Building the Case for Change

Abstract

Change is difficult for organizations and individuals, and they often seek to avoid it. It can be difficult to convince people that change is needed. It is up to the leaders of an organization and the change planning team to make the case for change. Change requires actively selling people on the merits and benefits of each change effort and to rally their logical, emotional, and political support for the change initiative.

Selling Change

We likely all agree that one of the most difficult tasks a change agent faces is getting people to support a change initiative. Even if people don’t actively resist the change and only adopt a strategy of passive inaction, that inaction could doom the initiative to fail in implementation.

Practitioners have been struggling with this challenge, and scholars have been studying it since before the days of the Greek philosopher Socrates, who received capital punishment for “corrupting” the youth by challenging the status quo. More recently, Harvard professor John Kotter has stressed the importance of developing a sense of urgency, saying: “The iceberg we’re standing on is melting, and if we don’t do something soon, we’re going to drown!⁶” Other scholars have stressed the importance of establishing and reinforcing dissatisfaction with the current situation. Yet others emphasize the importance of painting a clear vision of a desirable future state. In the sales profession, salespeople are taught to identify a compelling event—one that will make the current situation unacceptably costly. The prospect of a melting iceberg, the entry of a new competitor, the end of the fiscal year, or events in the regulatory environment are examples of such events.

These ideas have one thing in common. They recognize the necessity that people have to “buy” the change. That is, people must make an affirmative decision to take action in support of the change or at least not to oppose it if the initiative is to be implemented successfully. Therefore, one role of a change agent is to “sell” the change to stakeholders.

But we need to be careful with how we conceptualize “selling.” The concept of selling is often associated with persuasion and coercion. A great salesperson is often thought to be so persuasive that the salesperson could sell ice to Alaskan Eskimos and sunshine to Pacific Islanders. Steve Jobs’s “reality distortion field” is the exemplar of charisma and persuasiveness. Alternatively, sales managers often look for “meat-eating bulldogs” that tenaciously and relentlessly chew away at obstacles until anyone or anything in the way of an affirmative decision finally surrenders. Again, Steve Jobs is an oft-cited example of a change agent who won’t take no for an answer.

However, these approaches often don’t work when selling a change initiative, and you might not be successful in modeling yourself after Steve Jobs. Why? First, the change agent’s job is not done when the initiative has been approved. The change agent must often rely on the stakeholders to implement the change. Steve Jobs could demand action because he could and did dole out punishments and rewards. But research, such as Edward Deci’s self-determination theory⁷, suggests that even if you think you have the power to punish and reward stakeholders, the change initiative will enjoy a much higher probability of success if the stakeholders “buy” the change for their own intrinsic reasons.

Imagine that you don’t have the ability to reward or punish stakeholders. Imagine that they are like rebellious teenagers, unlikely to do anything you ask. For most of us, that isn’t hard to imagine. That’s the reality a change agent faces every day. So what to do? To make matters worse, imagine that the change you are selling isn’t associated with an existential crisis for the organization. There isn’t a melting iceberg. What then? How do you get people to take action?

I have found that people will take action only when they feel compelled by a force. If you’ve made the same observation, we’re not alone. Social psychologist Kurt Lewin posited that very theory⁸, which underlies the field of organizational development (OD). The task of the change agent, then, is to discover what forces stakeholders are feeling—and then to harness those forces to energize the change. Lewin called this process force field analysis. This analysis compares driving forces to resisting ones. While that analysis can be useful, it is a trivial subset of what Lewin meant. Actually, he used the metaphor of a field of tall grass, where each blade of grass is a different force the person feels. Force field analysis, in its full form, is the process of discovering the blades of grass in that field and seeking to understand how the person who feels them is influenced by them.

Lewin observed that forces can come from within the person (internal) or from the person’s environment (external). I’ve found that managers, salespeople, and change agents tend to look only at a person’s environment; then they classify those environmental forces as either drivers or resistors. They think they’re done. But after nearly 30 years of practice, I’ve found that, as Deci has shown, people are moved more by internal forces than external ones. If Deci’s 40 years of academic research are not compelling enough, I’m here to tell you: the most successful salespeople don’t use external motivations like persuasion and coercion. They find out what the person wants and why he or she wants it. In other words, they discover the internal forces the person is feeling. That’s why a great salesperson’s selling process looks effortless. The salesperson is like a jujitsu master harnessing the other person’s energies and motivations.

In the sales profession, an important step in the sales process is called discovery. To aid me in the discovery of a person’s internal forces, I found it helpful to divide the broad category of internal forces into three subcategories. The first and most important is the category of a person’s internal needs. These include the familiar needs in Maslow’s hierarchy, such as security, belonging, and esteem⁹. This category also includes needs such as personal values, ideals, and moods, and it can even include Freudian needs, such as narcissism or feelings of inferiority. I’m not suggesting you need to be a clinical psychologist to sell change successfully; however, you need to have the right attitude adjustment. Your attitude should be: people will do something because they want to do it, not because you or anything else is forcing them to do it. As Deci would say, people are “self-determined.” If you have that attitude, you’ll be able to discover what a person wants. She or he will probably tell you if you ask.

The second category of forces is a person’s behavioral tendencies—his or her personality and habits. People simply have different preferences, styles, and habits. Walking down the hall of an organization is like walking through a zoo where each person has different stripes, feathers, and antlers. Whenever possible, you’ll want to adapt your strategies and tactics so they are congruent with stakeholders’ tendencies. For example, if a person is analytically oriented, you can provide lots of data. If a person prefers to be a follower, perhaps having that person join a coworker or a group would increase his or her comfort with—and support of—the change. Of course, there are as many different tactics as there are differences in people.

The last category of forces consists of the cognitive strategies a person employs to manage himself or herself. For example, People often use schedules, plans, and budgets to manage their behavior. They may also rely on others, such as group exercise classes, to provide “scaffolding” that supports their desired behaviors. What techniques are your stakeholders using? By the way, in an organizational context, companies employ project management methods, many financial planning processes, performance appraisal systems, and many other operational procedures to manage the organization’s behavior. Keep in mind that from an individual’s point of view, those are external, environmental forces. By being aware of stakeholders’ cognitive strategies, you may discover ways to leverage the latter.

Taken together, these four forces—internal needs, behavioral tendencies, cognitive strategies, and environment—provide a checklist of things to be aware of when seeking to discover the what and why of stakeholders’ wants.

One mistake I’ve seen over and over in my professional practice is that people often feel pressured to initiate a change quickly—even before each stakeholder has processed the forces he or she feels and made the emotional commitment to the change. However, every ounce of advance buy-in will save you pounds of pain and delay later. Taking extra time at the start to line up all the forces for each stakeholder will help maintain the momentum of the change initiative and overcome the challenges and setbacks that will inevitably occur in the implementation stages.

Let’s summarize: Selling change is not a matter of charisma, persuasion, rewards, or punishments. It’s about being a sincerely curious and active listener. Force field analysis is not about making sure the driving forces overwhelm the resistance. It’s about discovering and harnessing the what and why that make stakeholders tick.

Go ahead and be enthusiastic, tenacious, and communicative. You’re more likely to succeed that way than if you are hesitant, inconsistent, and difficult to understand. But if you also pair your urgency and tenacity with listening and you harness the forces of change, especially the internal forces, you will become a truly effective and efficient leader of change!