They Probably Have a Good Reason Not to Change

I’ve found myself recently in several conversations about leading change in teams. What’s been interesting is how judgmental some of the conversations have sounded. For example:

There aren’t a lot of change agents on the team. 

Most of the people in the organization are stuck in their ways.

I just need them to buy into my vision.

Essentially, the speakers were saying that change would just happen if those bad people would just change their ways and see the world exactly as they do. 

When I heard those perspectives, it reminded me of this quote from David Pearl’s Story for Leaders: “As a leader it is worth remembering, for your people, the nemesis very often is you. It’s you that initiates routine-disturbing change. You are the one with the vision that requires them to stir themselves to action. You are the one wanting more for the team or business than it wants for itself. You are the one who has new ideas that upset their world, turning things upside down by reading books like this one.”

As I’ve observed leaders trying to create change, judgmental mindsets aren’t that helpful—mostly because they do nothing to identify ways to overcome the actual barriers to change. 

Instead, it’s more useful to start with the assumption that everyone else is a reasonable person making decisions that are logical. That assumption creates the need to analyze why they are making decisions that run counter to what the leader wants to happen.

And a good model for thinking about this is BJ Fogg’s behavior model, which I had the good fortune of learning in one of his workshops.  Fogg outlines the model in the book Tiny Habits and on this website. The key equation to remember is: 

B = MAP

I always remember it as: Behavior happens when the Motivation and Ability to take any action are high enough at the moment one receives a Prompt to take the action. 

As it relates to creating change in organizations, the model is helpful for a leader who wants to figure out paths to destination. For example:  

Behavior

What is it—specifically—that I want people on the team to start doing? And what behaviors do I want them to stop?

When I ask leaders that question, the response is sometimes murky—e.g., “be more proactive,” “innovate,” or “be more efficient.” Those framings are tough to get one’s arms around. Instead, gaining clarity on the desired change as defined by specific behaviors creates a clearer path. 

If “proactive” is clarified to mean something like “they come to strategy discussions with ideas on how they plan to solve their challenges,” it becomes a much easier outcome to design for.

Motivation

Assuming these are reasonable people, what positive and negative incentives exist in their context that makes the current decisions logical? 

For example, if the performance management system explicitly or implicitly tells people, “there’s zero upside in doing something different from what’s written in the operating manual, and there’s only risk if you mess it up,” a team leader's encouragement to “be proactive” won't be that impactful.

So that analysis prompts the leader to think more about: How might I change the wider context to make the action I want a good decision?

Ability 

How easy is it for team members to do the behavior that I want, especially relative to the behavior I don’t want?

If you’ve ever seen an image like this, it illustrates the need to think about solutions in terms of what’s easy—or not.

Obviously, the idea is to make the ideal behaviors easier and the suboptimal behaviors harder. People will always choose the easier one. 

Prompt 

How and when will team members actually execute the behavior I want? 

For example, a leader who wants more new ideas might start by asking for new ideas. A leader who wants team members to proactively solve their challenges might add a box to the strategy discussion template for “How you’re going to solve those challenges.”

Surely there are many others. I highlight those ideas above because many of the solutions I’ve seen leaders come up with to drive change have little to do with changing fundamental mindsets. Instead, they can start with adding prompts and making subtle shifts in the processes the team uses to get work done (e.g., meeting design).

Often, it’s not about getting people to think differently, they just need to do differently. 

A Question for You

What’s one thing, if you could finally figure out a way to change it, that would hugely impact your life?