance – was driven by things like achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility, and advancement.  Company policy and administration wasn’t on the list.

This has important implications for how you motivate people towards changes.  You can’t use things like supervision, relationship with supervisor, work conditions, or salary to motivate people to change.  You’ve got to find the things that top Herzberg’s list.

We Need Stinking Badges

Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre spoke the line, “We don’t need no stinking badges.”  With respect to Mr. Bogart, we do.  We need badges.  A few years ago, learning and development professionals discovered gamification and started putting badges into every training they did.  The world caught on, and there now seems to be a badge for everything.  From a social psychology point of view, this is a good thing – and it doesn’t hurt with Rogers’ perspective on adoption either.  (See Diffusion of Innovations.)

Degenerates into Work

It was Peter Drucker who said, “All good strategy eventually degenerates into work.”  At the end of the day, the work that you’re asking people to do – the work after the change – must be enjoyable at some level or they won’t be happy doing it.

Responsibility, Advancement, and Growth

Our egos are constantly making a mess of things.  We consistently rate ourselves as better than we are.  (See How We Know What Isn’t So.)  A way that we combat this is to receive more responsibility – even without additional pay, more advancement, and opportunities for growth.  These motivators beg the questions of how will the people who are changing feel more responsibility, that their careers have advanced, or feel that they have a greater opportunity for growth?  If there’s no answer, then you’re probably not motivating them.

Accomplishing Change

If you want to accomplish change, you may find that the answers exist in a 50 year old text that talks about how to motivate employees – one more time.