I had a meeting with a leader and his team the other day where we reviewed the effectiveness of some of the experiments they had planned.
Regular readers will know that I emphasize experiments in place of rolling out organization-wide solutions. Experiments are flexible. We can often do them without much buy-in across the organization, and they get us info fast (whether or not the result is what we expected). Experiments aren’t “quick wins” of the old change literature; rather, they are ways for leaders, teams, and organizations to build their muscles around collaboration and their ability to sit with uncertainty.
A few weeks before our chat, one of the senior folks on the team suggested gathering together a small group of operational leaders from different sites for a focused conversation about the indicators that they found hardest to meet.
Everyone thought it was a great idea—but, when we checked in, it hadn’t gone anywhere.
I got curious—and I asked if the group was willing to explore why they hadn’t moved this idea forward. My instincts told me that what we had on our hands was good, old-fashioned resistance.
The stated reasons that we don’t pursue a good idea are often tactical in nature. We don’t have the time. There’s no budget. We don’t have the right people. Folks are tied up with something else.
These are good reasons. But they’re often not the underlying reason. By definition, people make time for what they do (whether it’s something urgent or important). The same goes with budget and political capital.
This group of leaders was dealing with a competing commitment, an underlying desire to keep things as they were. Teams and organizations are really good at doing things in just the way they do them now. Changing that is hard.
And sustainable change can’t be done by pushing; it needs to be invited.
So, instead of thinking in terms of what wasn’t happening, we got curious about what happened instead.
The team saw that it was avoiding splitting the group of operational leaders into In and Out groups. They didn’t want to play politics, to exclude folks.
They didn’t want to make “enemies.”
Do you see how not wanting to offend folks by not including them is actually a really useful behavior?
It is useful, but, like all choices, it comes with a cost. Many of the operational leaders resisted the work this team was undertaking. They held fast to their opposition. By including them, the change process would stay stuck until those leaders loosened up.
The team reflected on this. They saw why they’d been reluctant to try this new approach—and they also more clearly saw the costs of sticking with the way they’d always done things.
In doing so, they were able to reflect and make their choice. They decided to move forward with the small group work, knowing that there might be backlash but also knowing that they were already dealing with a group of resistant leaders who felt excluded.
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