How can an organization increase its chances of surviving a threat when the remedy may alienate the same people whom management is relying on to execute that remedy? The lesson I’ve learned is that in a crisis, when speed matters the most, the fastest path to change may be the path most traveled.
The urgency of a crisis triggers a fight or flight in all of us. Among us the top leaders of an organization this can express itself in the contradictory impulse to shake things up or lock things down. Either impulse can unintentionally create anxiety across an organization, causing employees to lock into old ways of doing things at a time when flexibility is essential for organizational survival.
Recent research from Dr. Elizabeth Linos at The People Lab at Harvard lends credence to the idea that familiarity may be the most important factor in reducing resistance to change. Specifically, the Harvard study tries to understand why so few organizations are unable to scale-up evidence-based innovations. The study, which examines over seventy real world transformation initiatives, found that the determining factor of success across a wide range of innovations and organizations was whether leadership used familiar channels of communication to launch the innovation. The surprising part of this finding is the value of overcoming organizational inertia through simple gestures like signaling to staff that some things, such as how an organization communicates with its stakeholders, will continue to be “business as usual”.1
I have experienced first-hand the importance of respecting an organization’s norms around communication…and the consequences of ignoring those norms. Consider the conventional wisdom, which I have too often followed, that transformation leaders should launch new initiatives by shaking up those same communication norms with an all-staff retreat or town hall. While big events, like retreats and town halls, are useful at getting everyone’s attention in a single day (and showing external stakeholders that “things are happening”), the novelty may also signal to staff that the changes that executive leadership is requesting are more alien, and thereby more threatening, than those changes actually are. Consider the off-sites you have attended, where enthusiastic applause and pledges in the meeting room contrast moments later with cynical chatter on the catering line.
Looking back at my own experience through the lens provided by Dr. Linos, I have found that communication through routine, familiar channels can often be a better approach in reducing resistance to adoption. (It can also save money on catering!) In one recent project requiring the reallocation of working capital to an urgent new investment, instead of calling a special budget meeting where executive leadership would announce its new priorities, we tried introducing the new spending priority through conventional channels by joining a long-standing internal planning council as a standing member. In another project, which focused on eliminating widespread hiring delays that were threatening a major program roll-out, we decided against our first impulse, a high-visibility all-employee video broadcast featuring our top executive. Instead we called on on business unit leads to deliver the message through normal leadership channels.
Communication through familiar channels has not been a guaranteed path to success, but in my experience the use of familiar channels like standing meetings and the chain of command can build the interpersonal dialogue and trust that are essential to program adoption.
