No, you can’t. People can find all types of creative ways to stop you in your tracks. For instance, the president of a small company once told me that his idea was dying due to “malicious compliance.” People did just enough to stay out of trouble and keep him off their backs, but not enough to make the change a success.

There are a few exceptions to this. Some organizations bribe people with incredible bonus and retirement packages, and so people will do anything to reach the pot at the end of that rainbow. But even that approach can have its problems. When these soldiers of fortune set priorities for their own work, your pet idea may not make it to the top of the list because it fails the “what’s in it for me?” test.

Another problem is that the bribes usually don’t reach down far enough into the organization, so the middle manager, professional staff, supervisors, and hourly workers don’t have all that much interest in making the executives richer. What a surprise.

(This is adapted from my new and greatly revised book, Beyond the Wall of Resistance: Why 70% of Changes Still Fail – and What To Do About It. You can order the book by clicking here.)

Here is her testimony to the President’s Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.

Watch Carolyn’s testimony (her remarks begin at 36:25 and end at 46:34 on the YouTube video).

Moving to how before people know why a change is needed.

People need to know why something is important before they can get interested or even be willing to hear why you want them to do it. Too often we fail to address “why” something is important before we launch into explaining “how” it should get done. I am not interested in the explanation of how until you’ve convinced me why this is important.

I have been subject to many lengthy PowerPoint presentations when a well-meaning leader introduced a big change. The first three slides deal with why this change is important, and then the next 150 mind-numbing slides deal with how they are going to proceed. If he didn’t grab their attention in those first three slides, he is not going to see a spark of recognition at slide 29. His audience tuned out twenty slides ago.

(This is adapted from the new paperback edition of Beyond the Wall of Resistance: Why 70% of Changes Still Fail – and What To Do About It. Rick Maurer. Bard press. 2010) 

Leaders fail to acknowledge how even a slight lack of trust and confidence in leaders can kill an otherwise fine idea

Trust can make or break a change. But sadly, many who lead change seem to ignore this critically important ingredient. They seem to believe that a good idea will win the day. It won’t.

If people don’t trust us, why would they follow us? The answer is that most of them won’t. On the other hand, if they trust us they tend to give us the benefit of the doubt. If we make a mistake, people tend to understand that we are only human, after all. But if trust is low, they listen intently for any word or phrase that could signal that we are about to take them on a dangerous ride.

(This is adapted from my forthcoming book, Beyond the Wall of Resistance: Why 70% of Changes Still Fail – and What To Do About It. You can preorder the book by clicking on the link you see on this page.)

Leaders assume that understanding equals support and commitment

It is common to introduce change by making a PowerPoint presentation to a large group. Leaders may schedule time for Q&A, but the questions they get from their audiences tend to be very polite. After all, who wants to tell the boss they don’t think this is a good idea? People learn to limit their comments to questions about time lines and budgets. They know those are safe questions. Any reservations or fears go underground and only get spoken about in hallways and carpools.

Since this leader got so many questions, he or she may believe that people are interested and ready to work to make this change a success. But the real issues that can kill or damage this project never get on the leader’s screen.

I conducted a study a few years ago and was surprised to learn that the failure to make a compelling case for change was the biggest reason why major new initiatives failed or went off track.

Making a compelling case for change seems to be the biggest thing you can do to build support and commitment for a new initiative, and yet, it is the most overlooked task in the life of most changes.

(This is adapted from my forthcoming book, Beyond the Wall of Resistance: Why 70% of Changes Still Fail – and What To Do About It. You can preorder the book at Amazon.com

Old MIS (Management Information Systems) departments often had the reputation of speaking some foreign language when they worked with senior management and other departments. They made the critical mistake of speaking their language and not translating so that their audience could understand them. It is your job to be “multilingual” so that various stakeholders can understand what you are saying. I have seen IT, HR, financial, and sales and marketing departments kill their own effort to make a case simply because they expected their audiences to learn their jargon. Big mistake.

(This is adapted from my forthcoming book, Beyond the Wall of Resistance: Why 70% of Changes Still Fail – and What To Do About It. You can preorder the book by clicking on the link you see on this page.)

Robery Kegan and Lisa Lahey found this immunity works against our best-efforts to follow through on plans.

Kegan and Lahey’s work dovetails nicely with Pfeffer and Sutton’s knowing-doing gap. In their book, Immunity to Change, they identify hidden commitments that get in the way of our ability to work on our goals. Weight loss is a good example of this. Tabloids give us new diets every week. We know that human physiology hasn’t changed since last Thursday, but we still hope that there might be some new finding that makes losing weight easy. These quick-fix solutions mask a deeper problem and that’s our built-in immunity to change. Even though we say we want to lose X pounds, we have an equally strong commitment to a way of eating and living that works against this goal. Only when we dig deep and find other (maybe unconscious) goals can we even think about losing weight. For example, I don’t want to give up pancakes, beer, sundaes, burgers, and pork rinds (just to pick a hypothetical example).

Same thing applies in organizational change. A leader may say that he wants to get people involved in planning a major new project, but he also wants to keep control over what happens.

Although they found organizations that did turn knowledge into action, more often they found that, “Other organizations composed of intelligent, thoughtful, hard-working, nice people, fail to translate their knowledge about organizational performance into action. It is almost as if there were some kind of brain vacuum in those firms that sucks the wisdom and insight out of their people.” The Knowing Doing Gap, page 6).

And they point out they in most cases it is not the people who are at fault.

I just did an Amazon search on “change management” and got 1344 hits. With all this knowledge, why don’t we do better?

We’ve got more theories and four-square consulting models than we need. Somewhere, there is a denuded forest with a placard that reads, “These trees died happily so that millions of pages of books, articles, assessment tools, and printouts of PowerPoint slides on change management could enter large organizations and rest comfortably as shelfware.”