In 1983, McKinsey consultant Julien Phillips published a paper in Human Resource Management describing what he called an “adoption penalty”: companies that failed to adapt quickly enough would inevitably fall behind. His ideas became McKinsey’s first change management model that it sold to clients.
Today, more than four decades later, change management has become a massive industry. Every major consulting firm has a transformation practice, and enterprise software vendors routinely bundle change management services with their implementations. Buy a new system and your vendor will be happy to throw in consultants to help you roll it out.
The problem is that their primary objective is to protect the larger sale, not to create lasting organizational change. That’s why most change management efforts emphasize communication plans, and training sessions. Those things have surprisingly little to do with whether a transformation ultimately succeeds or fails. Here’s what you need to know:
1. You have to overcome resistance
In Rules for Radicals, the legendary activist Saul Alinsky observed that every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution. That’s simply the physics of change. Every action provokes a reaction because, if an idea is important, it threatens the status quo, which never yields its power gracefully. If you intend to influence an entire organization, you have to assume the deck is stacked against you and anticipate resistance.
A simple truth is that humans form attachments—to people, routines, beliefs, identities, and institutions—and, when those attachments are threatened, we tend to lash out in ways that don’t reflect our best selves. As much as we may hate to admit it, we all do it from time to time. Anyone who has ever been married or part of a family knows that.
That’s why any time you ask people to change what they think or what they do, there will always be those who will work to undermine what you are trying to achieve in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. Once you are able to internalize that, you can begin to move forward and make progress.
The key thing about overcoming resistance is to anticipate it, which is why one of the first things that we do when we start working with an organization is to conduct a resistance inventory. We lay out the five categories of resistance and discuss how we can expect them to manifest themselves, and what strategies can mitigate them.
The biggest misconception about change is that once people understand it, they will embrace it, and so the best way to drive change forward is to explain the need for change in a convincing and persuasive way. So change consultants help arrange a big, splashy “kick-off” meeting, then look to move fast, gain scale, and generate some quick wins.
Even assuming that it is practical to convince people that way, by the same logic they can just as easily have their mind changed right back by counter-arguments. So even successfully shaping opinions is, at best, a temporary solution. Clearly, if we are going to bring about sustainable change, we need to shape not just opinions, but networks as well.
In my book Cascades, I explained how small groups, loosely connected but united by a shared purpose, drive transformational change. It happens gradually, almost imperceptibly, at first. Connections accumulate under the surface, barely noticed, as small groups slowly begin to link together and congeal into a network. Eventually things hit a tipping point.
The good news is that decades of research suggest that tipping point is much smaller than most people think. Everett Rogers’ “S-curve” research estimated it at 10%-20% of a system. Erica Chenoweth’s research calculated the tipping point to be at 3.5% of a society. Damon Centola at the University of Pennsylvania suggests the tipping point to be at 25% of an organization.
I would take each of these numbers with a grain of salt. The salient point here is that nowhere does the evidence suggest we need anything close to 51% support for change to take hold. The point isn’t to chase a magic percentage. Our job as leaders is to cultivate networks, help them connect and inspire them with a sense of shared values and shared purpose. That’s how you get an idea past the tipping point to where it can become self-sustaining.
3. You need to survive victory
Change management pioneer John Kotter, who first started writing books about organizational transformation in the 1970s, has long advised to establish short-term wins. He stressed that these must be unambiguously successful, visible throughout the organization and clearly related to the change effort. That’s probably why completing a launch and rattling off training completion statistics are among change consultants’ favorite ways to show progress.
Yet the concept is problematic for a number of reasons. If we are only looking for projects that will be unambiguously successful, it is doubtful that these will be meaningful and relevant. So inevitably leaders go for some “quick and easy wins,” and tout them widely, which makes the initiative seem more like window dressing than a serious effort.
At the same time, those who oppose the change you seek will be working in the background to undermine what you are trying to achieve. They will take your “small wins” as concrete evidence that the initiative is unlikely to achieve anything significant, that it is a waste of time. Trying to overpower the organization by touting “wins” will give your opponents more opportunities to throw sand in the gears.
Change is non-linear. Early progress does not equate to long-term gains. That’s why it’s critical that you make a plan to survive victory from the start and that plan must be rooted in shared values and a shared mission rather than a particular strategy or set of tactics.
And that’s what so often makes the difference between ultimate success and failure. Those that see driving change as merely a series of benchmarks often find their efforts thwarted. Those that build a plan to survive victory based on the forging of shared values, are much more likely to prevail. Transformation is always a journey, never a destination.
Focusing on what matters
There is an inherent flaw in human nature that has endowed us with a burning desire to convince skeptics. So it shouldn’t be surprising that change consultants focus on persuasion. Nothing validates a high fee like some clever wordsmithing designed to persuade those hostile to the ideas of those paying the bill.
Yet anybody who has ever been married or had children knows how difficult it can be to convince even a single person of something they don’t want to be convinced of. To set out to persuade hundreds—or even thousands—that they should adopt an idea that they are inherently hostile to is not only hubris, but incredibly foolish. Decades of evidence also show that changing attitudes, by itself, rarely changes behavior.
That also helps explain why so many change efforts fail. They start with tactics designed to create a specific effect, such as “build awareness” or “create a sense of urgency.” They roll out communication campaigns, design training programs, or host events like hackathons. Then they congratulate themselves and wonder why genuine change never happened.
That’s what the change consultants get wrong. You don’t “manage” change. You empower it by enabling those who believe in it to show it can work and then bringing in others who can bring in others still. The truth is that you don’t need a clever slogan to bring change about, you need a network. That’s how you create a movement that drives transformation.
Change doesn’t succeed through snappier slogans or even through better training, it’s when shared values align with shared purpose and sense of mission. Change succeeds when it works for people.
