Leading Continuous Change: Navigating Churn in the Real World

Leading Continuous CHANGE

Leading Continuous CHANGE

Navigating Churn in the Real World

Bill Pasmore

Leading Continuous Change

Copyright © 2015 by William Pasmore and the Center for Creative Leadership

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First Edition

Hardcover print edition ISBN 978-1-62656-441-1

PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-62656-442-8

IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-62656-443-5

2015-1

Cover design by Bradford Foltz.

Interior design and composition by Gary Palmatier, Ideas to Images.

Elizabeth von Radics, copyeditor; Mike Mollett, proofreader; Rachel Rice, indexer.

This book is dedicated to David Nadler.

You were a guiding force in the lives of so many. We miss you, David.

Contents

Foreword

Preface

CHAPTER 1 Riding the Coaster

CHAPTER 2 Leading Complex, Continuous Change

CHAPTER 3 Discovering: Think Fewer

CHAPTER 4 Deciding: Think Scarcer

CHAPTER 5 Doing: Think Faster

CHAPTER 6 Discerning: Think Smarter

CHAPTER 7 Building Greater Change Capacity over Time

CHAPTER 8 The Key Message and Guidelines for Action

Appendix A A Checklist for assessing Where You are

Appendix B Leading Continuous Change Self-assessment

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Author

Center for Creative Leadership

Foreword

WHEN I WAS IN MY EARLY TWENTIES , the US Navy taught me how to fly airplanes. It took considerable study and work, as well as great coaches. Under their direction it was not long before my fellow rookie pilots and I were mastering takeoffs, landings, formation flying, and all the complex steps in between. Then they presented the next challenge: landing on aircraft carriers.

If you have never tried to do this, I’ll tell you what an aircraft carrier looks like from 20,000 feet: pretty darn small. After a couple weeks of intense practice and feedback from our coaches, the moment of truth arrived: it was time to actually land on an aircraft carrier. That meant there was no room for error. Your only option was to bring the plane down exactly right.

Certainly, we trained hard for that moment. But in all honesty, no amount of practice on a runway can prepare you for landing on an aircraft carrier at sea. You have to account for shifting winds and the fact that the ship is rocking in the water, not to mention the tiny landing strip you’re targeting. If you are planning to pull this off, you need to adapt and react—very, very quickly.

As I meet with the leaders of the many businesses, government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and educational institutions that the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) is privileged to serve around the world, it strikes me that they are trying to do something quite similar to—and ultimately far more difficult than—landing on an aircraft carrier. They are trying to guide their organizations through an era of complexity and change that is unfolding at unprecedented speed, and finding the right place to land takes all the vision, skill, and courage they can muster. Like US Navy pilots soaring high above the ocean, they have no room for error. These executives need to get it exactly right. Their employees, clients, and communities are counting on that.

Yet all too often, disaster strikes.

Research shows that 50 to 70 percent of organizational change initiatives fail, wasting untold sums of talent, money, productivity, and opportunity. That is the story of the doomed DaimlerChrysler and AOL–Time Warner mergers and the disintegration of Polaroid. Even companies with very impressive track records, like Procter & Gamble and Walmart, have had to exit some countries where their usual recipe for success did not work.

Over the years in executive leadership roles with the US Navy, the State University of New York, and the Center for Creative Leadership, I have attempted to lead through the kinds of complexity that Bill Pasmore writes about in this book, and his guidance is right on the mark. Change initiatives fail, fundamentally, because leaders lack sufficient focus and a comprehensive plan. And that’s usually because we are too consumed with the crisis of the day to take the necessary time to pause and reflect on the broader, deeper factors that will really determine longer-term results. As we say at CCL, leaders need to slow down to speed up.

And as with US Navy pilots, they need a great coach who can show them how to do that. Bill is that coach, and in this book he generously distills the remarkable wisdom he has gained over 40 years of researching, teaching, and consulting on change. For the better part of a decade, Bill has been a colleague of mine at CCL, where he has assisted numerous clients globally—many of them in the Fortune 500—with successfully navigating the complexities of change.

His opening advice for clients essentially boils down to this: check your ego at the door. The fact is that almost no one has done a great job of figuring out the intricacies of leading through continuous change, in large part because there’s not a predictable formula for it. Every change initiative demands a customized approach that must first be created and then constantly adjusted as conditions evolve.

Bill cannot offer the Easy Button that the iconic Staples advertising campaign made popular, but in this book he does deliver an invaluable four-step framework for leading change. His emphasis on Discovering, Deciding, Doing, and Discerning offers a superb starting point for mapping out change initiatives in organizations of every size and type in any sector.

As a member of several corporate boards, I have learned the importance of stepping back and looking at the larger reality of what’s happening in a business environment, which makes it possible to help leaders see things that they might ordinarily miss because they are too focused on narrow objectives. The process Bill describes equips every leader to take the stance of a board member, of someone who cares deeply about the success of the organization and is thus willing to challenge conventional thinking in search of bolder and smarter alternatives.

While leading change is the kind of topic that can easily elicit theoretical responses, Bill remains eminently practical, breaking the extremely challenging process of change into manageable increments that make the seemingly impossible finally approachable. And that is a welcome gift because the sooner business leaders understand and experiment with the principles of leading change, the sooner they can build better, more sustainable businesses for the benefit of everyone. Bill’s trenchant insights, applied by the governments, NGOs, and educational institutions that are just as critical to the health of society, will help us build a better world, too.

John R. Ryan

President and CEO

Center for Creative Leadership

March 2015

Preface

IT HAS BECOME de rigueur to state that change is occurring in multiple arenas, all at once, and faster than ever before in recorded history. Leaders do not need to be told this. They are experiencing it firsthand. What smart leaders want and need is a way to get ahead of the curve. Instead of using every ounce of energy to just keep up, smart leaders want to approach change in ways that continuously build positive energy, create greater change capacity, and leave their organizations stronger. What’s more, they want to help their organizations make all the changes they should make simultaneously, not just one or two or a few at a time. Change is multifaceted and continuous. Smart leaders know they cannot pretend otherwise.

Until now our approach to change has been built around models that were developed with single changes in mind. We assumed, because we had no alternative, that simply applying these approaches to multiple changes occurring at the same time would work. Then we discovered something we did not expect. As we turned our attention to doing one change well, we took our eye off another and another. People who assumed responsibility for making individual changes were unable to get the resources or support they needed to get the job done. In some cases, the work on one change undid progress that had been made on another. It became clear that we needed a better way to get on top of everything, but we weren’t sure how. Some organizations appointed change czars to sort out the priorities and conflicts. This seemed to help a little, but then they discovered that a single czar could not stay on top of everything. If they appointed more czars, they just got in one another’s way. What to do?

I have spent my entire career studying change, assisting with change, and leading change in organizations. For me and the organizations I work with, change equals improvement. We need to improve to remain competitive and to provide job security and returns to shareholders. We see that change is necessary, and most of us want desperately to succeed at it. Yet we know that change is not easy and improvement is not guaranteed.

It is painful to watch people start change efforts with great hope and later become overwhelmed by the difficulty or complexity of change. I have worked with chief executive officers (CEOs) and senior teams who are wholly dedicated to success, yet they still struggle. I’ve also worked with CEOs and teams who were not as committed. In these instances I sometimes become frustrated in my efforts to help them understand the difference between their stated intentions and actual behaviors.

What prompted me to write this book is that I wasn’t as successful a change agent as I felt I needed to be. It’s not that I lacked education, experience, or skill. I have been a scholar-practitioner in the field for almost 40 years, teaching at such institutions as Columbia, Stanford, INSEAD, and Case Western Reserve and working with organizations ranging from the Fortune Global 100 to small nonprofits. Rather, I found that the available approaches were inadequate to provide guidance to those who wanted to take on the world or to confront those who remained intentionally oblivious as the world around them changed.

As you will read here, change efforts fail between 50 and 75 percent of the time; our track record is simply unacceptable. Now, as we are confronted with even more and faster change, I have worried about our ability to keep up. We need to get better at change—much better—and we need to do so quickly. I have been inspired by some of my clients, who are taking steps to either get on top of change or stay ahead of it. You will read about some of them here.

I am in this work for the people who show up at the plant or office every day, trying to do a good job, and find that something about their organization is getting in the way of making things better. I’m in it for the leaders who want to serve those people by creating the most effective organizations in the world. I know that they can win—they being the leaders, the shareholders, the employees, and the customers—only if everything works together. We need the right talent, the right business models, the right systems and processes, the right leadership, and so forth. We also need agility because the world is changing at an accelerating rate in ways that are more and more important to us. What is right is constantly changing. We can’t have these things unless we are capable of changing; and what’s more, we can’t reach our goal by changing just one thing at a time. We must learn to lead complex, continuous change.

If someone could give us a magic wand for successful change, we would take it. Faster change, less resistance, better execution—these are things we all desire. The material and approach presented here will not provide that magic wand, but you will learn something about what managing complex, continuous change requires and you’ll pick up some new tools you can use. Mostly, this book does not feel like the final answer to me, but it does feel like progress. If we continue to experiment with the methods outlined here, we will learn and improve—and in this crazy world, perhaps that’s as good as it gets.

By the way, if you are interested in taking a self-assessment on the mindsets introduced in this book as the foundation for leading continuous change, there is a link in Appendix B to the Leading Continuous Change Self-Assessment companion product. Progress begins with knowing where we are; this tool can help you understand the starting point for your journey.

1 Riding the Coaster

THINK BACK to your first roller-coaster ride. For some of you, it might have been on the comet, one of the great wooden roller coasters of all time, nearly 100 years old and still in operation at the Great Escape in Queensbury, New York, after having been moved from its original location in Fort Erie, Ontario.

As you approached, the screams from those riding the coaster grew louder. What were you thinking? Was it going to be fun or terrifying? As you waited were you anxious to get to the front of the line, or were you looking around to find a way out? By the time you actually sat in the car and fastened your seat belt, were you excited or shaking?

Clank, clank, clank. As the cars climbed the first big hill, were you taking in the view with amazement or wondering how you got yourself into this mess? Did you have a premonition of doom (after all, you observed the first-aid office near the exit of the ride), or were you ready for whatever came? As you crested the first hill, did you relax going over the top or envision yourself falling offthe moon and crash-landing into the park below, scattered into tiny pieces?

You were jolted from side to side. You may have wondered as you went up and down smaller hills and around curves if your seat belt was strong enough to hold you in. You had absolutely no clue where you were going or when the ride would end. Each corner brought a new surprise.

Obviously, you survived. Other than a few small bruises, you were fine physically, albeit perhaps a little nauseated (or very nauseated). Your legs wobbled for a little while once you got off, but it felt wonderful to be alive. You had done it.

Riding the coaster is an appropriate metaphor for living in a world of complex, continuous change. Sometimes we put ourselves in a position that leaves us exposed to unknown dangers, feeling vulnerable and out of control. We feel we don’t have a choice. Standing pat is a recipe for failure. We are not sure how to get through what will happen next—and what a ride it is. We are surrounded by churn—everything is coming at us at once from every direction. We try to slow things down, sort it all out, and make good decisions, but we know that we’re not on top of everything. More is happening than we could possibly have seen in advance. We want to believe we have things under control, but in a very real sense we are just along for the ride.

Neither avoiding change nor minimizing its importance is an optimal way to deal with complex, continuous change (triple-C). Neither cowards nor daredevils make great leaders of this kind of challenge. Others can tell you about their experiences in managing triple-C, but until you are the one in charge, you won’t understand what it really feels like. You have to jump on board and live it. Like riding the Comet, only in hindsight will you be able to compare your imagination with reality.

If you have ridden the triple-C Comet and survived, you may believe that managing complex, continuous change is no big deal. You would be wrong, as the examples here of very intelligent leaders failing at complex, continuous change will show. You